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How meticulous record keeping, perseverance, and over 30 subcontractors helped Reggie and Ann Marie Wood restore their home, and their life, after a fire.
Bob Sowder
On an ordinary day of shopping, Reggie Wood, 71, pushed his cart out into a thunderstorm to load his car with his purchases. Not ordinary, was that when a clap of lightning singed the air, Reggie jumped.
Just three months prior, while sitting in his easy chair watching the game, lightning struck Reggie and Ann Marie’s home on Bosworth Avenue. Thinking it hit their generator in the backyard, Reggie went to check. When he returned inside, he smelled the smoke. The lightning had struck their house. He quickly put collars and leashes on Lucy and Duchess, their two fur babies, and went out the front door into the pouring rain.
Meanwhile, Ann Marie was returning from a golf game with a friend when her cell phone rang. Their security company called to alert her that a fire was detected in their attic, setting off the alarm. She pulled up the hill to find fire trucks in the street and Reggie out in the rain.
“People go into shock when they go through something like this,” says Bob Fetzer, president of Building Specialists, Inc. who handled the Wood’s restoration project. “The stress is up there with that of a death in the family, often causing some PTSD.”
Up in Flames
While the fire was pretty much contained to the attic, water and smoke damage ruined the entire 3,600-square-foot home. Contractors had to tear it down to the studs and start over.
“Even the basement flooring buckled from the water,” says Ann Marie. “Two weeks after the fire, you could puncture the drop ceiling down there and water would flow out.”
After the first few nights in a hotel, the Woods settled into the home of a friend on vacation. Then, as fortune would have it, a rental became available at the end of their street. This location enabled Ann Marie to visit their home, now a construction site, every day.
Before anything could be done, ServPro came in with large tubes, three feet in diameter, and pumped hot air into the home through the front windows to dry out the moisture.
“They worked in 99-degree weather in July,” says Ann Marie. “They had on those suits. You know they were hot.”
ServPro also took photos of everything salvageable before boxing it up for cleaning. Those photos proved invaluable to Ann Marie while compiling her claim with State Farm.
Bob Sowder
What They Had
The Wood’s home was built in 1964 and mostly original when they bought it in 2006. So, in 2007 they started a remodeling project which included a two-story addition that turned a five-bedroom home into a three-bedroom. In 2008, they moved in.
That was not the end to their upgrades, either. In 2012, Ann Marie fractured her hip halibut fishing in Alaska and required hip replacement surgery. Since no bedrooms or showers are on the ground floor, they installed an elevator with an external shaft to help her get upstairs and a walk-in bathtub in the master suite. And, just a few months before the fire, they completed their outdoor kitchen.
A Lifetime of Collections
Ann Marie grew up in India, her parents married in Hong Kong, and she and Reggie have traveled extensively during their married life. The result, a home full of precious things—an Indian chest desk, a mother of pearl screen from China, a Chinese gong, an antique bedroom suite, pieces of art from Key West and New Orleans, a needle-pointed bell pull done by Ann Marie’s mother and a ballerina night light that was Reggie’s grandmother’s. Many of the Wood’s priceless treasures were damaged by flame, smoke or water. Only the piano was a total loss. Hope Arthur, owner of the Furniture Hospital in Cave Spring, restored some of these things, and more.
“In the melee of putting out the fire, someone kicked the bottom panel of the mother of pearl screen,” says Ann Marie. “Hope managed to piece it all back together.”
Piecing a life back together after a fire is no easy task. In fact, some cases are impossible because the money just isn’t there—even if you have replacement coverage on your homeowners insurance.
Putting it All Back Together
According to Josh Beisley, project manager with BSI who oversaw over 30 subcontractors on the Woods job, “insurance companies value the home and contents using data from a national estimating program which uses square footage measurements. We find this doesn’t give an accurate cost for custom home reconstruction.”
For example, you may have a state-of-the-art, 60-inch television with surround sound and the newest bells and whistles. But, unless you can prove the exact model you had and what you paid for it, the insurance company will replace it with a 60-inch TV of standard value.
And the improvements that the Woods spent years making to their 1964 home—a spiral staircase descending from a balcony off the master suite to the main floor, cedar lined closets and laundry facilities in the master suite dressing room and, of course, the elevator—could not be calculated by the square foot.
“We needed to go in and document everything they had before,” says Beisley. That’s where the photos that ServPro took, and Ann Marie’s meticulous record keeping, became invaluable.
As a retired regional vice president of underwriting with Anthem Insurance, Ann Marie had both the knowledge and the gumption to get everything she could in the claim. But she couldn’t have done it without the help of the folks from BSI.
Bob Sowder
“Our goal is to make sure the homeowner is made whole,” says Fetzer. “And the contents, the structure and everything else is a part of that loss.”
State Farm covered the restoration, a rental during the 49 weeks the Woods were homeless, and the reconstruction.
“We just wanted the full value,” says Ann Marie. And with the help of others, they got it and more.
While They Have it Torn Apart
Since the house was torn down to the studs anyway, the Woods thought it a good time to make a few more changes. So, instead of replacing the attic, they left vaulted ceilings. Where a wall once separated the kitchen and dining room, they opened it up. And “because lightning will strike twice,” Ann Marie says, they installed a new fire sprinkler system with a 350-gallon tank of water in the basement. It sprays water only where it detects heat to avoid damaging the entire house with water.
Bob Sowder
“And we paid for the upgrades,” she says.
Loss is always hard, whether a loved one, a pet or a home full of memories. But Reggie and Ann Marie have bounced back stronger and more optimistic than ever. Most folks say they make lemonade from life’s lemons. Ann Marie goes one better.
“We made a lemon drop martini out of the lemon,” she says.
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