The vacant Mitchell Seed Building next door was reduced to a pile of soot, bricks and twisted beams by a fire last month. Home Style Furniture’s owner Bob Hand tells us all of his inventory is on its way out.
“Starting next week all of our furniture is going to a salvaging company,” Hand said. “It’s a company out of Oklahoma, and they will take away everything. One thing about salvage companies, it’s an all-or-none deal.”
“A lot of the product, even after a month and a half since the fire, the soft goods stuff, we still smell some smoke. The hard goods stuff, bedroom furniture, dining, end tables, probably wouldn’t be affected at all, but, the way these companies work, they either take everything or they take nothing.”
The inventory will be covered by their insurance. As to the structure of the building, which Hand and his wife Deana bought in 1999, that’s going to be up to an engineer.
“The building is secure enough for us to be in here. We have a structural engineer who has spent probably 20 to 25 hours, both inside and outside the building. He’s got some measuring devices now in the building. His biggest concern is the structure of the fire wall.”
Those measuring devices are placed along some cracks in the wall on the south side of the Home Style building, which is the wall closest to the fire next door. They will measure any possible movement of that wall. A report from the engineer is expected next week.
Deana Hand tells us they had a delivery of new inventory just after the fire struck that had to be redirected because they could not cancel the order in time.
“We have about 7,000 square feet of product stored in another warehouse,” she said. “We were just about to install thousands of dollars worth of new lighting fixtures, but that has to be put off as well.”
Next door, the lot looks like a war zone. The Mitchell Seed building, also known as Research Seeds, was reduced to massive pile of debris, with mangled structural beams poking out of the pile and workers reclaiming thousands of bricks from the rubble. It’s not yet clear when Home Style Furniture will reopen. The couple expect to hear from the engineer next week.