Mr Davis still doesn't know how the petrol-fueled blaze started while he was fixing a fuel line on his beloved motorcycle in the garage of his Queanbeyan home last August.

The explosion and flames that followed burnt 60 per cent of the then-23-year-old's body and destroyed his townhouse.

If it weren't for the compression suit, gloves and socks covering his scars now, you wouldn't realise the turmoil and transformation the mixture of first, second and third-degree burns wreaked on his limbs and torso.

But the ordeal's most striking cover is the smile almost permanently fixed to the now 24-year-old's face, even as he revisits the Friday night that changed his life forever, and the months in hospital that followed as the gym junkie re-learned how to eat, stand and walk.

"I don't remember the explosion," Mr Davis said.

"The first memory I have after the explosion is about a second later when I was on fire.

"My first thought was, 'I need to check on [fiancee, Jess Attewell]' which, unfortunately, meant running from the middle of the garage into the house, which was through the fire."

Davis' reaction was to drop and roll on the kitchen tiles, but it wasn't until Ms Attewell covered him in a blanket that the flames disappeared and he was hurried out of the crumbling townhouse.

"I was in the driveway, just standing there screaming for help, looking at my body," he said.

"It had changed a lot in the last 10 seconds. I was in a huge amount of pain."

One neighbour hosed Mr Davis down outside but the icy winter water was too extreme. A second neighbour helped his scorched body into a shower to cool down while an ambulance raced to the scene.

"I was a little bit hysterical. I tried to sit down but I had second degree burns on my bum, that hurt too much, so I stood in the shower for what felt like a very long time," Mr Davis said.

"The last thing I remember looking at when I got into the ambulance was my arm and seeing the skin peeling off and just hanging there."

Mr Davis was rushed to the Canberra Hospital's emergency department and stabilised. Doctors sliced open his lower legs and right forearm to release pressure so his limbs wouldn't need to be amputated.

Mr Davis's body was "cling-wrapped", his burnt skin unable to retain water.

"They pumped me with 19 litres of water to try and hydrate me," he said.

"I was already a big boy at 95 kilos."

A mummified Mr Davis spent the night in an induced coma in intensive care before he was flown to Sydney's Concord Hospital the next day.

He underwent his first and biggest bout of surgery a couple of days later, but didn't fully emerge from the coma until a few weeks after the accident.

"I got really lucky, the skin on my chest and my quads wasn't as badly burnt so they would take that off and feed it into a machine that stretches it...so you have four times as much skin to graft," he said.

"They literally stapled my newly-stretched skin onto me."

Mr Davis stayed in intensive care for three weeks, battling septicemia, pneumonia and kidney failure, before he was relocated to the hospital's burns unit.

Concord became his home for the next couple of months, flanked by specialists including speech pathologists, physiotherapists and nutritionists.

Mr Davis shed about 15 kilograms in hospital as his muscles wasted away: "I became very skinny, I looked like a bobble head".

One of the most confronting challenges was cleaning and redressing his own wounds for the first time. He knew pain well by then, but there was something different about self-induced hurt.

"I'd seen my body but this was the first time I had to take the dressings off [myself]," Mr Davis said.

"Sitting upright to do my dressings was new to me, instead of lying down...on a bed that would be lowered into the bath. Blood was pooling around my legs; it was very confronting."

Simple movements most of us take for granted became milestones over the coming months.

Mr Davis had an endless list of exercises to perform each day, from moulding his face into exaggerated expressions to flexing his fingers.

He re-learnt how to eat, stand, sit, shower, turn a doorknob, walk and, eventually, jump back on a motorbike.

"When I was in hospital they asked me what I wanted to do and I said I wanted to do two things: one, go to the gym, and two, get a motorcycle - and I've done both," he said.

Nine months later, Mr Davis's routine is less hectic as he enjoys a more normal life in Canberra.

He proposed to Ms Attewell in January, "on the beach at sunrise", and they've moved into an apartment in Belconnen. Just this month he was promoted at work.

But everything is "just a little bit slower" these days. Mr Davis still undergoes physiotherapy once a week and even today, standing and sitting still sparks some leg pain.

Each day he peels of what is "essentially a skintight onesie with gloves and socks", showers and slathers himself in moisturiser.

"They'll take my garments away, piece by piece. I think the last thing I'll have is high socks," he said.

"I got really lucky. My body recovered quite quickly in the early days - it's still recovering."

Mr Davis hoped to begin reducing the coverage of his compression garments in the next weeks, starting with his left arm and torso.

But perhaps the most striking part of the long recovery has been his persistent positivity and humour.

Mr Davis and Ms Attewell shared a giggle as they remembered the blanket stuck to Mr Davis's burnt backside on that fateful August night, a regal veil flapping behind him as he stumbled towards the ambulance.

"We like having a joke, we burn through them," he quipped with a smirk.

Mr Davis largely attributes his gruelling recovery to Ms Attewell, who put her life on hold and stayed by his side throughout months in hospital.

"I think we took it as an ultimatum," Ms Attewell said of the ordeal.

"It's either fall in a heap and whinge and moan or say 'OK, this is what we've been dealt with, let's deal with it, lets move on, let's get life back to what it was'. We've learnt a lot about life and each other."

Mr Davis still has "shitty days" now and again but they've become rarer as time ticks over.

"In the early days everything was such a massive issue, nothing came easily; it was just frustrating," he said.

"A huge factor towards my rehabilitation was staying positive. There's no point sitting around feeling sad about it."