How to document storm damage so your claim actually gets paid

Claims are decided on evidence, and nearly all of the evidence that matters is available in the first week — then disappears. Water dries. Debris gets cleared. Walls get closed. The difference between a claim that pays and one that argues is usually just what somebody thought to photograph before the clean-up started.

Photograph in four passes

1. Wide, from outside. Every elevation of the building, plus the roof if it is safe to see it. These establish the overall event and the date.
2. Wide, from inside each room. Stand in the doorway. One frame that shows the whole room, so that later close-ups can be located.
3. Close on every damaged element. The stain, the crack, the lifted plank, the missing shingle. Get near enough that the damage is unmistakable.
4. Open construction. Once demolition starts, photograph everything the finishes were hiding — wet insulation, rusted fasteners, rotted sheathing, damaged framing.

What a useful photograph has in it

• A sense of scale. A tape measure, a ruler, or a familiar object in frame. "A crack" means nothing; "a crack 40 inches long" means something.
• Its location. Either visible in the frame or written in the caption. A photograph of unidentifiable wet drywall helps nobody.
• The date. Phone photographs carry this automatically in the file metadata — which is a reason to keep the originals rather than screenshots.
• Context. At least one wider shot that connects the close-up to the room it is in.

A note on metadata: photographs from a phone contain the date and often the location. That is useful evidence, and it is also personal data about your home — worth knowing that when you upload photographs to Punchlist360 the location data is stripped while the images stay full quality.

Write things down the same day

Memory is not evidence, and eighteen months later you will not recall which day the roofer first came, or what the adjuster said on the phone. Keep a running log with dates:

• When the damage happened, and when you first reported it
• Every conversation with the carrier — date, who, and what was agreed
• When each contractor attended and what they did
• When the property was made safe, dried out, or boarded up
• Any day work could not proceed, and why

On a construction project this is a daily log, and it is the document lawyers ask for first in any dispute about delay or responsibility.

Keep the receipts from day one

Emergency mitigation — tarps, boarding, drying equipment, a hotel while the house is uninhabitable — is usually covered, often under a separate part of the policy from the repair itself. It is also the spending most likely to happen in a rush, get paid on a personal card, and never make it into the claim. Here is what counts and how to file it.

Do it once, in one place

The practical failure is not that people do not document. It is that the documentation ends up in four places: photographs on a phone, receipts in a drawer, notes in a notebook, and emails in a thread. When the adjuster asks a question, assembling the answer takes an evening, so it does not happen, and the claim quietly settles for less.

Anything that keeps the photograph, the receipt and the note attached to the same item will beat a better-organised set of separate piles.