Every restoration estimate you will see in Washington is produced in Xactimate, a pricing system that lists regional unit costs for thousands of construction and restoration tasks and is updated monthly. Insurers use it to review claims, so contractors write their estimates in it to match. The upside is that your adjuster and your contractor are speaking the same language. The downside is that the document is written for them, not for you.
The anatomy of the document
Header. Your name and address, the claim number, the date of loss, and the price list used, which will be a Seattle-area list with a month and year. That date matters; prices change.
Rooms. The estimate is organized by room, each with its dimensions, floor area and wall area. Quantities for flooring, drywall and treatments come from these measurements, so if a room's dimensions look wrong, say so.
Line items. Each task on its own line with a description, a quantity, a unit, a unit price and a total. Units are SF for square feet, LF for linear feet, EA for each, DA for days and HR for hours.
Totals. Subtotal by room, then material sales tax, overhead and profit if applied, and a grand total. Your deductible is applied by the insurer, not shown here.
The lines you will see on a water loss
Water extraction by square foot, often split into categories of water and whether the floor is carpet or hard surface. Heavy extraction lines appear for saturated carpet.
Tear out lines: wet carpet pad, carpet, laminate, baseboard, drywall. Drywall removal is usually a two-foot or four-foot flood cut measured in square feet, meaning the bottom section of the wall was cut out to a consistent height for patching. Linear feet of baseboard. Square feet of insulation.
Equipment: air movers, axial fans, dehumidifiers of different sizes, air scrubbers, and sometimes specialty drying mats or injection systems for hardwood and cabinets, each billed per unit per day. The quantities should match the drying log.
Monitoring and setup: technician time for setting equipment and for each daily moisture check, usually in hours.
Antimicrobial application by square foot of surfaces treated after drying.
Contents manipulation: moving furniture and belongings out of the work area and back, sometimes with a block-and-pad line for lifting furniture off wet floors.
Containment: plastic barriers and zipper doors on jobs with contamination or dust, by square foot.
Disposal: dumpster or haul-off of removed material.
Detach and reset lines for toilets, appliances and vanities that had to be moved to dry under them.
Mitigation versus rebuild
Most water claims come in two estimates. The mitigation estimate covers everything above: stopping the damage and drying the structure. The rebuild estimate, sometimes from the same contractor and sometimes from another, covers putting it back: drywall, paint, flooring, trim, cabinets. The rebuild estimate often includes an allowance for matching materials, since replacing half a floor with a flooring that no longer exists is a real problem, and policies vary on whether they pay to match.
What the adjuster checks
The adjuster compares the estimate to the photographs, the moisture map and the drying log. Equipment days against the log. Square feet removed against the photographs of the removal. Room dimensions against the sketch. Then they approve, reduce or question lines, and the contractor responds. Most disagreements are about quantities and equipment days, and a well-kept log settles them.
What to do with your copy
Read the room dimensions and the removed quantities and compare them to what you saw. Ask about any line you do not understand; a contractor who cannot explain a line should not have it on the estimate. Keep the estimate, the drying log and the photographs together. If the house is ever sold, that file is the answer to the question "what was done about the water damage?"
