Take a Video of Your House Tonight

If you've never had a fire at a home, a business, a church, or a lake house, count yourself lucky. Fires are disorienting in a way that's hard to explain until you're standing in the aftermath. Everything you knew about that building turns into a question.

Here's the part almost nobody does ahead of time. It takes about fifteen minutes.

Walk your house with your phone and hit record

Begin at the front door. Go room by room. Open the closets. Open the drawers. Open the kitchen cabinets. Point the camera into the garage, the attic, the shed, the tool bench. Talk while you're walking – say what things are, and when you got them if you remember.

Then send that video somewhere that isn't inside the house. Email it to yourself. Put it in cloud storage. Send it to a family member. Anywhere you could get to it from a hotel room.

That's it. That's the whole exercise.

It matters because listing out twenty years of accumulated belongings from memory, under stress, is close to impossible. Nobody remembers what was on the shelf in the back of the closet. The video does.

Read your policy before you need to read it

Most people find out what their policy actually says at the worst possible moment. Pull it up on an ordinary Tuesday when nothing is wrong and look at it.

Questions worth putting to your insurance agent:

• What are my policy limits, and how was that number calculated?
• Does that number reflect what it would cost to rebuild this house today?
• Do I have coverage for code upgrades if a rebuild has to meet current requirements?
• How are the contents of the house covered?
• What about detached structures – the garage, the shop, the fence?

Answering those is your agent's job. Ask them now, while it's a calm conversation.

Rebuild timelines are longer than people expect

We've been working in DFW since 1997, and material lead times still haven't settled back to where they used to be. Things go on backorder. Labor books out. Getting material to a job site on schedule takes more effort than it did a few years ago.

That's not a reason to panic. It's a reason to hold realistic expectations about what a rebuild takes, and to talk to a builder early rather than late.

Know who does what

After a fire, several different trades show up, and they don't all do the same job.

Mitigation crews come first. They dry the structure out, cut away what can't be saved, haul debris, and clean up. They move fast because speed is the point – water sitting in a building causes its own set of problems.

Restoration and rebuild contractors handle putting the structure back together.

Roofing and exterior contractors handle the outside of the building.

One thing people don't expect: a fire brings a lot of water with it. Between what burns and what gets soaked, the roof usually ends up part of the conversation even when the fire didn't begin up there.

If the outside of your building took damage

Autograph Construction is a family-owned roofing and wrought iron fence contractor working across the DFW area since 1997. Texas contractor license #1223708. RCAT certified. Every job carries our lifetime transferable workmanship warranty.

If you want a starting point on roof scope, our roof estimator will walk you through it. Otherwise, get in touch or call (945) 231-3781 and we'll take a look.

Quality is our Signature.

Questions? Call (945) 231-3781