Massive leak. What to expect

[Just12345]

So this evening a huge leak happened under our bathroom causing horrendous damage to the kitchen and downstairs! Water poured through as it took us so long to manage to get the water stopped. We have no idea what caused it.

We have never had anything like this before and have contacted our insurance but they say no one will get to us for 24 hours. We have two young DC under 5 which we are currently finding a bed for for tonight ourselves but what should we expect next!

We have turned electricity off and obviously no water. Would insurance find us somewhere to stay?

Thanks so much for anyone who can offer advice

Sorry to hear your disaster. Did it happen suddenly or when the shower or bath in use. Sounds more like the waste pipes have disconnected.

What you get depends entirely on your insurance provision but my experience if you are often better getting some local trades out as an emergency. In my nearby town they will often come out to help and least stop the water and get the electrics functioning. Depending on the circuits, it is probably just your lighting circuit that will need testing but that's only assuming you have an RCD on the electrics (we have rentals so have dealt with this a few times). You will probably need any ceiling junctions or down-lighters pulling out to check for pooled water in them

Good luck

We had a tiny leak a while back but the water pooled above the kitchen ceiling - one day we noticed a brown patch and thought someone had sloshed water over the side of the bath, told DS to be careful etc - the next day we came home to find the kitchen ceiling on the floor and water everywhere. Emergency plumber came out that evening.
Leak was sorted straight away so we could stay in the house. DH contacted insurance and they were brilliant. We sent them loads of photos, so they could see it was an accident, and we weren’t on the make. Asked us to find a local tradesman to give us a quote (just one) and agreed to settle the claim straight away. It was all sorted within a week. A lot of mess and some hassle (plus we moved the kettle and microwave wave into the dinning room so we could make breakfast in there and had takeaways 😂) Ceiling looks fab now - makes the rest of the kitchen look a bit shabby!
Hope your insurance is as helpful. Take as many photos as you can would be my first piece of advice. Good luck

Thank you both so much for your replies. We have home serve and they are coming today . Insurance happy with that and insurance said we can get a hotel tonight. It was such a shock.

We had run a bath and then someone went to top up the cold and the water started pouring through the ceiling. So I really do hope it's something they can fix easily . I'm so anxious

I am really hoping home serve can get the leak sorted today. They have been brilliant in the past for us and then I would love the house to be liveable

Looking at the ceiling it does look like it has a massive crack appearing but hopefully it's not come down yet so that's a good sign

Sorry to hear about your experience, it is truly awful especially with little ones.

Not to make you worry but these things can unfortunately take a while to resolve with the insurance company. They will initially look to see if the issue is covered by your policy and whether they accept the claim. Depending on the severity of the leak and areas affected, you may need to e.g. strip out bathroom and kitchen in order to fully dry out these areas and appoint a contractor to make repairs so your house may not be habitable in the meantime.

You can request suitable alternative accommodation (presuming it is covered by the policy) e.g. it wouldn't be reasonable for the insurer to squeeze a family into one hotel room for weeks on end with no cooking facilities etc., but sometimes you have to really push for your entitlement under your policy. In some cases they may need to pay for a short term rental for example.

It is really important the damage is properly assessed by the loss adjuster - note that they act on behalf of the insurance company so they aren't strictly acting in your interests and we found underestimated the loss. Make sure you take photos and videos at each stage of the damage and any strip out work / repairs done so that you can discuss them with the insurer if you disagree with their reports and repairs for example.

You can also consider appointing your own loss assessor (they assess the loss on your behalf and handle everything with the insurer usually for a % of the total amount awarded).

Good luck with everything.

Homeservewill deal with leak. Your household insurance will make good the damage. They are likely to send a disaster management professional initially who will work to get the property dry, then an assessor will be sent to decode what needs to be replaced on a like for like basis. Then a contractor will be appointed to make good.
When we had a leak the water ran uncontrolled for about 2 hours it took a month to get us fully dry before anything else can happen.

Thank so much everyone for being so helpful! The leak has been found and resolved so that's sorted now we are waiting to work out how we asses the damage the water caused. Hubby has a call with insurance today. They told us they have approved the claim and I guess we now just wait to see how long to get damage assessed and ceilings and electrics checked

Hi guys. I'm back! Hoping for more advice or opinions

We finally have a dry certificate hooray.

We have a list from insurance company of work to be done it's heaps !

My question is have you found getting insurance company to do the work easier than getting a cash settlement and finding someone else to do it?

In my experience, if it is a big job, the amount that insurance quotes as a cash settlement for doing the work is ludicrously low. So if you ask them to do it, they have to complete all the tasks no matter how much it costs. The downside is that they will pick the repair company not you. We have had two big repair jobs on insurance. The first one we struck gold - the workmen were brilliant and did a fantastic job. The second time - sloppy workmanship. So it depends whether you would prefer to accept a lower sum but have free rein in choosing replacements/workmen yourself.

When we had our chimney rebuilt (storm damage) the insurance company dealt with the claim via a claims company. They asked us if we wanted a cash settlement. We refused this and the claims company asked us to get quotes in - we chose the builders - and they agreed and paid the quote (the cheapest I think, but can't remember), less the excess.

