So there I was one sunny morning (that happened to be Rafe's birthday), sitting in the bedroom above the entryway, sewing a Goldilocks dress for Vivien's school play, blasting Haydn's Teresienmesse. I thought I heard sirens outside, but I didn't really think about them. Then I got a call from Drew. His voice sounded squashed and stretched. "Hi. Our house is on fire. I'm over here. Just stay inside. The fire department's on the way." I went to the window over the garage, and this is what I saw:
The house was indeed on fire. Justin Hollobaugh had seen the smoke out his back window and called 9-1-1 and then called Drew: "Hey man, your house is on fire." Drew had looked around the room in confusion before he realized it was our house; the house we bought 6 months ago. Dana and Sydney Hanks were home. Dana saw smoke drifting past her bedroom window and instantly thought it must be coming from the garage. She ran downstairs but forgot to check the door before she turned the handle and got blasted by a wall of heat and smoke that finally triggered the fire alarms in the kitchen. She was a bit singed.
She called 9-1-1 and ran downstairs to get Sydney to help her move the cars away from the garage. The fire department showed up. I think the time between when they arrived and when the water started were some of the longest seconds of my life. Each heartbeat screamed hurry! with increasing desperation as the flames got ever higher. I could feel the heat from the window.
The firefighters used the water from the fire engine tank until it was spent. The next closest fire hydrant is in the Corry's yard across the street, but I think it was blocked from view by an ambulance, so they went all the way around the corner to the next one. It was an impressive hose.
Here's a view of the inferno from the front.
A bunch of ladies from the ward were on a hike that morning and could see the smoke from the trail.
Chris Sheffield came and sat on Merrick's bed with me and we FaceTimed mom while we watched the firefighters do their work from the skylight.
It took them a little less than an hour to get all the flames put out. This picture is the one that blows my mind, because when the Hanks moved in I helped move all their bins of Christmas decorations and boxes of Christmas trees in the crawl space over the garage, and I know the garage was so full of things they couldn't fit any cars inside of it, and all of that stuff, plus the roof, was reduced to this small pile of ash and rubble.
They came and knocked down the parts of the wall that were unstable so no one would get hurt.
Everett loved that part!
The fire department stopped by at intervals throughout the day to make sure none of the embers reignited. A company that works with the fire department came to secure the structure from intruders and put up caution tape around the site. We had many ambulance chasing public adjusters/restoration companies approach us both during the fire and in the days after, promising to take care of us and help us do battle with the insurance company during our rebuild. It was a confusing time.
Pretty bummer birthday for Mr. Rafe. But he did get a cool LEGO set that kept him busy. And we love him.
Sweetest Margo Lamoreaux came and took Vivien's costume that night and finished it for me.
We heard from so many kind people in our life in the next few days, offering help, advice, condolences, money, food. I think my favorite thing was when Jaimie Knudsen texted me to ask if she could bring me some stress snacks and brought me a package of the s'mores mix from Costco. The irony! Cindy Whiting told me about her garage fire they'd been through about a decade ago. Our friends from Seattle, the Picketts, came over and talked to us about their experience when their home in Lehi burned down. My cousin Garrick offered some wisdom he'd gained after his apartment burned down last year. Matt came by to commiserate with us.
I think a photo dump of the damage is in order.
A little closeup of the melted garbage cans
Side view of the house
The laundry room, with new sky lights!
Kitchen lights dropping like airplane O2 masks
Kitchen from the other side
Pompeii-esque shadows of under-the-sink items.
Sitting room below master
Master bedroom mess held up only by sagging carpet
Here's the upstairs view of that side.
The main floor bath that would be perfect in a haunted house
Some roasty toasty floor trusses and singed wiring
A basement, moldering from all the water it took to put out the fire
Basement bathroom ceiling under the kitchen that is like a water balloon
The fridge that will sit with food inside it for months
The angle between the Hanks' recovered china hutch and the front brick wall gives you a good idea of how badly our porch was sinking when we bought the house
The blackened lawn
All the siding blown off the porch roof
Debris
A piece of burned book that floated over to my parents' house on the wind. There was also a river of water from the fire hoses that deployed an army of charcoal lumps all around the neighborhood.
I should write down a timeline of what happened.
-Fire and Police Departments came to control the area and put out the fire
-A company called ServePro came with the Fire Department to offer their services. We hired them to secure the property (basically boarding up the door from the kitchen to laundry room so no one could get in without permission)
-Fire department engineer performed his assessment once fire was put out, then they knocked down the walls he deemed unstable
-Property had to remain untouched from there until the fire investigators (one hired by our insurance, the other by the Hanks') could come to determine the cause of the fire a few days later. They surmise the fire was started when electricity arced from some wiring that had been damaged by an errant nail placed in the frame 30ish years ago.
-The USAA contents adjuster (named Lancelot) requested a list of our lost possessions, then came for his assessment. This claim was processed by March 30th. We didn't lose many possessions except the furniture we inherited from Matt that stayed in the house.
