Good morning. It’s Friday morning and it’s time once again for Fan Mail Friday.
The question we have this week is really, I’m going to rephrase this a little bit, is are you thinking about repairing your fire damaged house?
You have the insurance check in your hand for the fire damage to your house. Now you’re faced with a decision. Do you fix up the house yourself or do you sell the house as is? The answer to that question really lies with your county or city building department because in cases of fire damaged house, there are some very clear requirements.
In my area, the house that has fire damage has to meet all of these requirements.
1. all the electrical must be rerun back to the main panel. There are no junction boxes allowed in the walls or in the attic.
2. all the framing, the roof trusses, the block walls all have to be inspected by an engineer to make sure that they will still carry the loads they’re supposed to. If not, then they have to be replaced.
3. the air ducts have to be replaced throughout the entire house. The reason for this is while the fire was going on, the air system, the AC system was picking up that smoke and pumping it through the entire house, so all the air ducts are now filled with smoke and you also may have to replace your air handler as well.
So the other thing that may happen is your attic insulation may need to be replaced. It could be water soaked or it could be have gotten smoke up there in the attic as well.
And the building needs to be brought up to today’s code. I had one I had to walk away from because one room was in a flood plain in that house and in order for me to get that past the county, I was going to have to take that one room and raise it off grade in order to be able to resell that house. Needless to say, that was going to be much more expensive than what it was worth.
All right, so, once you’ve addressed the code requirements, then you’ve got the other stuff to deal with. You’ve got the flooring to deal with. You’ve got the cabinets to deal with. You’ve got the walls and the light fixtures, and the painting. You’ve got all the cosmetic stuff. You still got that to deal with. So, the choice is yours, but if you decide you’d rather walk away and walk away from the bad memories, then call Rapid Home Deals, (352) 480-0955. We’ll pay you cash for your fire damaged house and you can add that to your insurance proceeds and start over again somewhere else. And we’ll see you next Friday.