Restoring Your Collectibles After A Fire

8/13/2019 (Permalink)

Finding your pristine collection of 1950’s dolls or once-colorful beer steins covered in a dense layer of dark soot while inspecting your Longview residence after a fire can make you feel like the fire, and its effects invaded every aspect of your home. Even glass cabinets and other enclosures often permit smoke to find its way in and settle on the contents’ surfaces.

At SERVPRO, we take pride in helping our customers reclaiming their homes and their possessions. We lessen its effects by using approved methods we learn through our Institute of Inspection Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC) training. Before, we cleaned such items by hand, which could produce excellent results, although taking an enormous amount of time to accomplish.

Instead, we now use ultrasonic technology to remove soot and other grime from your most prized possessions. Small imperfections can grip onto soot and make an unsightly, ugly mark that diminishes the beauty of such pieces in a collection. Cleaning by hand often left these defects marred. A short period in our ultrasonic water bath, however, cleans soot from every surface, including in between tightly abutted surfaces that face each other. This ability to clean blemishes and hairline cracks makes a tremendous difference in how your collection appears when you receive it back from us.

While still at your property, we carefully pack each item in its own piece of plain paper and place it inside a clean box. Taking these boxes to our facility also includes inventory sheets that correspond to each box. These sheets follow your items through the entire process. After the water bath, we place them in a drying chamber.

Although the cleaning method eliminates the soot that causes collectible items to smell like smoke, we still provide further deodorization. We do this inside the drying chamber without moving them. Handling them as little as possible reduces the chances of breakage. We then re-wrap each item and place it into a new box so we can return these items to you, along with their inventory sheets.