I've been through 2 tornado cleanups, and a friend's fire cleanup. I've sat in with the final calculation/settlement with the adjusters on all 3 occasions. Never has anything listed been questioned as to whether it was actually there or not. We were told to make a list of damaged and destroyed items along with prices, everything was reviewed, nothing was questioned.
The first tornado situation was my parents, the adjuster actually gave more on alot of items than we wrote down. We had a wheelbarrow with a broken handle, so dad found the price of a handle. The adjuster said "No, if you cannot use that wheelbarrow today the same way as you could last week, we pay you for a wheelbarrow, not just the handle." There were several items like that. If it was useable before and unuseable after, it was paid for. The 50's Willy's jeep that ran but hadn't been used in 4-5 years got smashed under the barn, was written up as a farm vehicle, and he said any 4x4 vehicle that ran was worth $1000. It, and several other items we were allowed to keep. Some we fixed, some we sold, some were scrapped. I still have an old Snap-On box at Dad's that got smashed and filled with water. Maybe I'll restore it someday.
The 2nd tornado was mine 2 years ago. On a strictly cash basis we came out ahead on every item, including the reconstruction of our buildings. The adjuster did all the initial calculations based on "standard" numbers in their system, all of which were wrong in our favor. Two 10x10 roll-up doors came back as $1700 each, in the end our cost for installed door was $1200ea. Most amazing to me, after all the standard numbers were totaled up, they added 10% of that total for a general contractor, and another 10% for "general contractor profit", both of which I was allowed to keep since I acted as the general contractor, which consisted of making about 3 phone calls.
Unfortunately it took us most of the summer to do cleanup of all the trees, which the insurance did not cover.
