Fire Damage Restoration · Marietta, GA
A hidden basement-wall fire in a Marietta home
This fire started and stayed inside the basement wall of a Marietta home, so the visible damage was minor but the hidden damage was not. We opened up the cavities to find how far the fire and smoke had traveled, chased the odor through all three floors, and cleaned, deodorized and sealed it in.
How the job went
A fire you couldn't really see
The fire had started inside the wall between the basement living room and the home gym, and from the finished rooms there wasn't much to see. What gave it away was the smell: a strong smoke odor in the basement that had climbed through the house and the HVAC vents all the way to the master bedroom, two floors up. The insurance carrier wanted the fire origin left untouched at first while the cause was reviewed, so we started by sealing off the basement stairwell to stop the smoke climbing any further and ran air scrubbers on every level.
Opening the wall to see how far it went
To find out what the full extent of the damage was, we pulled the wood paneling in the gym, which exposed a layered wall: paneling over a siding-type material over drywall. Behind it, the fire had run deep into the cavity, into the insulation and the exterior siding. We took out a couple of metal ceiling panels too and found heat and smoke residue up in the ceiling cavities and on the subfloor above. With a hidden fire, what's inside the wall almost always is worse than what shows on the surface.
Stopping for an asbestos test
On the living-room side of that shared wall, the old insulation and ceiling material looked like the kind that can contain asbestos. The home was built in 1979, so it was a real possibility. We stopped work in that area on the spot, left everything in place, and had it sampled before going any further. The results came back negative, and only then did we start removing again. We also found early mold on some of the exterior wall materials, which we treated as we cleaned.
Charred framing meant structure came first
Inside the cavities, some of the structural studs were charred straight through. You can't clean or deodorize burned wood that has to come out, so we documented it and brought in a qualified structural crew to replace the charred framing before we finished the remediation. Doing it in that order is what makes the deodorizing actually hold, instead of sealing odor in around wood that's about to be torn out anyway.
Cleaning the whole house, top to bottom
Because the smoke had traveled well past the basement, this became a whole-house cleaning, not a basement one. We worked from the top down so we wouldn't recontaminate what we'd already finished: the upstairs bedrooms and bathrooms first, then the main-level living areas and the kitchen, cabinets and all, and finally the basement, which got the deepest cleaning since that's where the odor was strongest. Every surface was HEPA-vacuumed and then hand-cleaned, down to the exposed studs and joists.
Chasing the odor out, then sealing it in
The smell soaks into the materials themselves, so cleaning alone is not enough. We removed the burned source first, cleaned everything, then ran a dry-vapor deodorizer to neutralize what was left, moving it through the basement, kitchen and master bedroom to treat and re-check each area. Once the basement framing was confirmed clean and dry, we sealed it with an odor-locking encapsulant. We'd planned for ozone and fogging as backups but didn't need either: the source removal, cleaning, vapor and sealing brought the odor down to nothing, with none of it coming back in the treated areas. By the end the house was clean, deodorized and ready for the rebuild.
