catastrophe_part.four

[and we're still going... ]

for those of you just joining us, the title of this post specifies part four. so... go read the first 3 if you want to get caught up. for everyone else, im not re-capping, so lets dig into the meat & potatoes.

at this point the house was drying-out pretty well.

i'd been in fairly frequent contact with greg, who was more than happy to keep me apprised of the situation. however, i was having no luck finding a roofer that would put on the torched-down modified roof, and i was getting frustrated.

then saturday i get a phone call from ryan - not happy again. great, now what?

apparently he'd stopped by to check on the progress of the house dry-out [during yet another rain storm... this has got to be one of the wettest seasons on record in cincy, its just been non-stop.] only to find that the new tarp was billowing up and water was once again getting into the house. are you freaking kidding me.... obviously he wants me to get something done. and now.

so we hung up and i gave the roofer a call... and got his voicemail. what kind of a roofer doesnt take calls on a saturday? frustrating... so i leave him a voicemail and let him know that the tarp is coming up and i need him out there asap to get it fixed. and... he doesnt call back...

in fact, its not till monday that i finally hear back from him and hes not happy either. he says he'll have his guys go out and look at it, but ensures me that they installed it properly and theres no way it should be blowing up.

the next morning i finally get some news on whats happening with the tarp. the roofer calls me back and lets me know that he sent guys out monday and as it turns out the tarp was in fact blowing up on one of the front corners of the house. the bad news, is that from what he tells me the tarp was obviously tampered with. [what??]

the tarp was brand new when they installed it and they used a series of 2x4 nailers on top of the tarp all around the edge to pin it down uniformly so that it wouldnt tear out around a nail. well that makes sense to me, so what the hell happened?? apparently someone got out there and removed the nailer boards in the corner area and when they put them back they somehow did so wrong [im still lost on how the hell you can do that wrong!] and the roofers guys could obviously see new nail holes in a different place than where they had them originally and somehow this accounted for it blowing up in that corner. [again. im still lost. if they nailed it back down in the same manner as before, even in a slightly different place, then how exactly did it come up?? and while we're on the subject, who the hell was tampering with the freaking tarp? whats the point in that??]

anyway, hes pissed and informs me that i will be billed for them having to go back out and fix it after someone else messed it up. great. whatever, the insurance company said they'd handle the temporary roof repairs, so im not worried about it. at this point anyway...

since i have him on the phone, i take the opportunity to discuss the situation with the estimate for the repairs. i tell him what the insurance agent told me and discussed what money they were going to provide and what they were and werent going to pay for and asked if we could negotiate on his estimate at all. to which he replied flat-out, that its their company policy not to come down on their prices, period. [wtf??] seriously?? who has a company policy like that?? i tried to reason with him, i tried to make him understand that there was no more money, i tried to get him to help me out at all, and he just was not willing to budge. instead, he started to tell me that the insurance company is screwing me over and that theres no way in hell i'd find anyone to do that roof for cheaper than what hes quoting me if they do it right, yada yada yada.... great. im truly screwed here.

so eventually, after hes been chewing on my ear for a while, he decides hes done and lets me get off the phone. and now, i dont know what to do. i dont have an extra $7000 just laying around to put into this stupid house[nor would i want to if i did!], hes not willing to budge on his price, and the insurance company isnt willing to give me another dime. so... now what??

well, at this point my old buddy greg just happens to give me a call to update me on the dry-out. mmm-kay... what else could go wrong?

well, luckily, on greg's end. not much, lol! considering hes already all but gutted my house, what bad news could he have? "we've decided to bulldoze the whole thing and start over"?? ;]

apparently the house isnt/wasnt drying out as fast as they'd hoped, so its probably going to take another week. additionally, there are some places that the walls just arent drying out and they were hoping they would. one wall in particular is the one between the kitchen and dining room and theyre pretty sure theyre going to have to open that one up to get it to dry out, if not tear it out all-together. but other than that, everything is going well and they're very optimistic about the process being completed sooner rather than later.

well this is good news to me. something actually getting done, i cant wait! so again, while having him on the phone already, i take the opportunity to discuss with greg the situation with the roof and ask if he thinks he'd be able to help me out. and greg of course says he'd be glad to and will have his guy come look at the roof as soon as he can to put together an estimate on it for me.

not long after i hang up with him, i get a call from the estimator from rainbow, rob - whod id spoken with a little before when i gave the interior work to rainbow, and who is also always happy to speak with me - who wants to briefly discuss the roof. so i give him the whole story and tell him whats going on with the insurance company, etc. he says no problem and they'll get something to me as soon as possible.

/*/ now to clarify on a few things mentioned in the previous section.

1. tearing out walls. i dont know about you in particular, but when my mother heard this specifc little factoid she was very concerned about the structure of the house, and understandably at that. so for any of you out there that had the same initial thought, let me put your mind to ease briefly.

our house is over 100 years old and is essentially a long skinny rectangle in shape. the way it was built is through exterior structural brick walls [that are nearly a foot and a half thick] with timber floor joists that span from one wall to the other along the narrower width. this is traditional construction for that time period, and is perfectly legitimate and structurally sound if done properly. this is also why if you've ever been in a really old neighborhood, you may have noticed that nearly every house was less that 25 feet wide and was long and skinny from front to back. this accounts for the basic material limitations that they had to work with 100 years ago. and responded to the same type of construction that we have here, where the exterior walls support the entire house and the floor/ceiling joists span directly across the house from one side to the other. what this does is put all of the load of the house on the exterior walls, which is then taken straight down to the foundations [typically stacked stone in these 100 year old houses] and then again into the earth. this basically means that every wall on the interior of the house is typically a non-structural wall unless there were some kind of modifications made after the house was originally built. you can further verify that this is the case by simply going into the basement. if none of the interior walls go down to the basement floor [which most of the time they dont in these old houses] then they obviously arent being structurally supported by the ground directly, i.e., not structural. [well, not structural in the sense that theyre not holding up the entire house and you could have some serious issues if you removed one.]

