Restoration Done dries out the house, then stays to put it back together
The Spokane Valley company handles both halves of a disaster, the cleanup and the rebuild, along with the insurance paperwork that sits between them.
Spokane Valley, WA
The fire started in a basement. When the crew from Restoration Done opened up the walls, they found that some of the wiring behind them was old knob and tube. Then came asbestos testing. The job kept growing.
“If you open up the wall and you realize, okay, this is not meeting code, we’re having to do a ton of code upgrades,” says Garrett Black, the company’s operations manager. “You’re talking about a lot more demolition.”
That is the nature of the work, he says. A job can start with a fire or a small leak, and nobody knows how far the damage runs until the drywall comes down. “You don’t know totally what you’re going to get,” Black says.
Restoration work comes in two halves. First is mitigation: stop the damage, tear out what is ruined and dry the building. Then comes the rebuild. Restoration Done, based in Spokane Valley, does both. On a smoke job, Black says, the work “includes cleaning, contents, demolition and rebuild, all of which we do.” Between the two halves sits the insurance paperwork.
The company is owned by Filipp Kishko and Val Rybakov and has held a Washington general contractor’s license since 2022. It says its technicians are certified by the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification. Black says the company typically takes on three to five projects a month. It also works in Idaho. The farthest jobs have been about 50 minutes out, he says: Post Falls and Spirit Lake on the Idaho side, Tekoa and Deer Park in Washington. Closer in, the map takes in Spokane, Airway Heights and Colbert.
The freeze season and the fire season are the busy ones, Black says. The months between run slower.
One small job he describes started with a little leak in a tiny bathroom. The crew sealed off the room and tore out the floor. They did some sheetrock work, put down a new subfloor and laid new vinyl over it. A big job looks like that basement fire, with surprises inside the walls and a houseful of contents to deal with.
One customer, Rickey R., wrote in a Google review that after a water heater burst, the crew came the same day he called, started on his floors and told the household step by step what they would be working on. Another, Judy M., wrote that the team was quick to respond and quick to console, and that talking with Filipp put her whole family at peace with the choice.
Most of the work is paid for through insurance, and the money arrives in pieces. “You get paid in two segments, mitigation and rebuild,” Black says. “And those are often months different.” On a smaller project, he says, payment can take three to six months. On a large one, with all the approvals, it can take a year or a little more.
Before any check is written, the company and the insurer have to agree on what the job is. The adjuster writes a scope of work and later reviews the bill. “They challenge your billing, and you have to prove and defend your entire work with all your documentation, photos,” Black says. How long that takes depends a great deal on the adjuster, he says. Some help push a job through. Others can drag it out for months. A mortgage adds one more step. The homeowner receives the payment, cosigns it and sends it to the mortgage company, which then has to send it back.
Black puts the company’s aim plainly. “We’re here to take care of people,” he says.
Sometimes that starts before any drying does. When an early-morning fire displaced seven people from a house in Spokane’s Logan Neighborhood, The Spokesman-Review reported that Restoration Done arrived at the property midmorning to help with the damage. It also brought the family care packages of food and water.