GUILDERLAND — Judi Eells’s husband, Wayne, goes over every day to “scavenge” for items in the rubble of the home they shared and where they raised their two sons, at 52 Van Wie Terrace in Guilderland. A fire on July 29 left the home a “catastrophic loss.”

“When the insurance company calls it a catastrophic loss, it means all your stuff is lost,” Judi Eells, 70, explained this week. “That’s a lot of stuff, that’s a lot of memories,” she said of the couple’s almost 46 years in the home.

She is still getting used to speaking in the past tense about items she used to own, like the piano she had had since she was 10 years old, or the photo of her dancing with her father at the wedding of one of her children.

Eells is getting better now, she said, at saying that she “had” these items once. She takes comfort, in the case of the piano, for instance, in the idea that she enjoyed it for many years — longer, no doubt, than she will be without it.

“I did have it; it’s not like I’ve been deprived,” she says of the piano.

The best things they have located in the rubble, she said, were her Apple watch, which still works, and a keychain holding two of her mini thumb drives, containing files and photos. The drives were also fine, once they had dried out, Eells said.

The cause of the fire that started in the attached garage, Eells said, has never been determined.

Eells got a call on her cell phone the morning of July 29 while she was in church and immediately knew something was wrong. It was her next-door neighbor, saying, “Judi, I don’t want you to get upset, but your house is on fire, and the fire department is here.”

Most of the fire damage was to items in the garage, living room, and kitchen, while the contents of other rooms were damaged more by smoke and water, she said.

There were believed to be no people or pets inside, and firefighters decided to “do an exterior attack,” rather than send firefighters in, said Westmere Fire Chief Henry Smith at the time. They cut holes in the roof and, using a ladder truck, sprayed water back and forth, in a torrent, into the structure.

The force of the water moved things from one room to another, Eells said. She found food in the bedroom, and one shoe on top of the dining-room table.

Those same next-door neighbors initially asked the Eellses to live with them. They then walked over one day when the Eellses had come back to survey the damage and handed over a key to their own home, inviting the Eellses to feel free to go in at any time to use the bathroom or take a break, Judi Eells said.

The Eellses spent a few days in a hotel and then moved into a one-bedroom apartment off Washington Avenue Extension, where they remain for now.

They are in the process of building a home in Hermon, New York — population almost 1,200 — just outside the Adirondack Park. Wayne Eells inherited about 200 acres of “beautiful meadows” and riverfront land there, his wife said. They picked the most scenic spot and plan to put a modular home there.

Wayne Eells’s brother lives nearby; he owns the rest of the land that makes up the family farm, Judi Eells said.

“It’s a beautiful, quiet area, if you like that sort of thing,” Judi Eells said.

She moved with her family to Westmere when she was 8 years old and has lived in the bustling corridor since; Guilderland has a population of about 34,000. She likes being a stone’s throw from Crossgates Mall and is not thrilled at the prospect of the nearest grocery store being half an hour away.

But they are keeping all their doctors in the Capital Region, which will give them reason to come back often and see friends too.

The earliest that the foundation for their new home can be dug is March, Eells said. It then needs to cure for 30 days. Building the style of home they selected takes an average of 10 weeks.

After that, the couple will need to do all of the interior painting, she said, adding that it had been four months — “not until last Friday” — that she had been willing to look at paint colors.

“It took that long,” she said.

Their insurance agent had told them for years that they were underinsured. She said that’s a “gamble” that many people take.

After the fire, the Eellses were assigned two “concierges” to handle their claims for the structure itself and the contents, she said.

The money for the contents came in faster, Eells said, but even the money for the structure was settled by the end of August. They got the maximum allowable for each category for their level of insurance premium, Eells said, because the house had been deemed a catastrophic loss.

On the advice of their contents concierge, the couple put the money for the contents into a separate account, to avoid mingling it with their other funds. They haven’t bought anything for their new home yet. There’s nowhere to put it.

The money for the structure itself is in a trust, with the couple’s older son as trustee.

The insurance pays for their apartment and retroactively covered the hotel they stayed in during the month after the fire.

They are cleared to stay in the apartment for a year, through July 29, the anniversary of the fire.

There is a sense of unreality about their days now, Judi Eells said, as if they are playing make-believe. “This isn’t like a vacation, but it’s like, ‘When do we go back?’ Then it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, there’s nowhere to go back to.’”

She still has a lot to do. She will be “doing laundry till the day we move out of  here,” she said, soaking and scrubbing and trying to get soot out of salvaged clothes.

She worries, though, about her husband, a retired independent contractor who kept his thousands of dollars’ worth of tools in the home’s garage. There’s little for him to do after he comes back from sifting through the rubble every day.

