I am in the middle of a large loss fire claim. My sentiments pretty much echo juliatallmadge's (wish I could reach her to find out how it all turned out). Mine was a high-end single family residential rental. The renter was at fault, so not only do I have the experience of dealing with my own insurance company (State Farm), I will be getting experience dealing with the renter's TWO insurance companies (one is for the general renter's policy and the other is for a general liability umbrella policy). All I can say is, it has almost been one year and the house is still standing unoccupied and untouched. The inside of the home was completely smoked out and partially structurally damaged. Only now is the claim being subrogated by my insurance company, which has paid to term limits, to the tenant's insurance company. As juliatallmadge stated, it looks like the tenant's insurance companies will try to micro-negotiate everything, so I am in the process of shopping attorneys. Since the fire was the fault of the tenant's, I deserve to be compensated for my loss. But I get the distinct feeling at this stage this will not happen without legal representation and quite possibly a legal battle that may go all the way to court. I will know more as this situation unfolds in the next 2-6 months. I can only say that State Farm has been wonderful. But be very certain to read your policy thoroughly, because even your claims adjuster can make big mistakes that you might catch. We caught a 90K mistake in our favor. Also, DO NOT make the very common mistake of being underinsured. If we had not been underinsured, we would already be started on the construction while waiting for the tenant's insurance companies to settle with us. Take pictures and videos of EVERYTHING. Open your drawers and cabinets and shoot pictures. Shoot every single feature in your house. And then store those someplace safe outside of your own home. Also, because I saw it happen, keep your computer backed up on a hard drive and store it outside of your home or in a fire/flood proof vault, as well. In my opinion, $1,200 a year for homeowner's insurance is chump change. I was paying more than that and was still underinsured.

Any septic tank that cannot withstand the weight of even four feet of snow on top of it would not be approved in the first place. Secondly, the OP has never revealed as to whether this is a concrete tank or a steel tank or how old the tank actually is. Snow loads that exceed the tables in the local building code would be considered a peril within the spirit of insurance. However, adjusters are going to be looking very closely at some of those barns to see if they were well-maintained or not. Wood supports that were rotted out will likely cut back the amount the insurance company will pay.

Well, this has definitely been a learning experience for us! We've not been happy with the level of responsiveness from our insurance company although it supposedly is ranked as one of the top companies in the country. In many ways they have screwed up from the get go. So, we've been feeling that we are definitely on our own on this one. After more than a month of hassling this, we are starting to think that perhaps we should have just hired a GC. But, at the start we didn't realize that the scope of the necessary repairs would keep expanding into the realm where a GC might be necessary. Our adjuster just told us to find some companies to bid on the heating and plumbing work (all that we initially thought was involved). As we get further into this, we are realizing all of the additional things that will need to be worked on. I guess we are lucky in that we have the funds in hand to pay for some of the initial expenses such as temporary lodging and initial diagnostic work on the house. A number of times we've talked about how in the world people who don't have the extra money would be able to handle making these payments and then waiting for reimbursement. Our insurance company didn't even step up and offer any assistance with finding temporary lodging until more than two weeks into this. And, then, they didn't have any better options than I'd managed to find after hours and hours of searching on my own. I think some of the issues we are having are due to our wanting to do things our own way to make sure they are done correctly and in a manner suitable to a 100 year old house. The insurance company has four approved contractors in our city, and if we had chosen to work through them all of the money would have gone directly to them through the insurance agency without us having to be involved at all. But, we started looking into reviews of those companies, and they weren't great. So, we opted out of using those approved contractors. We are ending up acting as our own GC, but it is a lot of work! We are lucky we have the time to do this. Yes, we have just considered paying off the rest of the mortgage and could do that. But, we live in a pretty pricey house and that is a good chunk of money that we might want to have available elsewhere in this entire process. So, we are sitting on that idea for a bit. And, when asking about pocketing some of the money by doing work on my own, my intent is not to defraud or raise rates. I just want to know why I could not do the painting myself since I am as capable as the professional that I know the insurance company will be paying a pretty penny to do the same work. So, are some of you suggesting that we just hire a GC, have the GC make a bid for the entire project, and then make our own arrangements with the GC on how we could save some of the total sum by doing the work ourselves? Thanks for all of the advice and personal experiences.

Your lawyer should be handling this for you. Then you don't have to spend 'hours on the phone'. You let your lawyer do that. You don't even look at medical bills, you forward them right to your lawyer. First off, if your jurisdiction is like mine, you've probably got two years to settle this--DON"T BE IN A RUSH. Your husband may yet discover he has longterm damage that needs to be addressed. Once the claim is settled,it's really difficult, if not impossible, to reopen it. When my dd was rear-ended, she was immediately okay (but thoroughly checked over at the hospital). She eventually was diagnosed with a degenerative spine injury caused by the impact. We turned the case over to our lawyer within hours of it happening. Our lawyer took care of all the negociations--all the paperwork, handled getting DD a rental car, a very quick check for the value of her totalled car--getting us MORE than book value for it. Her medicals were another thing. She was paid for all her medical bills (and they ran up to a pretty extensive amount) and about $50,000 for future medicals and pain and suffering. Please, it's late to be getting him in on this but don't try to do this on your own. Not only is your lawyer more experienced with negociating settlements, what's generally allowed in this sort of case in your area, but you MUST have representation when you go to the depositions you'll probably have to give. This is the sort of thing where it may cost you a bit to have a lawyer, but it will cost you much more not to have one. This post was edited by azzalea on Fri, Jul 12, 13 at 18:00