NYS and NYC M/WBE Certified Contractor
The fire is out. Now the clock starts over. Soot begins corroding metal surfaces within hours. Smoke embeds into porous materials — original plaster walls, hardwood floors, period millwork — within the first day. Firefighting water soaks into structural cavities and creates mold risk within 24 to 48 hours. Every hour you wait, more of your home is quietly getting worse.
Roslyn’s housing stock makes this especially critical. A significant portion of the village contains homes built in the 19th and early 20th centuries — structures with original plaster walls, wood-framed construction, and materials that don’t respond well to aggressive or uninformed cleanup methods. Smoke remediation in a home with original plasterwork requires a completely different approach than working in a 1990s drywall build. Getting that wrong doesn’t just cost money — it destroys things that can’t be replaced.
Then there’s what fire uncovers. Many homes along Main Street, East Broadway, and throughout the historic village core were built before asbestos and lead paint were phased out of residential construction. Fire disturbs those materials. That’s not a minor complication — it’s a legal and health issue that requires specific state licensing to address properly. When you have one team that can handle the fire damage, the hazardous materials, and the full reconstruction under a single license, the process stays clean, documented, and moving forward.
We are a locally owned restoration and general contracting company serving Nassau County, including Roslyn and the surrounding villages of Roslyn Heights, Roslyn Harbor, and Roslyn Estates. With over 5,000 completed restoration projects across New York State, our team has handled fire damage in every type of Long Island home — from post-war builds to 19th-century structures with the kind of architectural detail that can’t be sourced from a lumber yard.
What separates us from most restoration contractors in the market is the combination of credentials we actually hold. We’re IICRC-certified for both fire and smoke restoration and water damage restoration. We hold NYS DOL licenses for asbestos abatement and mold remediation. We’re USEPA Lead/RRP certified. And we’re General Contractor licensed in Nassau County — meaning the same team that remediates your home can legally rebuild it. That’s not the standard. Most restoration companies stop at cleanup and hand you off to someone else. We don’t.
The result is one point of contact from the night of the fire to the day you move back in. No coordination gaps. No accountability gaps. No wondering who’s responsible for what.
The first step is getting there. We respond 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with a target of being on-site within one hour of your call anywhere in Nassau County. When we arrive, the priority is stopping the damage that’s still happening — board-up, emergency water extraction, and containment to prevent soot and smoke from spreading further into unaffected areas.
From there, we conduct a full assessment that documents every affected surface, material, and system. This documentation isn’t just for your peace of mind — it’s built to insurance-standard specifications, which directly affects how your claim gets processed. We bill insurance companies directly and have guided hundreds of Long Island homeowners through the claims process. Our goal is making sure nothing covered gets left off the table.
If your home is in Roslyn’s Historic District or the Historic/Scenic Overlay Zone, there’s an additional layer to navigate. Post-fire restoration work affecting the exterior of a contributing property requires review and approval from the Village’s Historic District Board — and any reconstruction needs to use natural facade materials compatible with Roslyn’s architectural standards. That’s not a surprise for a contractor who knows this village. We account for permit requirements and board review timelines from the start, so the project doesn’t stall mid-process. Remediation, hazardous materials abatement if needed, structural repair, and full reconstruction all move under one license, one contract, and one team.
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Fire damage restoration isn’t one service — it’s a sequence of them. We deliver the entire sequence in Roslyn: emergency stabilization, structural drying, smoke and soot removal, odor elimination, hazardous materials abatement where required, and full licensed reconstruction. For homeowners in older parts of the village — particularly properties near the historic core around Main Street and Old Northern Boulevard — that hazardous materials piece isn’t optional. It’s a legal requirement, and it requires contractors holding NYS DOL asbestos and mold licenses alongside USEPA Lead/RRP certification. We hold all of those in-house.
One service type worth knowing about specifically for this area is oil burner puff-back. The North Shore of Long Island has a high concentration of oil-heated homes, and a puff-back — where a furnace backfires and coats the interior of a home with fine soot — is one of the most common fire-adjacent service calls in Nassau County. It doesn’t involve an actual fire, but the soot damage can be extensive and it affects the same surfaces a fire would: walls, ceilings, HVAC systems, furniture, and personal belongings. We handle this fully within our scope.
NADCA-certified HVAC cleaning is also included when smoke or soot has entered the duct system — which it almost always has. Smoke travels through a home’s ventilation before most people realize it, and leaving contaminated ducts in place after a restoration defeats the purpose of cleaning everything else.
