I guess I haven't posted much about it here, as I don't have a TTA, thus no "build thread" on this forum.
But we had a small garage fire last February. Not a phone call you ever want to get from your wife when you are away from home.
I can empathize with the flooded basement.
Here, the local fire department (with a station 1 mile from my house, a benefit that we liked when we bought the place that paid off) is using a large round saw to cut a section out of the overhead garage door.
Very little actual "fire"...a boxed Edelbrock roller bearing water pump (for the T/A) fell off of a stack of boxed car parts, landed on a much larger box with a car cover (for the T/A, bought from a member here IIRC), knocking it to the ground right in front of a kerosene heater on a thermostat. When it got cold enough, the thermostat kicked on, and the heater burned the all synthetic cover into a molten pile of goo. Anyone who's ever burned a piece of plastic knows the kind of black, stringing, soot that is created. Take that huge ball of plastic, and burn it in a tiny enclosed space, and you have quite a mess. I few other things were lost (brand new Wen belt/disc sander combo, and a few small odds and ends), but the fire dept. got things extinguished quickly, and none too soon. Many, many combustibles in the garage. This could have ended very differently.
Here's what the white painted drywall ceiling looked like afterwards.
Molten plastic car cover fills this control joint in the cement floor.
Along the top of the pegboard wall behind my workbenches, strings of carbon (not cobwebs) are deposited along the ceiling. Of the many plates on display, only this plate left a perfect carbon imprint of itself on the wall. The way the smoke and heat moved and swirled is fascinating. Items right next the fire were relatively unharmed, while items on the other side of the garage are plastered in soot.
No more (boxed) Wen sander. White softener pellets form the melted bag of same...
Soot that jetted it's way through the pegboard and onto the painted drywall behind.
Demo.
New and improved.
About 3 months later than projected, my "stuff" returns from being cleaned just this week. Trying living without any tools of any kind for a year. No fun.
I'm sure I'll still be working on this until we hit the 1 year anniversary.
So that has pretty much consumed my summer. Not seen is the mountain of car parts (3-4x's the number of boxes pictured here) that I had to remove and clean (insurance has very limited dollar amount for car parts, so their redemption was all on me).
Still we did get the T/A out some this summer (it was stored in another garage, unlike my Chrysler) to cruise nights, club activities, the Dream Cruise, and a few other events. A good year. I was supposed to spend last spring working on it, and again this winter. I'm "hoping" that in February or March that I can move it in to this rebuilt space, and get a few things done to it.
A few pictures of our summertime fun....
