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

will they have to bring down and rebuild ceiling?

We couldn't initially but we are now. We were offered accommodation but I'm very glad we made it work at home. We will have to move out for works which is another reason I don't want to use the contractor appointed as I think they will have us out for months.

They won't have to take our entire ceiling down but they will have to replace parts of ours .

Just to update! The loss adjustors are being a nightmare. After telling us we could appoint our own builder they are now saying they need to re examine the property before they can agree anything. 5 months after they originally did send someone out who wrote a 5 page report on the damage. They can't give us timescales which means we will probably lose the slot the builder we have found can do.

I can't believe how hard this process is. I feel very thankful we can live in our house whilst this is going on.

I think the financial ombudsman service also investigates insurance companies. Perhaps you can find the email address of somebody reasonably high up at the insurers and start making noises about involving the ombudsman? Surely there must be some obligation on the insurer to get the work done in a certain timeframe?

Thank you. We are going to look up ombudsman's today

I just thought I would come back to update! Work has finally started 9 months after the leak . We successfully appointed our own contractors but it took a long time to get signed off. Initially I was so keen to use theirs as I thought that was easier but how wrong I was! It's been a huge slog with the insurance but I think we are almost there now

Unfortunately for us when they started work we found some unrelated issues we had to resolve on our house first ( huge electric issue) so it's all been a big huge job but I am slowly starting to see progress! Hopefully work should be done by October