Hour one: safety, then the phone
Make sure it is out. Grease and oven fires reignite. If the fire department came, wait for them to release the kitchen. If you put it out yourself, keep the extinguisher nearby and do not leave the house unattended for the first hour.
Open the windows, turn the HVAC off. Ventilation helps; the furnace does not. Running the blower pulls smoke into the ducts and pushes it into every bedroom.
Do not start cleaning yet. This is the counter-intuitive one. Wet-wiping soot smears it into paint and grout permanently, and wiping without a respirator puts fine particulate and the by-products of burned plastic into your lungs. The surfaces will still be there tomorrow.
Photograph everything. The stove, the hood, the cabinets, the ceiling, each room the smoke reached, the extinguisher residue, the contents. Take a video walking through the house. Do it before anything is moved or wiped, because this is what the claim is built on.
Call your insurer and call dispatch. Report the claim the same day; you will get a claim number and an adjuster. Then call (844) 543-5757. A fire restoration crew does the assessment, documents the smoke spread room by room, and starts the steps below. Your policy requires you to prevent further damage, which is exactly what early cleanup and drying are.
Day one: stop the damage from spreading
Smoke residue is acidic. Within hours it starts etching chrome, discoloring plastics and appliances, and setting into grout and unfinished wood. Within days it stains marble, countertops and painted walls permanently. The first day's work is about stopping that clock.
What the crew does first
- Protects traffic paths so soot is not tracked through the house, and sets air scrubbers with HEPA filtration to pull particulate out of the air.
- Dry-cleans the most vulnerable surfaces with chemical sponges: chrome fixtures, appliances, countertops, glass.
- Handles extinguisher residue. Dry chemical powder is corrosive and gets everywhere; it is vacuumed with HEPA equipment, not swept.
- Deals with water. If the fire department put water on it, the floor, the cabinet bases and the ceiling below are wet, and drying starts the same day. Water damage after a fire explains why this matters more than most people expect.
- Checks the HVAC, pulls the filter and tapes off returns if the ducts need cleaning.
What you can do safely
- Move undamaged furniture and belongings out of the smoke path to a clean room or the garage, after they are photographed.
- Wash the clothes you were wearing. Launder removable textiles that are not heavily sooted, once each, in cold water first; heat sets smoke.
- Throw out opened food and anything in the fridge or freezer that lost power.
- Start the receipts folder: hotel, meals, replacement basics. These are additional living expenses your policy may reimburse.
What to leave alone
- Upholstery, drapes, carpets and anything porous. Wet-cleaning sets the odor; these are either cleaned with the right process or replaced.
- Walls and ceilings. Wet wiping smears; painting over soot without the right sealer lets the odor back through within weeks.
- Electronics that were in the smoke. Do not power them on; soot inside is conductive and corrosive. They are assessed, cleaned or written off.
Days two and three: cleaning, sorting, scope
By the second day the crew has a room-by-room map of where the smoke went, which decides everything that follows.
Soot and smoke cleaning. Kitchen fires produce protein smoke, which is nearly invisible, smells strongly, and bonds to surfaces; grease fires produce oily soot that smears. Each needs its own cleaning chemistry, and the order matters: ceilings and walls top-down, then cabinets inside and out, then floors. Smoke and soot cleanup describes the process.
Contents. Everything in the smoke path is sorted into three piles: clean on site, clean off site, or non-salvageable. Items in the third pile are inventoried before they leave the house, because that list is your contents claim. Contents cleaning and pack-out covers how it works and the contents inventory guide covers how to document it.
Odor. The smell is not just in the air; it is in the paint, the cabinet interiors, the HVAC and the framing behind the stove. Odor treatment comes after cleaning, not instead of it: thermal fogging, hydroxyl or ozone treatment with the house empty, and sealing of surfaces that cannot be fully cleaned. Smoke odor removal goes into the methods and why a candle and open windows do not work.
Scope and estimate. By day three the crew writes the estimate in the format your carrier uses, separated into cleaning, contents and rebuild. Cabinets that were scorched, drywall behind the stove, the ceiling above it and any flooring that was wet usually come out. Your adjuster reviews that scope; on covered claims the contractor bills the insurer directly and you pay your deductible as your policy states.
What it costs
For planning only, in the Puget Sound market: cleaning and deodorizing a kitchen with smoke through the main floor commonly runs in the low to mid thousands. A fire that burned into the cabinets and hood, with ceiling and drywall replacement and a new range, commonly lands between five and twenty thousand with the rebuild. Whole-house smoke from a kitchen fire that ran long enough to fill the second floor goes higher, mostly on contents and odor work. Fire damage from a sudden fire is covered by nearly every Washington homeowners policy, including the cleanup, the rebuild and often temporary housing; the first 72 hours insurance guide walks through the claim side of the same three days.
The mistakes that cost the most
- Running the furnace. Puts smoke into every room and the ductwork.
- Wet-wiping walls and ceilings. Permanent smearing on paint and grout.
- Painting over the soot. The odor comes back through in weeks and the repaint is on you.
- Throwing things away before they are inventoried. They disappear from the claim.
- Waiting for the adjuster before any cleanup starts. Soot keeps etching; adjusters work from the crew's documentation and do not expect to see an untouched scene.
If the fire was tonight, the next step is a call: (844) 543-5757. Board-up if a window went, HEPA scrubbers, first-day cleaning and drying start the same day across Seattle, the Eastside, Snohomish, Pierce and Kitsap.
