Recovery & Resources: A GUIDE TO...

If your home made it through the fire unscathed but now smells like you just hosted a three-day barbecue contest, you might have to take special measures to clean up.

“If it is smoke and not soot, you can just let the house air out,” said Bill Calvy of World Restoration, a firm based in Orange. “But you don’t want to do that until the air conditions change, or you will just be bringing more of the smell inside.”

Soot that gets embedded in walls is another matter.

“Just using Lysol is not going to do it, no way,” said Annie Wilder at the Swelldom cleanup company in Sun Valley. “You have to use special chemicals.”

Indeed, using household products on sooty walls can make matters worse. “Soot is a greasy product, not like dry ash,” Calvy said. “You end up smearing it all over the place.”

The pros can use a variety of processes. “We use a thermal fogging,” said Sylvia Gilmour of Disaster Kleenup in Gardena. “We go into the home with a machine that looks like the one in ‘Ghostbusters.’ It’s sort of a gun that shoots out this solution that has been heated.”

The fog and other chemical processes neutralize the soot and smoke smell, but at a price that can run into several hundred dollars per treatment. “It’s covered by most household insurance policies,” Wilder said.

As for your clothes, it’s all a matter of degree. “If you have just a little bit of the smoke and stain in your jeans and other washable clothes,” said Shaida Hobian of Fame Quality Cleaners in West Hills, “you could probably put them in the wash and they will come out fine.”

But take care. “A wash could set a stain in if it’s bad,” she warned. “Then it would be hard even for the dry cleaner to get it out.”

Dry cleaners use special solvents to treat smoke-damaged clothing. “On 95% we have good luck and they come out just fine,” Hobian said. But make sure, Calvy said, that your dry cleaner is familiar with the special treatments used for smoke and soot damaged items. “If they don’t, it could just end up being much worse,” he said.

Outside, the ashes that rained down on the area might have given your place an unwanted Pompeii look. But unless the ashes are still smoldering, they don’t cause too much of a cleaning problem. “If it is bad on the roof, you should sweep first and then hose it down,” suggested Gilmour.

“If you hose it first, it might smear. It’s like cleaning your carpeting without vacuuming first.”

Ashes also pose little problem for the pool. “They will not damage the plaster,” said Alain Francois, owner of Agoura Pool and Spa. “They will eventually skim off the top when the pump goes on and go through the filter. Some will drop to the bottom where you can vacuum them.”

Ashes can be easily cleaned off a car, too, in most cases, according to A.J. Rassamni, owner of the Great American Hand Car Wash in North Hills. “Just a wash should do it if the ashes were cool by they time they got to your car,” Rassamni said. “But if they were hot, the heat might have damaged the paint. Then you need a good wash and wax.”