Fire Damaged Restorations

Written by Kevin Crane

Tragedy struck the home of one of our favorite clients. The Island house had been a treasured escape for many years and was filled with generations of family memories. All vanished quickly when a fire broke out and raced through the old dry Douglas fir and cedar building. The fire burned at a very high temperature, incinerating the house completely and almost everything inside. Almost nothing was left.

Fortunately, no one was hurt in the blaze. When the embers cooled, some of the family jewelry was found among the ashes. There were generations of jewelry, some dating back to the 1870s.

We have been restoring fire damaged jewelry for many years so we were able to clean, polish and restore much of the jewelry, in some cases we re-cut and polished the diamonds and colored stones.

One of the pieces was melted in the fire it was an 18 Karat yellow gold charm of  an apple tree with two apples we replicated the design from our original designs and notes.

We later discovered a photograph of the original.

Below is a gallery of more restoration from this fire