riley605: Sorry, long again. I am very familiar with your feelings as I have seen this many times. When homeowners fight long and hard to build their home, the new or nothing approach is common in these situations. Usually its an emotional flinch reaction and if you understand the entire process, that will go away. Living in temporary housing no matter how nice will have its challenges. Your family will probably have some squabbles over this. There will probably be sleepless nights and a ton of hand wringing while this is going on. There will be times with a ton of stress as this whole process will be a major disruption in your lives and a major pain in the @$$. Heck the material selections for roofing, flooring, paint colors, tile, fixtures, etc. etc. etc. is alone very time consuming for a big home. The material selections are the easy part of the restoration process also. If it was me, my priority would be to find the "RIGHT" contractor to be my advocate so I get my house "PROPERLY" repaired ASAP. Once the house is repaired, I can get my family back in and our lives back on track. After months or even a year of this, it can wear on people so doing it right and being expeditious should be approach. Without seeing the home (you can send some pictures if you like) its hard to tell if a full tear down is necessary but it doesnt sound like it. A complete demolish and start over will add so much time to the rebuild. Not sure about Oklahoma, but here, if its a total rebuild, I will need site plans, a full blown set of architectural plans with all mechanicals just to get my building permit. If you are just repairing the home, the permit process is much easier. Also if you demolish the home, youll probably need to redo you septic or sewer connections, electrical connections and water connections. The disturbance to the yard is going to be much greater and you could need to redo sidewalks and driveways. All these things can take a ton of time and I dont recommend if its not necessary. Also, if its not necessary, State Farm will have a legitimate reason to delay and fight the costs. State Farm is terrible when it comes to claims IMO. Like a good neighbor my @$$. State Farm is the 600 pound gorilla in the industry and their adjusters are usually not the best. They will try to get by on the cheap if they can. Understand those words "IF THEY CAN". All but a handful of insurance companies will try to settle cheap "IF THEY CAN". Its up to the policy holder to make sure the insurance company gives a fair and proper settlement. How do you do that? First option is to hire a "good" public adjuster because a bad PA will only make matters worse. The public adjuster works on your behalf for usually a 10% fee. Sometime the PAs are useful but when they are involved, it takes forever to settle. If you hire a PA, dont count on moving back into your home soon. You may not even start the restoration process for a full year if you hire a PA. PAs can be useful on very large losses or commercial losses where business interruption and complicated policies and legal issues exist but for simple sticks and bricks issues, I feel they are more trouble than they are worth. Second option is to hire a "good" restoration contractor because a bad one can again make matters worse. A "good" restoration contractor is not going to be the cheapest as State Farm would prefer but the insurance company is obligated to pay fair and reasonable pricing, not the cheapest. The contractor will be doing the negotiations with the adjuster for the repairs. Final option is to hire the contractor that State Farm recommends if that do recommend one. During these large storms, they may not recommend someone. If you are in a very rural area, State Farm might be using the best company around because there are no other companies available. Normally I only recommend someone use the insurance companys contractor if the contractor is the only good player in the area or if its a minor claim. The contractor doing the repairs should already be involved. Usually when we do a rebuild, we are on the scene scoping the loss within a day or two. I know there was much damage in the area, but this is even a bigger reason to find your contractor now. If there is a good amount of rebuild work due to the storm, you want to be on the front of line so youre not waiting for the contractor to finish other work first. If you need help finding a good restoration contractor, I can possibly help. I know companies in the industry all around the country and if I don't know a good one in your area, others that I know will. If there is a good one operating in your area, they won't be too hard to find. Who is currently scoping the loss to write the estimate? Is it the adjuster or did the adjuster send in a contractor to write the estimate? In order to properly write a scope of repairs can take a week or two on the site, measuring, photographing and documenting. Then the estimator will have another week or two in front of the computer entering the data. Its not uncommon for a month or two to go by before these scopes (estimates) are properly prepared. Your contractor should be doing this NOW!!!! What the 2-story home roof specialist suggested???? Never heard of that title before but if you are missing parts of the roof in different areas of the house, why would you need to rebuild the second floor if the wall framing is in good shape. If the roof is trussed or even stick built, you can remove the entire roof, reframe it and leave the second floor framing intact if its in not damaged. This project is going to need someone to be the tough guy, pit bull, champion or whatever you want to call it. If your husband is not that person and you are, then you should be handling this. I have had many clients in the past where the Mrs. wears the pants on these projects and I rarely see the husband. There is nothing wrong with this because if the Mr. is not the one who will push and you will, you should be the one in charge of this process. It sounds like you were anyway when the house was built. If the house doesnt need to be demolished, rest assured, a good contractor will rebuild it to your standards and possibly even better then it was prior to the storm. Let me know how I can assist, BTW, was anyone hurt when your home was struck?