The couple has received several offers from people wishing to buy the property, she said, but they will not sell until they feel they are done scavenging.

There’s an irony in all this, said Eells. A retired school librarian — she worked at Becker Elementary in the Ravena-Coeymans-Selkirk district — she now serves as the New York Conference Director for her church, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, which has an agreement with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Red Cross to help out in large-scale disasters.

Eells’s duties include organizing relief efforts and training volunteers in the psychology of dealing with survivors of floods, fires, and other disasters.

Two months after the fire at her home, Judi Eells went to Houston to set up a warehouse for donated goods for survivors of flooding.

“My heart ached,” she said. “We were one family unit, just us.” She and her husband had a “phenomenal support system,” including family, neighbors, and friends from church.

“In a disaster,” she said, “you can’t go to your neighbor, because your neighbor’s got the same thing.”

The view of a disaster that you get looking at a TV screen doesn’t compare to the way it feels when you stand in an evacuation center and see “the depth of what people are dealing with in a warehouse,” Eells said: the row after row of cots and of people with children in tow, with all their worldly goods beside them.

The training she used to give volunteers was accurate “to a point,” she says. But she knows better now, how similar a disaster is to a death. And survivors can have very different ways of grieving.

She has never cried, she said, saying that tears are “just not one of my things.” For her, stronger than the sadness has been the shock.

“It takes time,” she said, “to stop comparing what was to what is or will be.”

A kitchen fire closes restaurant for a year

Nirvana Indian Restaurant on Route 20 in western Guilderland was closed for 14 months after a fire on Sept. 9, 2016, which started in an air-conditioning unit. The fire broke out between lunch and dinner, when the restaurant was empty. Employees were gathered outside on a break, and one of them discovered the fire when he went in to use the restroom.

The recovery took much longer than she ever expected, said managing partner Ann Thomas last Thursday, the day the restaurant reopened.

She recalled that the owner of another Indian restaurant — Sitar on Central Avenue in Colonie — reached out to her early on, and said that that Sitar had had a fire years earlier and had recovered after eight or nine months.

At the time, she said, she thought, “Eight or nine months? Such a long time!”

She had originally thought, “We can just clean up, and then do construction.”

Thomas soon found that the 50-year-old building, which was for many years a Greek restaurant called The Chariot, had original electrical wiring that was not up to current codes; she needed to have all of the wiring redone.

The building got siding for the first time, a new air-conditioning and heating system, and a new roof.

“There were not just contractors waiting for us; they are running back and forth among two or three other jobs,” she said.

Unexpected delays included shipments that would take longer than expected or arrive damaged and need to be sent back.

Thomas was very grateful for the quick response of the fire department, which she said arrived in less than five or 10 minutes. “The main thing is, I’m glad no one was hurt at all.”

The quick response kept the fire from spreading, she said, noting that there is a bar inside the restaurant, which was lined with bottles of alcohol at the time. “Not one of them broke,” she said. If they had, she said, the fire could have been much worse.

Much of the damage was not from fire, but from water, she said.

The fire was a shock to everyone who worked there, Thomas said. “Everything was going along well. People were like a family, and then suddenly there’s all this chaos.”

Some employees moved on to different jobs. Some were able to come back to work for Nirvana again, so there are “some of the same faces, and some new faces,” Thomas said.

The chef is new, but the taste of the food is “almost the same,” Thomas said. “It has to be the same. It was good before, and it has to be good now.”

The restaurant has started back up slowly, with no alcohol at first — its liquor license only arrived on Nov. 21. For now, the menu offers buffet only, with no à la carte items.

“We’re not starting with a bang; we’re starting slowly,” Thomas said.

The view of a fire investigator

David Juron is a volunteer firefighter with the Westmere Fire Department and a town fire investigator.

It’s natural, he said, that it takes a long time to rebuild after a fire. Even in the best of circumstances, it can take a year from start to finish, just to build a house.

Juron called himself “an advocate for sprinklers.” Town code now calls for them to be installed in apartment buildings with three or more units, but he would like to see them in private homes as well.

There’s a cost involved in installing sprinklers, he said, “but you get a break on your insurance.”

Sprinklers may cause some water damage, Juron said, “but it sure beats the fire damage.”

And sprinklers save lives, he said.

Juron said homeowners need to be insured, not for the assessed value of their properties, but for the replacement value.

Today it may cost twice as much to build the same house on the same lot as it cost decades ago, he said.

In some cases, a foundation may need to be taken out and rebuilt, because of the water damage and the smell from the smoke.