This edition of Ask Annissa takes a tour of the mobile restoration unit for Steamatic, an Australian restoration firm.

This edition of Ask Annissa deals with the heightened emotions people experience during the holidays and the challenges that creates when disaster strikes.

This edition of Ask Annissa deals with cleaning taffeta wallpaper, which is actually a fabric and needs extra care.

This edition of Ask Annissa explains that with proper training and the right systems in place, content restoration can happen at a much faster pace.

Extra stress this time of year calls for a lot of care, compassion and grace.

This edition of Ask Annissa tackles the question of whether or not it’s possible to come up with square foot pricing for a content restoration job.

How big of a facility do you need to conduct contents restoration? And, if you want to work with hard and soft contents, which should you get started with first? Annissa Coy answers these two questions.

In this episode of Ask Annissa, Annissa Coy answers the following question: “I was wondering how you handle so many different specialty type things that we need to clean when it comes to contents restoration. For instance, I have a home that had a light fire and they have a six-foot, mounted bear that was in the living room.” 

Specialized teams of artists, electronic technicians or textile restoration personnel are trained to analyze items based on many types of damage: heat, soot, smoke, humidity, breakage and water. The most elusive damage is from soot. Short term, lingering soot in items will cause a smoke smell to persist in the room. Medium to longer term, up to six months or a year, these soot particles can cause corrosion in electronics and the item can stop working.

“Hoarding cleanup is not an easy task, and it is best done by restoration professionals who have the expertise and equipment to perform the job efficiently and safely. By no means was this particular case the worst I have seen in my tenure, but the timeline from the property management company was tight, so we needed to get to work quickly and efficiently,” Ben Doebler writes.