Here's another viewpoint. We sold our house on the first weekend of February, 2005. The house was listed for a total of 8 hours before we signed an offer sheet/ binder. Believe me when I say we we're in shock! We spent three months removing all our personal items/ pictures & etc. from the house. We re-painted most of the rooms. A couple of major things we did that needed to be done was replace the heating/ hot water system. Both were 33 years old. We tiled the kitchen floor and had some new tiling done in the bathroom. I did all the work except for the tile and furnace. Our realtor assisted us in staging the house to show off it's best features. Price wise, while we were spending the 3 months getting the houses ready to sell, we went to open house in our area that showed the same type house as ours - a raised ranch. We had a good isea of the market and our realtor did a market analysis for us - part of her job. And this was not the "make a killing" mentality. We had lived in the house for 23 years. We knew what we would make. Did we ask to little? No. We asked a fair price and were willing to negotiate on price. We priced to sell! The other aspect of the sale was we were already in contract for our present house. We purchased our present home for $200,000.00 under the market value. We made an offer on it before we had our old house on the market. The reason was the house had not been maintained. The furnace hadn't been serviced in three years, the cook top on the range was broken through, the oven hadn't been cleaned in God knows how long. The dishwasher was rusted out and the hardwood floors were a disaster because of animals. I could go one because I've already addressed 37 seperate projects since we moved in in March 2005. My house is now worth what it should have sold for. So, a well maintained, clean house does make a big difference. Buyers know when the owners have taken care of the property. It is called pride in ownership. Price does make a difference. A fairly priced house will sell much faster than an overpriced one. So congrats to Kevin and all the other who have sold quickly, even in a depressed market. Enjoy the journey. eal51 in western CT

The electrician's repair report was enough to get the insurance written-- and he didn't have to do anything else So we closed He came out to the house the day after and showed us some of the problems with the main electrical box and pointed out some other problems in the house And he was upfront about what was more cosmetic vs borderline problamatic Basically it is a 40+ yr old house that has had remodeling donein stages and needs to have the electrical box cleaned up and updated When the sellers did the kitchen remodel they added a new smaller panelffor part of the new fixtures but they didn't move any of the crowded circuits over to balance the load Some of the circuit breakers are looseand need to be replaced with more modern version probably shouldn't have passed inspection but required replacing--like the double tapped breakers But the electrician also said that the kitchen remodel had been well done--so that is positive Some of the things we are changing include relocating some ceiling fans and light switches and changing out some light fixtures and plug covers--which are mainly cosmetic vs dangerous but prior owners had open/unshielded light bulbs screwed into the closet fixtures which is dangerous--especially with all they had crammed into their closets on the top shelves they had taken out the porch light fixture on the ceiling of front portch--and covered the junction box with cardboard they painted-- so you couldn't really see anyone at the front door w/o opening it because there is not enough light at night... Having that corrected... 'they also had some small transformers like you use for landscape lighting on back patio with extension cords handing out of them--right by where the BBQ grill is-- looked messy and dangerous--so that is getting cleaned up Yes--I probably overreacted-- but our RE agent has been in business for more than 10 yrs he has seen enough home inspection reports to know when something is going to be a problem I can't believe that the guy doing the home inspection didn't tell him at the time that those breakers wouldn't pass insurance requirements... anyway-- a house with an electrical problem is not so bad in the scheme of things... we flew back from FL Friday and found out Monday that friend of our son--young man we have known since jr high--died very unexpectedly after going to ER for what he thought was bad case of flu... left wife and three children under 3-- so that was terrible news... difficult to take pleasure in your own happiness

He is by no means uneducated, he used to build houses in his spare time, knows all the codes etc but no he would have no clue how to work in an office and don't think he could stand it anyway.He is brilliant and talented in so many fields but they are all physical and his job has taken all those options away. I didn't think about disability at the State level but then he would never consider Medicaid or food stamps, we have way to many "slackers" working the system here in Michigan.SSDI will not be enough to live on so I was hoping there was some other kind of compensation for someone that's been "used up" on the job.