Rebuilding After a House Fire

The roof after the fire (left) and during construction

Kristin laid down strips of indoor-outdoor carpeting on the rented home’s hardwood stairs so the dogs wouldn’t slip. “It was makeshift,” she says, “but I knew we just had to survive while we were there, just get through it.”

Every morning, Kristin and two of her friends, Caroline Kaplan of Bethesda and Heidi Brotman of Chevy Chase, went to the house to pack things up. Firemen had cut the electricity to the home, so the air conditioning and the lights were off. The street-level windows were boarded up to prevent break-ins and the smell of smoke still hung in the air. Kristin wanted to throw everything away, but her friends wouldn’t let her. “You saved your kids’ baby clothes for a reason,” they said.

Kristin’s mom kept telling her, “Don’t think about two weeks from now, just think about today, and tomorrow you’ll get up and do tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, three investigators—one hired by the Burkas’ insurance company, one hired by the lawyers representing the homeowners next door, and one hired by the liability insurer of the builder of the house next door—began working to determine the cause of the fire.

The Burkas’ insurance company’s investigator and the homeowners’ investigator determined that a cigarette butt on the next door neighbor’s property had started the fire, Goodman says. But the investigator hired by the builder’s liability insurer said his findings were inconclusive—which meant that the insurer wouldn’t assume liability and refused to cover any of the costs of rebuilding the Burkas’ house.

The Burkas weren’t worried. For 20 years they had paid high premiums to their insurer (which they declined to name for this article) for what they thought was more than enough coverage. But once they started submitting claims, they realized the fire was just the beginning of their problems.

The Burkas quickly learned that before the insurance company would include even the smallest items, such as an article of clothing, rug or piece of furniture, in their settlement amount, it had the right to declare them salvageable by cleaning. The Burkas could refuse the cleaned items, but they had to pay for the cleaning first, refuse any still-damaged items, and then file a claim for the replacement of the items and the cleaning costs.

Smith’s design for Ava’s room centered around a hanging chair she found online. Photo by Bob Narod.

Kristin says their clothes felt stiff and scratchy after being cleaned, and many pieces shrank. She and her mother spent three months sorting through boxes of cleaned clothing and shoes, and figuring out the replacement value for every item they returned.  

The family room rug, purchased only months before the fire, came back from cleaning covered in tiny black spots. The insurance company insisted that it was as good as new. There was also a smoke- and water-damaged custom-made couch in the family room that the insurance company wanted to clean. “Our kids have allergies and asthma,” Kristin says. “How do we know when we sit on it, what poofs out isn’t toxic?” Eventually, GGG stepped in and pushed the insurance company to replace the sofa and the rug.  

The insurance company kept urging the Burkas to accept a lump sum settlement. “They just kept lowballing us,” Kristin says. “They want to wait as long as possible to pay out, hoping you’ll just give up and take the offer.”

Max’s new room has custom shelves to accommodate the computers he likes to build. Photo by Bob Narod.

Although GGG eventually negotiated a settlement on the Burkas’ behalf, Eric says the money was much less than what they originally sought. There were also many items they couldn’t claim, including GGG’s fee and payments to their attorneys. “I lost many days of work,” Eric says. “I couldn’t get that back.”

In January 2014, McLean, Virginia-based builder BOWA began a top-to-bottom renovation of the Burkas’ home. Potomac’s Steve Kirstein, one of BOWA’s owners, says the hardest part of a post-fire renovation is getting rid of the smoky smell that can linger in the framing. The Burkas’ insurer didn’t want to replace all of it, claiming that the “non-damaged” pieces could be “soda blasted” (similar to power washing), but GGG convinced them to cover the cost.

The BOWA team also found that many of the pipes had split while spending a few cold months in an empty house. The Burkas’ insurance company argued that the pipe damage was unrelated to the fire, forcing them to file a second claim and pay another $5,000 deductible.

The Burkas had to pick every finish and fixture for the renovation in a hurry. “A blank slate can be overwhelming,” says their designer, Gerald Smith of G.L. Smith Associates in Georgetown. But he and the Burkas worked well together from the beginning. “He got our style,” Eric says. “He would show us something, and we would love it.”  

