Whack!

It occurs to me as I write that word that it is rarely a sound you want to hear. Maybe if you are at the baseball game and your favorite hitter is at the plate. Maybe if you are repairing a wooden fence and are driving in a nail, just so long as it is the nail you are whacking and not your thumb. However, if you are in your car…

Whack! Whack! Whack!

As hailstones go, these weren’t terribly impressive, maybe golfball size in diameter and not nearly as weighty as a golfball. Traveling at the speed they were traveling however, made them quite formidable. I feared that my windshield was headed for the scrap heap of windshield history. I was just a mile from the relative safety of my garage, so I picked up my speed and passed a couple of drivers that decided that the best strategy was to pull off of the road and wait out the storm. The hail was relenting a bit by the time I made it to the garage, but the lawn was covered in ice balls. I got out of the car and checked for damage. The windshield survived the barrage. The car’s body had a couple of dents, but my Mitsubishi is older than dirt and already has plenty of character marks. No need to call the insurance company for that. The house however, that was another matter.

Hailstorms are an accepted fact of existence around this small slice of paradise we call Kansas. California has its earthquakes, Texas and Florida have their hurricanes. We’ve got hailstorms… and tornadoes… and winter ice storms… and… You know, maybe this isn’t exactly paradise after all. We experienced our first damaging hail storm roughly twenty years ago and I confess that I wasn’t prepared for the deluge of roofing company advertising that would grace our small town. Literally overnight, hundreds of yard signs appeared along the main drag through town, promoting dozens of roofing companies, each promising free estimates and fast, friendly, and fair roof repair. We also got inundated with a lot of door-to-door solicitations. I wasn’t for sure about how to handle this annoyance except I wanted the salespeople to go way and I didn’t want to use the shotgun to convince them. Many of them weren’t particularly scrupulous, offering us kickbacks against our deductible if we selected them to fix the roof. Further research on my part determined that such kickbacks might or might not actually be legal, but it wasn’t something the State was in a position to enforce regardless of the legal status. That wasn’t a road I wanted to travel. We asked around and I got some advise on getting an estimate. Eventually, I got a few names from the insurance company and we picked one of those.

The process has changed in the past 20 years, although not nearly as much I had hoped. There are far fewer signs now, which is nice. I suppose more can be accomplished nowadays through social media and text messaging than putting up a bunch of eyesores around town. The number of sales calls also dropped off a bit, although we tilted the scales in our favor on that one. After the first two sales visits, my wife posted a sign on the front door which read “DAY SLEEPER.” She didn’t add my suggestion to the post, which would have included “HEAVILY ARMED.” Regardless, the sales visits stopped. Once again, I went to the insurance company and got some suggestions for getting an estimate. The agent was loathe to actually recommend someone. I suppose there’s some legal problems with doing that and I’m not very proficient on insurance law, but the agent did mention that one of the companies already had a dozen people on the ground doing estimates so our wait time would be minimal. As an added bonus, I had heard of the company and they had a decent reputation. They did an inspection and determined that the roof needed replacing. Personally, I couldn’t see the damage, but the insurance company was going to pay for most of it and I was pretty sure the mortgage company was going to demand that we get a new roof regardless of my poor vision. Nearly everyone else in town was going to have to get one, too.

Which brings me to one of several things I don’t understand about the process. We needed to have a contractor give us an estimate and then the insurance company also did their own estimate. I’m really not sure why that is. I understand that the insurance company would be stupid to trust the contractor, but if the insurance company is going to do an estimate anyway, why do we need a contractor estimate? As it happens, the estimates were a mere $15 apart, so everyone was happy in the end.

Also as it happens, new roofs are expensive. The roof replacement for our 1300 square foot home was $18,000. Not surprisingly, that’s more than double what it cost twenty years ago. After further discussions with the insurance company, they sent us a check that would cover about half of what they were obligated to pay. The other half would come upon completion. Another weird part of the process was that I had to send the check to the mortgage company in Arizona because they had to endorse it, too. That process took two weeks, which gave me two weeks to worry about whether the check got lost in the mail. It didn’t.

Another interesting part of the process is that you don’t have to use the same contractor for the repair that you used for the estimate. We did, because I liked how smoothly the process worked in the estimate phase and they were local and they had a good reputation. They sent out a sales guy and I gave him the grace of listening to his sales pitch, which he had clearly put a lot of work into. He had color portfolios and spreadsheets and all kinds of neat bells and whistles. Really, about the only thing he could have done to lose the sale was make a pass at my wife. He didn’t, so I signed the contract.

Our process went so smoothly that we were well placed on their schedule and our roof was the first in the neighborhood to be replaced. A mere 24 days after the storm, the shingles arrived and were gently dumped on the rooftop. The next day, the crew arrived. I only interacted with a couple of them. The foreman spoke decent English, which was probably why he was the foreman. The language skills of the rest of the crew were a little more uncertain. I told my wife we might need her Spanish speaking skills if they needed anything, but they didn’t. For most of an entire day (Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday morning) they worked. The weather was hot, although not nearly as bad as it can be in June in Kansas. For about 12 hours we were regaled with more whacks, this time of roof replacement sounds. Annoying for sure, but we were emotionally prepared for that. After completion, they scoured the yard with magnets trying to pick up stray nails. They missed a few, but at least our driveway was secure, so our tires remain intact. The new gutters were installed on Thursday, presumably by gutter specialists since they weren’t part of the original crew. They were done in an hour. All that is left is to pay the bill. The insurance company has promised us that the remaining money will magically appear in our checking account in a few days. No need to go through the mortgage company this time. Then, for a few more days, we’ll get to set a personal record for most money ever in our checking account until it all disappears when I pay the bill, which arrived literally within hours of the last workman disappearing around the corner.

For our community, the process is far from over and every morning when I greet the new day, I hear the echoing whack, whack, whack of hammers hitting steel on homes near and far. If history is any indication, we’ll be hearing that sound until at least the end of July. It’s still a sickening sound, but at least it represents something other than fear of golfballs falling from the sky. Now it represents recovery.