When your home gets damaged because of a natural disaster or accident, it’s your responsibility to clean it up. Even if your insurance company agrees to pay you compensation for the damage your home has sustained, nobody will be dispatched to help you unless you personally arrange and pay them to.
So, how are you supposed to clean your house after it’s been seriously damaged, and how can you do it safely? This post will explore this topic, offering a few tips that you can use to make the process a lot easier.
Contact Insurer
If your home has been seriously damaged because of a natural disaster, then you will probably be able to get an insurance pay-out. Before you begin cleaning up or repairing your home, call your insurer. Your insurer will likely dispatch an agent the same day (or the next day) to inspect your home. If their inspection finds that the damage was indeed caused by a natural disaster and wasn’t your fault, then you will receive a payment relatively soon after their final decision has been made. The reason that it’s best to let the insurance agent visit your home before making repairs or cleaning up is so that they can see the damage in its entirety. If there is anything that you need to fix immediately, then photograph it so that you can show the agent later on.
Structural Issues
Once the insurance agent has visited your home (or if you have taken photographs), then go ahead and begin repairing any structural issues immediately. Leaving structural issues unfixed could result in further damage to your home. A house with structural issues is very dangerous. In fact, you may not legally be allowed to live in your house if there is severe structural damage. You should never attempt to repair structural damage yourself. Instead, you should hire a professional to do it for you. If you don’t have any construction experience (or equipment) then trying to make structural repairs yourself is foolish.
Professional Cleaning
Instead of trying to clean everything up yourself, hire a professional cleaner to do it for you. It’s especially important to hire professional cleaners if your home has flooded (or has flood damage). According to the cleaners from cleopatracleaning.com.au/gold-coast/flood-damage-and-restoration, a professional cleaning company will be able to remove as much water as possible from your home and repair any flood damage that’s been caused. Before hiring a professional cleaning company, make sure that you read their customer feedback online, just so that you can determine their level of experience and see what their previous clients have to say about them.
Making Repairs
If there are any small repairs that need to be made, then you should try to do them yourself. Even though your insurance company will be giving you a pay-out, you don’t have to spend all of it on making repairs, you can save some of it. Making repairs yourself will allow you to save yourself money since the cost of hiring workmen to make repairs for you can be very expensive. You should never attempt to make electrical or plumbing repairs yourself though since a lot of experience is required to work with these things.
Enlisting Help
For any repairs that you can make yourself, it’s often a good idea to enlist the help of friends, family members, or loved ones. Undertaking post-damage repairs can be a lot of work. Additionally, you can ask the people that you’ve asked for help to clean up after you or repair other things. Having other people help you will make the process a lot easier. Additionally, they will be able to walk through your house and look for any damaged items or repairs that need to be made that you might not have noticed. At the very least, it’s good to have company when you are undertaking any type of heavy work.
Researching Contractors
One last thing that you need to make sure that you do is to carefully research any contractors that you are considering hiring to repair your home for you. Unfortunately, cowboy builders are on the rise. Whenever you are hiring a contractor you need to make sure that they are experienced, licensed, and know what they are doing. One way of ensuring this is to read their online reviews. If they have received consistently bad reviews, then it is a strong indication that they can’t be trusted to do work for you.
If your house has been damaged, then you likely won’t be able to rest until it has been cleaned up and repairs have been made. It’s often best to leave these things to professionals so that you don’t hurt yourself or make things worse. A professional repairman or cleaning company will be able to sort everything out for you while you focus on investigating the cause of the accident or claiming an insurance payment.
