This all started with a puddle on the floor. I have been blogging my way through the process involved in making a claim with my homeowners insurance company, from start to whenever it gets finished. The insurance company connected us with a claims investigator. Here is how that went.
As I said, it all started with a mysterious puddle on the floor. It seemed that the water leaked in during a hard rain. My husband made a claim with the company we have our homeowners insurance through. So far, we have had some repairmen come take a look at the damage, and we got three form letters from the insurer. Each letter said something different from the other two.
The next step was to have a claims investigator come take a look at the damage. In previous blogs, I’ve been calling this person a claims adjuster. It seems that this particular job could be correctly called by any of the following titles: claims adjuster, claims appraiser, claims examiner, or claims investigator. The person we got in contact with said he was a claims investigator.
The claims investigator was first contacted by our insurance company. He called us to coordinate a good day and time for him to come over and take a look at the wall that the water seeped through. He arrived as scheduled. He took a look at the wall, by the floor, and noticed that the paneling on the wall had warped. He asked questions about what the repair workers said about the walls. He asked us what our decorative concrete floor was on top of. Was it wood, or another layer of concrete?
He drew a quick diagram of the shape of the room that had a puddle on the floor. To make measurements, he used a hand held device that shot a laser beam across the room. It told him the length of each wall in the room.
Next, he went outside to take a look at the outer wall where the water had come in. Just like the repairmen, the claims investigator didn’t see any obvious places that would have made it easy for the water to come in. After that, he went to his van, pulled out a ladder, and climbed on the roof. We live in a mobile home, so it was a bit uncomfortable to hear his footsteps as he walked across the roof. It turned out that our roof is just fine. He could not find anywhere that looked like it would produce a leak when it rained.
When he was all done, he shared his findings with us. He decided that we need to have two of the wall panels replaced. The room would then require repainting. He figured out what that would cost, and subtracted out our deductible. The remaining amount went into a check that is written out to both me and my husband. This money is to be used to pay the repairmen who come to fix the wall panels.
Image by Mark Hunter on Flickr