Document the damage before you repair it.

Repairs after a storm are urgent and right. What gets lost, over and over, is the ten hours of documentation that should happen first. Here is what to preserve, and why the order matters.

You have two jobs, and they are not in conflict

Your insurance policy requires you to take reasonable steps to protect the property from further damage. Tarp the roof. Dry the interior. Board the window. Do not wait on any of that for photographs or lawyers; failing to mitigate can hurt your claim all by itself. Keep the receipts: standard policies both require a record of those emergency expenses and generally cover their reasonable cost.

But there is a difference between temporary protection and permanent repair. The tarp is mitigation. Tearing off and replacing the roof is repair, and repair is the step that destroys evidence. Nearly everything on this list fits in the gap between those two, and that gap is where the claim is won or lost.

Photograph everything before anyone touches anything

Before the contractor, before the adjuster, before your own cleanup, walk the entire property with your phone. The one exception is emergency protection: if water is actively coming in, protect first and photograph as you go. The duty to prevent further damage always comes first.

• Shoot wide, then medium, then close: the whole elevation, then the damaged area, then the detail. A close-up of a crack means little without the context shots that show where it is.
• Cover everything, not just the obvious damage. Every room, every elevation, the attic, the roof if you can do it safely or with a ladder shot from the eave. Damage you have not noticed yet is still damage.
• Follow the water. Photograph the path from where it entered to everywhere it went: ceilings, walls, floors, contents.
• Take a continuous video walkthrough narrating the date and what you are seeing. It is the fastest way to capture context, and the timestamp travels with the file.
• Re-photograph after each stage: after the tarp goes on, after drying equipment comes out, before and after any tear-out.

Photographs answer the question every claim eventually turns on: what did the property actually look like before the repairs changed it.

Keep the materials

This is the step almost no one takes, and the one that matters most if your loss is more than a routine claim. When damaged materials are torn out, keep samples: shingles or roof tiles with their fasteners, sections of flashing, a piece of the failed stucco, a cut of the wet drywall showing how far the water traveled. Bag them, label them with the date and location on the house, and put them in the garage.

Tell your contractor, in writing, that you want damaged materials preserved rather than hauled away, at minimum representative samples of everything removed. Contractors are paid to make debris disappear; they will not save it unless you ask.

Why it matters: the failed assembly is the physical evidence of why it failed. A shingle with its actual fastener pattern can show whether the roof was attached the way the code required. Once that goes to the landfill, the question of whether your loss was storm damage, or a construction defect the storm exposed, may become unanswerable. And if a dispute was already reasonably foreseeable when the materials were discarded, the destruction of that evidence can itself become a problem in the case. The law has a name for that concept, spoliation, and the safest way to never learn its details is to keep the samples.

Get the cause examined, not just the damage

The adjuster documents what is damaged and what it costs. Someone should also look at why it failed. A roof that lifted because it was under-fastened, or stucco that let water in because it was installed wrong, is not just a storm loss; it may also be a construction-defect claim against whoever built it, on its own separate deadlines. That is the subject of its own article in this series, and the short version is: the storm claim and the defect claim live in the same damaged wall, and only an examination of cause can tell them apart. Have that look happen before the repair erases what there is to look at. If a qualified inspection cannot happen before urgent repairs, your photographs and samples are what stand in for it.

The short version

Protect the house now. Photograph everything before each step. Keep samples of what comes out, and tell the contractor in writing to save them. Get the cause examined before permanent repairs. Report the claim inside the notice window. A well-documented loss may still be a fight, but an undocumented one hands the other side its best argument: that no one can now say what really happened.

Related: After the storm: when the damage reveals a defect  ·  Roof damage and a denied or underpaid claim