Fire and Smoke Damaged Drywall in San Antonio

Walk through a house the day after a fire and the drywall tells three different stories. Near the fire, it's burned. A few rooms away, it's gray with smoke and soot. And anywhere the fire department sprayed, or where their water ran down the inside of a wall, it's wet. Each one gets handled differently, and most fires leave some of all three.

• Burned or heat-damaged. Charred paper, blistered paint, board that's crumbly or soft when you press on it. That drywall comes out. Cleaning can't fix board the heat has already broken down.
• Smoke and soot stained. The wall is solid, but it's dull, gray or streaked, often darker near the ceiling and around outlets and vents. This is the drywall that can often be cleaned and kept.
• Soaked by firefighting water. Swollen, stained from below, sagging on a ceiling. That's water damage on top of the fire, and it follows water damage rules.

Before anyone sorts anything, the house has to be safe. The U.S. Fire Administration's After the Fire guide says not to enter a damaged home unless the fire department says it's safe. Don't be surprised to find holes in a few walls when you do go in. The same guide explains that firefighters may cut into walls to make sure the fire is completely out and not hidden inside them.

A lot of smoke damage on walls is cleanable. If the board is firm and the residue is sitting on the paint, cleaning it off and sealing it is usually the better path than tearing out a wall that's structurally fine. It keeps more of your house intact, too.

What decides it is how the wall responds to cleaning. Soot from different fires behaves differently. A fast, hot fire tends to leave a dry, powdery soot. Burning plastic, foam or cooking oil leaves something darker and oilier that smears. They don't come off the same way, which is why we look at the residue before picking a method. If a wall still looks stained or still smells after a proper cleaning, that's usually the sign it should be replaced.

Drywall that burned, charred or got cooked by heat comes out. We cut it back past the damage to sound board, and we look at what's behind it while the wall is open: the studs, the insulation and how far the smoke got into the cavity.

Opening a wall often turns up wiring, outlet boxes and switches near the fire. We don't do electrical work, so anything electrical inside an opened wall is for a licensed electrician to check before new drywall covers it up. If framing burned too, that's part of our fire damage repair work, and it gets sorted out before any new board goes on.

Putting out a house fire takes a lot of water, and drywall soaks it up from the bottom and from above. A ceiling under a soaked attic can sag. Walls wick water up from wet carpet. Once that's happened, it's a water damage job inside the fire job.

The EPA says to dry water-damaged areas within 24 to 48 hours to prevent mold growth, so we don't let wet walls wait on the smoke cleanup. Board that can be dried gets dried, and board that's too far gone gets cut out above the wet line so the cavity can dry. Our water damaged drywall page goes through that process in detail.

If firefighters broke windows or opened the roof to vent the smoke, which USFA says they may do, the house needs to be closed up before anything inside can dry. Our board-up and roof tarping service covers that temporary protection.

Drywall is gypsum wrapped in paper, and paper takes on smoke. So does the insulation behind it. The University of Florida handbook notes that smoke can permeate walls and other surfaces, and that if it isn't properly removed, smoke odor comes back from time to time, especially in warm or damp weather. In San Antonio, that describes most of the year. A wall can look clean in October and smell like a campfire the first hot week of spring.

That same handbook says insulation may retain odors. When we have a wall open, we check the insulation, and smoke-soaked insulation comes out rather than getting closed back in. Our smoke odor removal page covers the rest of the house, and how to clean the residue first and treat the odor second.

Once the burned and soaked board is out, the cavities are dry and the cleaned walls are sealed, the rebuild starts. We rebuild the projects we restore, so the crew that did the cleanup is the one that hangs the new drywall.

1. Hang. New board goes up on sound framing, with insulation replaced where it came out.
2. Tape and finish. Joints and seams get taped and mudded, and the patches are blended into the wall that stayed.
3. Texture. We match the texture on the rest of the room, whether that's orange peel, knockdown or smooth, so the repair doesn't stand out.
4. Prime and paint. Primer, then paint, on the new board and the sealed walls together, so the room finishes as one surface.

The ANSI/IICRC S700, the industry standard for professional fire and smoke damage restoration, covers restoration cleaning and fire odor management, and it leaves reconstruction outside its scope. That's the line we work along too: cleanup by the standard, then the rebuild through our reconstruction team. While the walls are open and drying, furniture and belongings can go out through contents pack-out, wrapped, inventoried and stored until the rooms are ready.

Your policy and your carrier decide what's covered and what gets paid, including whether a wall gets cleaned or replaced on the claim. The deductible is yours. We don't interpret policies, and we aren't adjusters. We help document the damage and work with your insurance carrier throughout the restoration process, with photos of each wall before it's cleaned or cut out. Our insurance claims page explains our part.

Texas Damage Response is an IICRC-certified company, veteran-owned and family-operated, based in San Antonio and available 24/7. Work starts on the first visit. If the fire just happened, our fire damage restoration and fire damage cleanup pages cover the rest of the house, and our kitchen fire cleanup page covers the grease and soot a stovetop fire leaves on walls and cabinets.