Smith describes the renovated house as “stylish urban chic.” He mixed textures, such as hammered metallics and smooth concrete, and styles, combining new modern pieces with antiques that were restored after the fire.

Smith designed Ava’s room around the “Manu Nest” hanging chair that she found online. Made in Latvia from volcanic basalt fiber, it’s Ava’s favorite place to sit and read. Lily, who is involved in local musical theater and dreams of one day performing on Broadway, asked for a wall of exposed brick to give her room the feel of a New York loft. For Max, Smith created custom shelves to accommodate the computers he likes to build.  

In November 2014, 14 months after the fire, the Burkas finally moved back home. Though the house was even better than they had hoped for, Eric had a hard time letting himself enjoy it. When people would ask if he was excited about his new house, he didn’t know how to respond. He kept thinking, The fire was terrible. Our old house was great. I wouldn’t have changed a thing. He says he gets upset now when people say, “Your house is so great. Maybe we should burn down our house.”

Each member of the family has suffered moments of post-traumatic stress in the last two years. When a chemical leak in Maret’s biology lab caused the fire alarms to go off, Ava began to shake in fear until she saw that Lily and Max were safe.

Two months after moving into the renovated house, Lily was home alone studying when a malfunctioning smoke detector triggered the alarm system, setting off buzzers and a “Fire, Fire” announcement. Panicking, she ran outside with the dogs and called the fire department.

Kristin gets anxious any time she hears a siren, especially if she’s not at home. “You thought it would never happen to you, ever, and then it did, and you realize it could happen again,” she says.

A few weeks after the fire, Eric began seeing a therapist to help him deal with the stress from his father’s death and the fire. The therapist helped him look at the situation in a different light: One good thing—a beautiful new house—had come out of all the horrible things that happened that week and in the ensuing 14 months, and he was allowed to enjoy it.
He says he finally does.

Lessons Learned

The Burka family (from left to right): Ava, Max, Kristin, Eric and Lily

According to the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service, there are about 500 dwelling fires in the county every year. Eric and Kristin Burka never imagined that their house would be one of them. They thought they had taken appropriate measures for a speedy and seamless recovery in the event of a catastrophe, but they wound up battling their insurance company for two years, learning countless lessons about coping with disaster. Here, a few of the biggest takeaways:

?? Hire someone to represent your family’s interests. Hiring Rockville-based Goodman-Gable-Gould (GGG) was the most important thing he did, Eric says now. During the weeks after the fire, the GGG staff inventoried the Burka’s remaining possessions and documented every unsalvageable item. “You need the details,” GGG’s Harvey Goodman says. “Otherwise they’ll say you bought your shirts at Walmart, when you really bought them at Neimans.” GGG also served as an intermediary between the Burkas and their insurer.

?? Make sure your insurance policy covers additional living expenses (ALE). The Burkas’ policy included ALE, so their insurer covered the increase in living expenses that allowed the family to maintain its “normal standard of living” after the fire, including $9,000 per month for a rental house and $5,000 per month for rental furniture. Goodman says a lot of people don’t get ALE coverage because they think they’ll be back in their houses soon and can stay with family and friends in the meantime. But following a major disaster such as a fire, many people are out of their homes for a year or more.

?? Know what you have and know what it’s worth. Many people don’t realize that an insurance company doesn’t automatically pay an insurance claim or pay one lump sum, Goodman says. Instead, it’s the insured’s responsibility to prove their claim in order to be compensated for their loss. Eric says he wishes he had walked through his house before the fire with a cellphone and taken a video documenting the family’s possessions. “Who can remember what they had in their bathroom cabinets?” he says.

?? Opt for full replacement cost coverage on your homeowners’ policy. Standard actual cash value coverage only pays what possessions were worth when they were purchased, not what it would cost to replace them today. A chair that cost $100 in 2000 has an actual cash value of $100. Under full replacement cost coverage, the chair is valued at what it would cost to buy in 2015, say $400.

?? Understand your homeowners’ policy. “You never want to be like the Farmers Insurance commercial,” Goodman says. “You think you’ve got coverage for a diamond ring, but you’re really only covered for a candy necklace. Don’t think it will never happen to you, because it happens to someone every day.” 

Gabriele McCormick is a regular contributor to Bethesda Magazine.