#91 We filed an insurance claim and headed back home to discuss

We left Savannah and headed back toward our home in Wilmington which was in a bad way because of the pipe freeze. The adjuster made the comment that if I wished I could stay on my excursion they could take care of everything without my presence. I don't know I just felt I needed to be there in person and look around just have a little bit of control over what's going on. We stopped at North Charleston at Francis Marion National Forest to break the trip up mostly slept and left.

I called the insurance company and started the process of rebuilding the house. When I first talked to the insurance adjuster, I told him that I didn’t think it would be all that bad. I have all tile floors and I thought that would mean we were indestructible. We'll probably just have a little sheetrock damage in the ceiling and very little else. He said well it sounds like your kind of an easy-going guy and I said I try to be. I did mention that the next room over has what's called Pergo or laminate flooring and as a pretty good chance that that's damaged. It swells up pretty bad when he gets wet and he said well let's take a look at it tomorrow.

As we started, I asked him to use a state farm-approved company. He suggested using ServiceMaster and they came the next morning and started the Demolition and drying out process. I really can't say enough good things about them. They’re a really good company. I would say if you were paying out-of-pocket it's pretty brutal but I had the insurance take care of it directly. Every floor system in the house was destroyed and we had about 1500 square feet of tile ceramic tile. The other thousand square feet was a laminate product, All the Durock under the tile had to be removed. Half the sheetrock in the house was ruined. The kitchen cabinets were condemned. The HVAC system was destroyed because it was full of water. It was a much bigger deal than I had ever expected. When it was all over and done and the final numbers came out the total damage to the house for this event was far more than we paid for the entire property about 24 years ago.