Fire in the House!

We received the following email from our property manager the final day at sea of our cruise:  "Hi, Lee called us early this morning and said the house caught fire, the fire dept came out and put it out, not sure the extent of damage..."  Yikes that gets your mind whirling; still 200 miles off the coast of New Orleans, too cheap to make a phone call to get the rest of the story and no idea how serious the damage is to the house we just bought and remodeled a year ago.  By logging onto the local newspaper website we learned the fire department had responded at 1:19am and found the front of the house 'fully engulfed' in flames.  Fortunately for us, we were on a 'Fun Cruise' and went to the 'Chocolate Extraordinaire' event, dined on chocolate goodies and forget our concerns.   

We were able to look at the house on the following Monday and this is what we found:

The plywood is covering the opening of the broken window.  This window was original to the house with a large beveled plate of glass.

A view of the inside:

The newly sanded and stained hardwood floor did not suffer any damage and there is minimual damage to the interior wall. 

There was some smoke and heat damage to the porch ceiling as well:

This is the railing where we suspect the fire originated at the point where it attached to the house as that is the point of the most fire damage:

The house is still occupied, there were no injuries, and the handyman that did the remodeling is confident he can make the necessary repairs within the limits the insurance company allowed.  All have certainly been blessed!!


This is what it had looked like.