The 20-Minute Home Inventory That Makes Storm Claims Easy

After a hailstorm, a claim moves at the speed of your evidence. Homeowners with dated photos of the roof, the gutters, and the contents of the garage get paid for what they lost; homeowners without them get a debate about what was already there. Twenty minutes with your phone, once a year before hail season, is the whole fix.

Why every claim needs a before

An adjuster only ever sees the after. The question underneath every storm claim is what the property looked like the day before the storm, because policies cover sudden damage and exclude wear, neglect, and damage from earlier events that were never claimed. Without a before, that question gets answered by the adjuster's judgment and, increasingly, by the carrier's own aerial imagery. With a before, it gets answered by your photos, with dates on them.

The same logic covers everything inside the house. Contents claims need proof that you owned the item and some sense of what it was worth. Memory is a poor inventory. A phone video is a very good one.

The walkthrough inside

Open the camera, start a video, and walk. Narrate as you go: the room, the big items, roughly when you bought them. Open every closet and pan slowly across the shelves. Open kitchen drawers and cabinets. Pull back the shower curtain. In the garage, film the tools, the bikes, the lawn equipment, and the shelves of things you forgot you own. Do the attic storage and the basement if you have them. Zoom in on the serial number stickers on the TV, the computers, and the appliances.

Do not organize anything first. The point is a dated record of the house as it is, and ten minutes of slightly messy video beats a tidy spreadsheet you never finish.

The walkthrough outside, which is the roofing part

Now switch to still photos, in good daylight. Shoot every slope of the roof from the ground and from across the street, then zoom in on the ridge, the valleys, and any spot where you can see flashing. Get close to the gutters and downspouts, because soft metal is where hail shows up first and where an adjuster will look to confirm a storm hit. Photograph the window screens, the fins on the air conditioning condenser, the mailbox, the fence, the deck boards, the siding on each side, the grill cover, and the patio furniture. Our collateral damage guide is the full list of what hail marks around a house.

The timing is the part people skip. Do this every spring, in late February or March, before the season that actually breaks roofs gets going, and do it again within a day or two of any storm you could hear on the windows. The spring set proves the gutters were clean. The post-storm set proves they are not anymore. Together they date the damage better than any radar printout.

The paper that matters

Three pieces of paper decide a surprising amount about a roof claim, and all three should be photographed into the same album. The first is the invoice from the last time the roof was replaced, with the date, the shingle brand, and the color, because roof age drives how carriers underwrite and, on some policies, how they pay. The second is the warranty paperwork from that job. The third is the current declarations page from your homeowner policy.

Add receipts for the air conditioning system, major appliances, and anything over a few hundred dollars bought in the last several years. A photo of a receipt counts. A memory of a receipt does not.

Where to keep it

The house is the thing that might get damaged, so the record cannot live only in the house. Let your phone back the photos and video up to the cloud automatically, then put everything in one shared album with a plain name like Home Inventory and the year. Share that album with your spouse or an adult child so a lost or broken phone does not take the record with it. If you prefer belt and suspenders, email the video to yourself as well. Some carriers offer an inventory tool inside their app, which is fine to use as a second copy, not the only one.

Know your policy before you need it

While the declarations page is in front of you, read it. Find the claims phone number and your agent's number and put both in your phone under a name you will remember after a storm. Find the dwelling limit. Most importantly, find the wind and hail deductible, which on many Georgia policies is a separate figure from the standard deductible and is sometimes a percentage of the dwelling coverage rather than a flat amount. That number decides whether a given storm is worth filing on. Our deductible guide shows where it hides and what the percentage versions actually cost.

Note the renewal date too. If a carrier is going to raise a question about your roof, renewal is when it happens, and your spring photos are the answer.

After the storm, repeat the outside set

When a storm comes through, walk the property again with the camera within a couple of days and shoot the same angles. Compare the gutters, the screens, and the condenser fins to the spring photos. New dents on metal that was clean in March are dated evidence of hail at your address, which is exactly what the claim needs. Do not get on the roof; the shingles are the one thing you cannot judge from the ground, and a free inspection with photos finishes the record at roof level. Our licensed adjuster on staff documents and scopes what is up there, and the photos are yours whether you file or not.

The twenty minutes, in order

• Ten minutes: one continuous narrated video of every room, closet, the garage, and any storage space.
• Five minutes: still photos of every roof slope, the gutters, screens, condenser, fence, deck, and siding.
• Three minutes: photos of the last roof invoice, the warranty, the declarations page, and major receipts.
• Two minutes: confirm the upload, name the album, share it with one other person, and set a reminder for next February.

If you would like the roof-level half of that record done properly, Robust Roofing offers a free inspection with photos, before the season or after a storm. Call (470) 887-6637 and we will put it on the calendar.