This was our experience too, it's very hit and miss.

Insurers have "preferred" contractor firms, which quote hugely discounted prices in return for bulk work from the insurer. However we found that our insurer's preferred firms were only interested in the "strip out" part of the works and weren't at all interested in doing the actual repairs. However, insurers will usually only offer a cash settlement equivalent to what these firms would hypothetically charge, which was nowhere near enough for a "typical" builder to do the work.

From what I recall, the insurer would usually ask a few of their contractors to quote for them for a big repair job, so maybe see if you can get a sense of what these firms are like when they visit? Hopefully there will be someone decent.

It can be difficult getting any builder at the best of times so you have my sympathy!

We ended up appointing a loss assessor to review the claim on our behalf, as the amounts offered by our insurer were unreasonable and none of their contractors wanted to do it. Even though the loss assessor charged a % of the eventual settlement, we actually got a sufficient settlement to complete the extensive repairs with a decent builder we appointed.

Thanks all that's so useful! It's 4 pages of repairs so I think we would prefer they get someone to do it but I imagine that may take a long time! Hopefully tommorrow we will get a better idea of timelines

It's been 2.5 months since the leak! I had no idea how slow things were

If you happen to know any builders or handy people you could also get them to take a look at the scope of work and items that are covered in the settlement to make sure everything is covered - it might give you some extra comfort. We found lots of things had been missed off and the strip out itself caused various damage (eg. the insurer hadn't factored in damage to the kitchen cabinets or worktops in the strip out), so agreeing the scope of work was a massive task in itself.

Probably too late to this, but we had a huge leak under our kitchen floor which meant the floor needed ripping up and everything redone and our insurance was great. They found us a short-term rental nearby which was very nice and they covered the cost and dealt with all the aggro, outsourcing it to a firm that specialised in such things if memory serves, and they covered all the cost for the work, managing via their contractors to fix it properly and within a fair amount of time. We didn't do anything beyond the initial claim. I was really relieved and we ended up with a better kitchen floor and better plumbing under it. Can't recall who the insurers were but it wasn't anything special, just standard insurance and it all worked as you'd hope it would. Hope it does for you too.

Thank you! We finally have contractors coming to look Tuesday sent by the insurance. Hopefully this means we are finally getting somewhere

We are now 3 months post leak so I just had no idea it was all so slow ! I think we have had an update each week but it's just slow

Just to add my maths is slightly out with dates it's 2 months 😂 feels like forever

We're still waiting for the insurance contractors to arrange a start date for us to sort out cellar flooding from Storm Babet. Granted lots of that has entailed waiting for water levels to drop for the spring/summer so that things aren't just going to re-flood over again while they're working, but it's taken blooming ages!

Could not have coped with the stress of having to find people ourselves though. Poor next door neighbour's insurers have refused to pay out for hers.

@CoffeeWithCheese the stress of finding someone ourselves worried me to so hoping the insurance company contractors are good. I hope yours gets started soon . I am thankful that in 10 years of home ownership this is our first leak situation but it's certainly a learning curve

Hey all! I'm back. With absolutely no update! I am so frustrated.

The loss adjustors appointed a contractor who promptly came around a month ago and spent hours measuring our house. They then confirmed they would send the report back to the insurance for approval so we could book in and get work going .

That was 4 weeks ago and they still haven't written the report! We have complained , our insurance company have complained. The loss adjustors have complained . My husband has called them and they use a different excuse each day,

So we are stuck. The load adjustors said they would appoint a new contractor but then said they don't have any others in our area so our only option is to find our own .

We feel so frustrated so have started looking for our own but it's hard and everyone is so booked up!

Anyway that's my update. Any advice greatly welcomed

One of our neighbours had an upstairs loft leak whilst away on holiday over Christmas. The whole house inside is being ripped out, workman started last week after 2 months waiting for the place to dry, she’s been told it will be early July before she can get in, but so far there’s only been one man there, but kitchen and bathroom have been stripped out, floorboards and doors and a lot of brickwork has been removed, 3 skips so far. All furniture, carpets and white goods went very early. It’s a massive job, she is staying with friends and family. She has employed someone direct, but with that, she has to come every day as there’s obviously a lot to sort out.

We're still waiting as well OP - have the works confirmed from the fix-y up people and the dampy-tanky people - just no one's arranging flipping dates! At this rate we'll be back into winter storms again before it gets done and bailing out the cellar again!

Oh it's so frustrating I really feel for you! Today we found a contractor direct that will come and quote so we have that happening tommorrow so some progress our end at least

OP i would love an update! similar here

I sadly still have little in a way of an update.

We found our own builder and we have had a kitchen company in and got our own quotes, we are waiting for the builder to update his and then we will submit this to the insurance company and hope they approve it. Hopefully this week.

The contractors the insurance company use did eventually provide an update 5 weeks after they visited, I have literally no desire to ever use them as what was meant to take 2 days took 5 weeks and it was literally a piece of paper they needed to send over . I can't imagine how long they would take to do work on my house.

The insurance company said they will approve us to use our own company but we originally wanted to avoid it due to the possible cost to us but now I just want someone booked that I trust to start work on my house, as it is the builder we found can't start till September at least.

are you still. able to live at the property?