Post Fire Footage: My Retro Collection Destroyed

This is the footage I took the first time I was allowed back inside my home after the fire, with quick temporary access alongside the disaster recovery person. If you have been through a fire yourself, this could be a difficult watch, so please consider your own feelings before pressing play. Please also excuse the quality: I could not edit this the way I normally would.

Inside the house

Everything is completely sooted. The lounge was so dark that I am not sure the camera picks much up, and the firefighters had clearly been through. Behind where a curtain used to hang were my racks, holding the collected stuff from years of the channel. I was stupidly thinking something might be salvageable, but this was not even where the fire started, and there was almost nothing left.

Soot blackened lounge inside the Mark Fixes Stuff house after the fire — The lounge on my first visit back inside

The shelves that held my MSX and Sinclair QL machines, all really good stuff, are gone. The Monster Joysticks are not the best advert for themselves now. It was genuinely dangerous to go further because of the ceiling, and hard to breathe.

The Mark Fixes Stuff workbench

Then the area where I used to film. My workbench PC, which took me so long to get a graphics card for, is obviously no more, and my Canon cameras were under there too. When the phone rang it stopped the recording, which also switched off the light, and I have never experienced darkness like it.

Fire damaged room inside the Mark Fixes Stuff house where the workbench used to be — Where so many videos were made

A few things were relatively untouched, but even those were fused together and I could not get to them. Everything is dripping wet. We had spent all our savings getting this house done up, including a new front door, which I had to lock up again before leaving.

Fire and water damaged interior of Mark Fixes Stuff's house shortly after the blaze — Everything is soaked as well as sooted

Nobody was hurt

I’m just so happy that no one was hurt.

That is the thing that matters. Thank you all so much for your kindness and generosity: it gave my family a massive boost at an incredibly hard time. Thank you as well to MeanMachineDean and The Retro Collective for setting up a donations pool. With that much support, how could I not come back? This was the start of what became the Phoenix Project.

Some of what came later: restoring a soot damaged Intellivision, and from before the fire, my Monster Joysticks build and review.