Fire damage restoration in Columbia, SC.

Many of the houses we work on in Shandon, Rosewood, Melrose Heights, Earlewood and Olympia were built long before drywall and modern fire blocking. That changes what smoke does inside them and what can be saved.

Plaster and lath. Sound plaster is a hard surface, and many smoke-stained plaster walls can be cleaned and sealed instead of torn out. Plaster that soaked up water from the hoses, or that has come loose from the lath, is a different story, and we test before recommending either one.

Open framing cavities. Older framing often has stud bays that run uninterrupted from the crawl space to the attic. Smoke rises through them and leaves residue on the second floor and in the attic, even when the fire stayed in one room downstairs. We open strategic points to check rather than assuming those cavities are clean.

Layered flooring. It is common to find two or three floors stacked on each other. Water and smoke get between the layers, so the scope has to say how many layers come up, and older vinyl and mastic get tested before they are disturbed.

Our main fire and smoke damage restoration page covers residue types, how we remove odor, HVAC and the four-step process from board-up to finished house. Drying the water from the hoses works the same way as on our Columbia water damage jobs.

The Columbia-Richland Fire Department is a consolidated department. It covers the City of Columbia and Richland County and ran 32 stations according to its FY2025 annual report. Ask the department how to request the incident report for your claim. We mention the department for context only. We are a private contractor with no affiliation to it.

The City of Columbia issues permits inside city limits. Outside them, it is Richland County, which has a different process and timeline. A Columbia mailing address does not always mean a city permit, so we confirm the jurisdiction from the parcel before the rebuild is scheduled.