Hail, No!

It was May of 2008, and my wife was due to have our second child any day. We woke up around midnight to the crashing thunder of a big spring storm, soon followed by the tinkling sounds of hail bouncing off the roof. Here in Central Texas, hail isn’t that unusual, or usually that much of an issue. This time was different.

Handfuls of hail...

The storm soon grew loud enough to wake our three-year-old daughter, and she and my wife huddled in our windowless interior bathroom. I had gone out to put blankets on my truck, a task that I abandoned as the hail flew at me sideways at 60 mph. The hail pounded the wood siding of the house, with the effect of sounding like being inside a giant drum. The storm was so loud that I didn't even hear the softball-sized hail smashing through all the glass in our west-facing windows a few feet away.

When the hail petered out, we quickly realized we had a bunch of ice starting to melt on our wood floors and no window panes to stop the rain. And the power was out. I quickly used a plastic snow shovel to scoop up ice and glass and dump it back out the window openings, then dried the wood floors the best I could.

More Property = More Hail Damage

After the storm, we also finally replaced our paper window shades.

Having rental properties is like home ownership multiplied, so next up was checking all of our rental properties in the neighborhood. At the house next door, one of the tenants saw me through the now open window and let me know they'd only had one window break. The rest of the windows were protected by trees and screens. He’d gotten the ice off the floor and was working on putting cardboard over the hole. Two other houses were mostly protected by trees and west facing front porches. One house had the tenants out of town and broken windows and melting ice on wood floors, so I had another middle of the night clean up job in the dark (with the power still out).

Start Your Claims ASAP

While I was making the rounds, my wife had the foresight to start filing insurance claims. This meant we were at the top of the list to have the insurance adjuster come out and begin that process, which was important to us since we were due to have a baby at any time.

Bye bye, original glass windows.

At sunrise the next morning, the whole neighborhood was carpeted with the bright green leaves that had been stripped off the trees. I stood in line to buy window glass at the hardware store as soon as it opened, which was important since they quickly sold out. Next, I started photographing everything in daylight. This was useful when dealing with the insurance company when it was time to document damage that was repaired or cleaned up before the adjuster came out, and to document how a hail storm could cause damage inside the house.

The Takeaway

All together it was a learning experience as it was the first, and still only, time I’ve filed insurance claims. Things I learned:

1. File the insurance claim as fast as you can. This can be done 24 hours a day. The people who waited until the next day to file claims were waiting a couple of weeks before the insurance adjuster even came out.

2. Document as much as you can. Photos are best, plus of course receipts for any supplies you buy to clean and repair your property before the insurance adjuster comes out.

3. Don’t accept the insurance company’s numbers for repairs. In some cases, their numbers were lower than the costs of repairs. Some repair items, such as roofing, were pretty straightforward, but the insurance company’s computer model for calculating wood siding repair and painting didn’t match up with the actual cost. After some back and forth and documentation with contractor bids, the insurance company paid the full cost of the repairs.

In the end, the houses all were repaired and our son was born a few weeks later. The critical repairs (windows) were done right away, and the bigger stuff (roofs, siding, paint) we saved for later. And now, we’re hyper aware when a humid front from the coast and a cool north wind are heading for a collision over Austin.