The first hour decides most of it
A supply line lets go behind a vanity. A drain backs up in a storm. You come home and there is two inches of water across the basement.
What you do in the next hour affects what you are paid more than anything that happens after it.
Stop the water. Shut the valve, kill the power to that area if water is anywhere near outlets, and call your insurer to open the claim the same day. Then, before you drag a single thing out of the room, photograph it exactly as you found it.
That last one is the step people skip, and it is the one that costs them.
Sudden and accidental is the whole test
Most home policies in Ontario cover damage that is sudden and accidental. They do not cover damage that built up over time and was left alone.
That one distinction decides most disputes. A pipe that burst on Tuesday is sudden. A shower pan that has been leaking into the joists for three years is maintenance, and maintenance is yours.
The difficulty is that once the drywall is off, the two look identical. Rot around a shower is rot around a shower. What separates them in the file is evidence and timing, which is why the same-day call matters so much. A claim reported three weeks later invites the question of how long it had really been going on, and that question is expensive.
Sewer backup and overland water are usually endorsements rather than standard coverage. If your basement took water from a storm or a backed-up drain, find out whether you carry them before you assume anything. People discover this at the worst possible moment.
Photograph it before you touch it
Wide shots of every affected room, taken from the doorway, so the whole room is readable. Then close shots of every damaged surface. Then the source, if you can see it.
Get the water line on the wall. Get the underside of the vanity. Get the model and serial plates on anything mechanical that got wet. Open the cabinet doors and shoot inside them.
Do not throw anything out. Not the soaked baseboard, not the ruined rug, not the cabinet you already know is finished. An adjuster cannot pay for something nobody can see, and "it went to the dump on the weekend" is not evidence.
Keep every receipt from the emergency work as well. Fans, a plumber at midnight, a hotel if the house is not liveable. Those usually form part of the claim, and they are usually the first thing forgotten.
The adjuster's scope is an opening position
An adjuster will come, look, and produce a scope of work with a number attached. Most people read that number as the answer.
It is a starting point, written by somebody who spent forty minutes in your house.
Adjusters are not dishonest and most are trying to be fair. But they work from a standard estimating system, at speed, on a room they have seen once. They will not know your floor is a discontinued plank. They will not know the tile in that bathroom stopped being made in 2016. They will not know that the wall they scoped for a patch is the wall carrying your cabinets.
You are entitled to have your own contractor scope the same damage and submit it. That is normal and expected. It is also where most of the money that gets missed is recovered.
What gets left out almost every time
Matching. If half a floor is destroyed, patching it leaves a visible line running through the house. Most policies address matching to some degree, but it rarely appears in a first scope unless somebody raises it.
What sits behind the finish. Water goes where it wants. A scope covering drywall and paint but not the insulation behind it or the subfloor under it is covering the part that shows.
Code. If the work needs a permit, the rebuild has to meet current code rather than the code the house was built to. That can mean new wiring, new venting, a different guard height on a stair. Bylaw coverage exists for exactly this and is often left on the table.
Drying time. A wall can read dry at the surface and still be wet inside it. Closing it up early is how you get mould in a rebuild that was otherwise done properly.
What we do, and what we do not do
We do not bill your insurer and we do not act for them. The claim is between you and your insurance company, and anyone who tells you they will simply handle all of it is telling you something worth being careful about.
What we do is help you put it together properly so it is accepted the first time. We walk the damage with you and tell you what to document. We write a scope that itemises the whole job rather than the visible half, in language an adjuster can read line by line. You get a quote you can submit.
Then, if the claim goes through, we rebuild it. Kitchens, bathrooms, basements and whole floors, in Markham and across the GTA. The same people who build our design work build this, to the same standard, because there is no reason a room rebuilt after a flood should look like a room rebuilt after a flood.
How long the whole thing takes
Faster than a renovation, usually, because most of the design is settled by what was already there.
Emergency drying runs a few days. Adjusting takes anywhere from a week to a month depending on the insurer and the size of the loss. The rebuild itself runs like any job of that size, so a single bathroom is weeks and a finished basement is months.
The part that stalls is almost never the building. It is the file.