As some of you might have already heard, we had a 100ft Douglas Fir fall on our house in last Wednesday's wind storm (video below). My kids and I were home when it happened and but we got very lucky that we didn't sustain any injuries. We were able to get a tree service to remove the tree within a few hours and then tarp the roof pretty quickly after that, which helped to mitigate the amount of water damage. Two days after the tree fell, we meet with our insurance adjuster at the house to go over all the damage. Before meeting with the adjuster, I had several conversations with family and friends regarding the situation and all of them shared the same fear, that the insurance company was going to be a nightmare to deal with because they would low ball us on the repair costs. I made a few phone calls and had a local engineer and contractor meet us at the house to discuss the details with the adjuster. I think this made a world of a difference because they were able to explain all of the needed repairs in detail and come up with a realistic time frame to which our adjuster agreed. This also helped shorten our time frame because the alternative would be the adjuster collecting information on his own (photos & measurements of the damage), then trying to find a contractor in our area and then sending them the details of the job to see if it's something that contractor can handle. This is usually where the disagreements over cost pop up because the adjuster has already come up with a figure for repairs before a contractor has even reviewed the project, and as you can imagine, a contractor has much more accurate knowledge of construction and repairs than an insurance adjuster. Unfortunately its going to take about six months to complete all of the repairs because everything above the top plate needs to be removed and replaced. That means we have to clear everything out of our house to put half of it in storage and bring the other half of it with us to a rental house. It's going to be a wild few months. | 
