The structure is only half a house fire. The other half is everything inside it — furniture, clothing, dishes, books, photographs, tools, toys — every piece of it now smoke-exposed, some of it soaked, and all of it in the way of the structural work. Contents handling is the part of fire restoration families feel most personally, and the part where sloppy work does the most quiet damage: items lost, items ruined in storage, items thrown out that a specialist could have saved.
Our contents process is built around the inventory. Every item is photographed, listed, and given a condition assessment before it leaves the room. Salvageable pieces are packed out for cleaning and deodorization; non-salvageable pieces are documented for your claim before disposal. You should never have to wonder where something is or why a decision was made about it.
The contents side of a fire job includes:
The same inventory that tracks your belongings becomes the contents schedule your insurance claim is built on.
Inventory comes first, always. Working room by room, we photograph items in place, log them, and sort into three streams: clean on site, pack out for cleaning, or document as a loss. Pack-out is deliberate — wrapped, boxed, and labeled so every box maps back to a room and a list entry. At the facility, items are cleaned by category: hard goods washed or hand-detailed, textiles run through specialty laundering, upholstery and leather treated by material. Cleaned items then go through deodorization, typically in an ozone chamber, before storage — cleaning without deodorizing sends your belongings back smelling like the fire. Everything waits in storage until the structure is finished, then returns against the same inventory it left on.
Honesty about salvageability saves you money and grief. Food, medications, and cosmetics exposed to heat or smoke are not restoration candidates — they are disposal and claim entries. Melted plastics, charred furniture, and textiles saturated with greasy protein residue rarely justify cleaning cost against replacement value, and we will say so item by item rather than clean everything billable. Smoke-exposed electronics need specialist evaluation because soot is conductive and corrosive; our role is to stabilize them and stop anyone powering them on, not to repair circuit boards. Fine art, antiques, and heirloom textiles go to conservators when their value warrants it — we coordinate that referral instead of improvising on irreplaceable things.
Contents cost scales with count and decisions. The number of affected items sets the inventory and packing labor; the salvage ratio sets the cleaning volume; storage duration follows the structural timeline, not ours. Specialty items — electronics evaluation, document recovery, conservator referrals — add scope where they apply. The economic question we put to every borderline item is simple: does cleaning cost less than replacement, and is the result worth having? When the answer is no, documenting the item as a loss serves you better than a cleaning charge. Contents coverage is its own portion of a homeowners policy, and our itemized inventory is built to support exactly that portion of the claim.
To a clean, secure facility where cleaning, deodorization, and storage happen under one roof — not a job trailer. Every box is labeled against the inventory, so any individual item can be located while your house is under repair. If you need something back early, medications or work equipment for instance, it can be pulled, cleaned, and returned ahead of the rest.
Sometimes, but never by plugging them in to check. Soot is mildly conductive and corrosive; powering a contaminated device can finish what the fire started. The right order is: leave it off, note it on the inventory, and have it evaluated by an electronics specialist. Some devices clean up well, others are written into the claim — the evaluation decides, not guesswork.
As an itemized list with photographs and a condition and salvageability note for each entry. Adjusters use it two ways: to approve cleaning costs on what is saved, and to substantiate replacement on what is lost. Building it carefully at pack-out spares you reconstructing your belongings from memory months later, which is the hardest version of that task.
The complete restoration sequence for Wasatch Front homes after a fire — from the first assessment through the handoff for rebuilding.
Learn more →Identifying dry, wet, and protein soot correctly — then cleaning each with the method that removes it instead of setting it.
Learn more →Why smoke odor outlasts the visible damage, and what actually eliminates it — source removal first, treatment equipment second.
Learn more →Securing a fire-damaged house against weather, entry, and further loss — and meeting your policy's duty to mitigate.
Learn more →Ogden to Provo, Salt Lake and Davis counties in between. One specialist trade, one phone number.
Tell us what happened and where the damage is.