It depends on where your property sits and what the fire damaged. If your home is within Roslyn’s Historic/Scenic Overlay District — which covers a significant portion of the village — any work affecting the exterior requires review and approval from the Village’s Historic District Board. That includes paint, siding, windows, roofing, and masonry. It also means reconstruction materials need to meet local code requirements for natural facade materials like stone, brick, wood clapboard, or shingles. Synthetic replacements that would be standard in other towns aren’t permitted here.
This is something a contractor unfamiliar with Roslyn’s regulations can easily miss. Pulling a Nassau County building permit and proceeding without Historic Board review on a contributing property can result in stop-work orders, fines, and forced removal of non-compliant work — which adds time, cost, and stress to an already difficult situation. We account for this review process from the beginning of the project, not as an afterthought.
The short version: your insurance company will send an adjuster to assess the damage, and the scope of what they document directly determines how much your claim covers. The problem is that adjusters work for the insurance company, not for you. If the documentation is incomplete — or if the full extent of damage isn’t captured early — you may end up with a payout that doesn’t cover the full cost of restoring your home.
We document every phase of the restoration process to insurance-standard specifications and bill insurance companies directly. Our team has worked alongside Nassau County homeowners through hundreds of claims and understands what adjusters look for, what tends to get underdocumented, and how to make sure the full scope of covered work is on the table. For a Roslyn homeowner with a property valued at over $1 million, this isn’t a small detail — it’s the difference between a complete restoration and cutting corners because the claim came up short.
The visible damage — charred walls, broken windows, water on the floor — is usually the least complicated part. What tends to cause the most long-term problems is what you can’t immediately see. Smoke travels through wall cavities, into ductwork, and behind original plaster walls before the fire is even out. Soot deposits on the inside of those cavities continue to off-gas odor and corrode materials for months if they’re not properly removed.
In Roslyn’s older homes specifically, fire also has a high probability of disturbing asbestos-containing materials hidden inside walls, under floor tiles, or in pipe insulation — materials that were standard in construction through the late 1970s. Once disturbed, those materials can’t just be cleaned around. They require licensed abatement before any reconstruction begins. Structural compromise is another concern that isn’t always obvious from a visual inspection — which is why thermal imaging and moisture mapping are part of a proper post-fire assessment, not optional extras.
A puff-back happens when an oil-fired furnace or boiler misfires — essentially backfiring — and sends a burst of unburned fuel and soot back through the system and into your home. There’s no open flame, but the result can look and smell like a fire happened. Fine black soot coats walls, ceilings, furniture, and personal belongings throughout the house, and it gets into your HVAC ducts almost immediately.
On the North Shore of Long Island, including Roslyn and the surrounding villages, oil heat is common — especially in older homes that were built before natural gas infrastructure was widespread in the area. Puff-backs tend to happen most in the fall when heating systems are first fired up after the off-season, or when a furnace hasn’t been properly maintained. Whether your homeowner’s insurance covers puff-back damage depends on your specific policy, but many do classify it as a sudden and accidental event. We handle puff-back remediation the same way we handle fire damage — full soot removal, odor elimination, and NADCA-certified duct cleaning.
There’s no honest one-size answer here because the timeline depends on the extent of the damage, the age and construction of the home, whether hazardous materials are involved, and how quickly permits and any required Historic District Board reviews are processed. For a limited fire — say, a kitchen fire with contained smoke damage — remediation and restoration might be completed in a few weeks. For a more significant structural fire in an older Roslyn home, where asbestos abatement, full structural repair, and Historic Board review are all part of the process, you’re looking at several months.
What matters most in the early stages is speed of response, not speed of completion. The faster emergency stabilization and water extraction happen, the less secondary damage you’re dealing with — and the shorter the overall timeline becomes. Mold can establish itself within 48 hours of firefighting water exposure. Soot permanently bonds to porous surfaces within days. Getting a qualified team on-site within the first hour after the fire is cleared is the single most important factor in keeping the overall project timeline manageable.
Yes — and this is one of the more meaningful differences between us and most restoration companies operating in Nassau County. The majority of restoration contractors are not licensed general contractors. They can remediate, but they legally cannot perform the structural repairs, framing, electrical, plumbing, or finish work that comes after. That means most homeowners end up managing two separate companies, two separate contracts, and two separate timelines — while also trying to keep their insurance documentation consistent across both.
We hold a General Contractor license in Nassau County, which means the same team handles everything from the initial emergency board-up through the final reconstruction. For a Roslyn homeowner dealing with a significant fire in a historic home — where the rebuild needs to comply with village code requirements for natural materials and may require Historic District Board approval — having one licensed contractor managing the entire scope is not just more convenient. It’s the cleaner, more accountable way to get your home back.
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