2. secondly, i hadnt mentioned this before but its important to understand how these estimates are being made in this process. in the case of your typical contractor [the first one we were working with for instance] they do a walk through, inspect the condition of things, decide what they will or wont have to repair or replace, and then they do some quick multiplication assuming certain percentages or dollars per square foot, or ratios of man hours/material. its about as simple as that. if you ask them for an itemized breakdown theyll then typically do a little more work/research and give you some estimates on material pricing/square foot or linear foot depending on the material and potentially the number of guys they plan to have working for roughly how many hours. at this point however, once theyve had to give you more specific numbers, you'll probably see an additional item pop-up that says something along the lines of "any additional or unexpected work to be hourly cost plus labor." this means that if the job takes any longer than they originally estimated or anything gets more complicated than they originally thought, its going to cost you a lot more because theyre going to bill you hourly[and depending on the company or type of work, they'll typically bill 20-40 dollars an hour per worker]. just something to keep in mind.

contrary to that, insurance companies do things completely different. when they do a walk through/inspection/assessment, they take measurements and notes on materials the very first time [and hopefully pictures as well] of anything that is damaged and they simply plug in their numbers and materials into a program that spits out all the reports they need [which are your estimates]. this program essentially contains a database of the going rate of labor [either a national average or based on a given region], the costs of all different kinds of materials [same as before] and the quantities. the program then calculates everything and spits out an itemized list of what each piece will cost all broken down and tabulates the total cost.

its actually a neat little tool that certainly gets you very specific numbers very quickly. the only downside is that these numbers are typically a little low. mostly because any contractor youre going to find to work with is going to beef up their labor costs, material costs, time, etc. to increase their profit a little and make the job worth-while to them. they're certainly not going to walk away without making any money, but they're also not going to tell you where and how their profit is being factored in to their estimate, so more than likely the contractors estimate is almost always going to be higher [if not much, much higher] than the numbers being calculated by this program.

luckily for us, rainbow international is a company that specializes in working on disaster claims and working with insurance companies, so theyve made it their business practice to use all of the same methods and programs that the insurance companies use to calculate their estimates, so rainbows are typically near identical to the insurance company youre working with [yes, each insurance provider uses a different program and calculates things slightly different]. so... the estimates for the work that rainbow does, are almost always completely covered by the insurance company.

3. in addition to that, if the company youre working with happens to be approved as a "preferred service provider" [or 'psp' - this may be a slightly different term depending on the situation, but it will mean essentially the same thing] with your insurance company, then this whole process gets even simpler. it basically means that your insurance company trusts them, and basically stops asking questions and everything gets that much smoother. i wish id known about this preferred service provider business up front, it would have saved a LOT of headaches. it's my advice to always find a preferred service provider when dealing with insurance claims [this goes for vehicle too, been there, done that] it just makes the entire process so much easier on you. i havent discovered yet if theres a publicly available list of who these preferred service providers are for your insurance company, but if there is one, its definitely worth getting your hands on at the beginning of the process, instead of stumbling into later. /*/

a few days later i got an email laying out the estimate for the roof, which was well under the other guys $13,000 and i immediately faxed over to state farm.

however, after faxing it, i looked over it more closely and discovered that there'd been a little confusion in our phone conversation and they hadnt estimated for the torch-down modified roof, and they hadnt accounted for removal of the existing. after calling them back i discovered that their guys had only looked at one place on the roof briefly to establish the existing condition, and that wherever they checked the condition, they only found two layers of membrane [probably because the rest was blown off in that corner, lol!] and they were planning to just go over it. i explained that the entire existing had to be removed before hand and that i needed to see numbers for torch-down mod. if they could get them and he assured me he'd get new estimates out asap.

[meanwhile...]

on the insurance side of things, the dry-out process is taking longer than they expected and my mobile rep is now having to become mobile again. bye, ryan... this time around however, because of the type of claim, and the situation we're in, they decided to hand the case off to a local regional office to handle the remainder of the claim. [enter agents 4, 5, & 6] over the course of the next week i spoke with 3 different people who were at the local office and were passing my case around to get it in the hands of the right person to deal with the type of claim i had. [apparently communication is a little off from one branch of the insurance company to the other..] but eventually we got it settled and we have a very nice girl working on the case now with an actual phone number i can call her on if i ever need to, and shes been working closely and quickly with rainbow to get this all expedited and get the work started to put things back together.

monday morning i got the two new estimates, and while they were now higher to accommodate the cost of removal, they were still $4,000 less than the other guys, and since they were itemized and calculated the same way the insurance company would, i was hoping it would give us a little leverage to get it completely covered. sent those off to the insurance company immediately as well, and at this point we're all but caught up to real-time.

the most recent update after all that came the middle of last week.

1. dry-out is complete. woohoo!

2. walk-throughs with new insurance agents have been completed and estimates are being put together.

3. rainbow had been approved as a preferred service provider and the roof estimate has also been approved.

4. work is scheduled to begin on the replacement of the roof this week.

5. an estimate for the interior work has been started [although it's being split up into different parts for different kinds of work] for the interior and we should be getting numbers this week for flooring and then for the rest [hopefully!]

stay tuned, and i'll update again when i know more.

everyone have a great week!