Not us:
-USAA's structure adjuster (named Noel) came for the first time the day after the fire for his initial inspection. He came a couple of times to make a report to our insurance of exactly what had been damaged and what it was made of so the insurance could run it through their software program and estimate how much money we will need to rebuild (and bring the house up to current building code). Our USAA adjusters have been absolutely wonderful. Noel was also working on a case in Alaska at the time where the owner called him a few days after the assessment to make a statement--he'd burned down the house himself, because it was...haunted. He sees some crazy stuff in his work. Here's Noel walking through the house with Drew, pointing out how they determine which trusses are possibly salvageable.
-We chose a contractor (Jody Riggs) to oversee the demo/rebuild and interface with the insurance, which will be important when we need to update the rebuild estimate to reflect current prices of materials. Jody said he planned to live in his current home down the street forever, and will therefore be driving past our house every day for the rest of his life, so he has every reason to do a good job for us.
-Our insurance assessors decided the house needed to be stripped back to the frame to more accurately determine what was salvageable. The porta-potty and giant dumpster arrived on site, and our property became the jewel of the neighborhood. We hired a company to help clear out the Hanks' things that were damaged. It later turned out that our insurance did not cover the removal of that personal property, so goodbye $1,500. It took the Hanks about two months to finish going through all their remaining possessions to decide what they wanted to try to salvage, in between bouncing back and forth between temporary living situations until the money from their insurance company ran out. I thought I had a picture of the giant clothesline Dana put up in the back yard to dry the clothes that she washed in her washing machine that was sitting on the sports court and hooked up to the water at Killarney Cottage by a long hose that went over the fence, but I must've only showed it to someone on FaceTime. Whenever I start to feel stressed about this whole process I just remind myself how terrible it has been for the Hanks.
-Once the house was empty at the end of May, Jody (and his hard working children) could finish his painstaking, piecemeal demo. It's been interesting to watch the layers of the house be peeled back, revealing old flooring in the kitchen...
...and secret messages in the dining room!
We also discovered the house was built with hand driven nails, which is pretty cool to think about. You could see all the hammer prints in the wood.
They pulled all the siding off the top of the house. It kind of made me want to have a house of entirely windows...but it would make a lot of things difficult.
-Jody, Drew, and I met several times (in April, May, June, July, and a couple times in August) with Jody's friend Sam who is a draftsman, to scheme about changing some layout things in the house.
In between those meetings there was lots of this going on:
Looking at those pictures takes me back to trying to talk to my Dad when he was thinking about something on his computer! He's a good thinker though, so he was frequently enlisted for his spatial reasoning in the scheming. He has to close his eyes and visualize, since he can't be here in person. We all got to a certain point where it wasn't worth doing any more planning until we knew how much of the house we were going to be left with to build off of.
-Once the frame was all exposed USAA requested a structural engineer to assess the property and determine what could be reasonably saved. A miscommunication with Jody resulted in two different structural engineers being hired--we thought he was asking us to find someone, so we hired Roger Alworth's company to come do an assessment, but he actually wanted an engineer who specializes in trusses to do it, so goodbye some more dollars.
-In the meantime, Jody sent us to the Parade of Homes in June to get some ideas for the rebuild. There were definitely some killer views. I think I'd never leave my room...
Unless it was to get in the pool!
We laughed at all the bunk rooms in the family resort houses built by rich grandparents.
You know, the kind of houses that have a The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe entrance to the play room wing of the house...
...complete with BYU themed climbing walls.
I loved how they made this office that was crammed in a dark corner of the basement feel like it had a window. It reminded me of Grandpa's resin table.
The laundry rooms were all very exciting. So many crazy wallpapers.
-The truss engineer's report was finalized around July 22 and recommended demolishing the main floor and upper story completely, so our USAA structure adjuster came out again to update his assessment and start the process for approval.
-It took all the way until the end of August for everything to be approved with insurance and ready for the demolition to begin.
We walked through the empty house one more time and I tried to get some pictures of things I was working on in the plans since I wouldn't be able to go through and physically stand in the space anymore.
Merrick wanted to show me the windows that were boarded up.
Then Rex came...
...and started taking a couple things apart with his little excavator...
...in preparation for the next day, August 24, exactly 5 months after the house burned, when he took the whole thing down in about an hour and a half.
Behold, our cement box full of rubble:
Machines are amazing. In two days, one person was able to knock down an entire house, completely clean it out, and dig out the hole for the new foundation that will be poured under the porch. SO incredible.
We finalized the plans for the house we're hoping to build and sent them to an engineer to go over and make official, then Jody will need to make a bid for an exact rebuild of what was there and a bid for a rebuild with the changes we want to make, and those bids need to be submitted to our insurance and approved before the funds can be released to start building. We are having so much fun. There's a lot of sarcasm dripping out of that last sentence, if it didn't come through the screen very well.
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