Money should never be the reason a wet basement stays wet. Here is exactly how a water, fire, or mold job gets paid in Michigan — and what we do about the part insurance does not reach.
Start here
Almost nobody has a reference price for drying a basement. It is easier to understand as four separate pieces, because only two of them ever come out of your pocket.
Paid by Your insurance company
On a covered loss this is most of the job. Your carrier is invoiced for the covered scope, so it never comes out of your account and you are not waiting on a reimbursement check to get the work started.
Paid by You. Always.
Every policy has one, and it is the homeowner’s to pay on every claim. Any contractor who offers to waive it or absorb it is offering to commit insurance fraud with your name on the claim. We will not do that. See below for what we do instead.
Paid by Your carrier — but later
Most policies pay actual cash value first and hold the rest, called recoverable depreciation, until the work is finished and invoiced. It is your money. It is just sitting behind the work, which is a timing problem rather than a cost problem.
Paid by You
Long-term seepage, groundwater, a maintenance exclusion, mold above a policy sublimit, a denied claim, or an upgrade you want done while the wall is already open. This is the part people want options on, and it is the part this page is really about.
Coverage and payment decisions are made by your insurance carrier, not by a restoration contractor.
Your options
Most people use the first one and never think about the rest. The others exist so that a budget is never the thing that decides whether the drying equipment goes in tonight.
Most common
You do not front the covered work.
On a covered claim, we invoice your carrier for the covered scope instead of asking you to pay us and wait to be reimbursed. You sign a work authorization and a direction to pay, we document everything to the standard adjusters expect, and the paperwork moves while the drying equipment runs.
Pay as we go
Pay for each phase as it is finished — not up front.
You are never asked to pay for work that has not happened yet. Emergency mitigation is billed when the structure passes final moisture readings. Reconstruction is billed against completed phases you sign off on. If a phase is not done, it is not billed.
Tight budget
We can split the job so the damage stops today.
If the full scope is not affordable right now, we phase it. Phase one is stabilization — extraction, containment and structural drying — which is the part that stops the damage from getting worse and stops the mold clock. Phase two is the rebuild, scoped in writing now and scheduled whenever you are ready. There is no obligation to do phase two with us.
Out of pocket
Straightforward payment for uncovered work.
For work outside a claim — a small leak under the deductible, a maintenance issue your policy excludes, or an upgrade you want done while the wall is already open — we take card, check, or bank transfer against an itemized estimate you approve first.
We are in the process of adding monthly payment options through a third-party lending partner. We will publish the actual terms here when they are live — we do not advertise a payment plan before we can deliver it. If a monthly payment is what you need, call us and we will tell you honestly where that stands today.
The honest part
Sooner or later a contractor will offer to waive your deductible, eat it, or “work with you” on it. It sounds like a favor. It is not.
Waiving a deductible misstates the amount of the loss to your insurance company. The claim it affects is filed under your name. It is one of the most common triggers for a fraud referral and a denied claim, and the homeowner is the one left holding it.
So we do not do it, and we say so before anyone asks. Your deductible is yours on every claim, on every policy, with every contractor in Michigan. Anyone telling you otherwise is telling you something about how they run their business.
What we can do is make it land more gently: invoice your carrier for the covered scope so the deductible is the only thing you are handling, bill in phases as the work is completed rather than all at once, and phase the job itself if the timing is genuinely hard. Those are real options and none of them put your claim at risk.
Where we stand
A restoration company is easiest to judge by what it refuses to do when nobody is watching.
In Michigan that is insurance fraud, and it is not only our problem — it is filed under your name on your claim. It is one of the fastest ways to get a legitimate claim denied.
Coverage and payment decisions belong to your insurance company. What we control is documentation: photos, moisture maps, daily drying logs and a line-item estimate priced off the same list your adjuster uses.
No card surcharge, no processing fee, no financing markup. The price on the estimate is the price.
Emergency mitigation is billed when the structure passes final moisture readings. Reconstruction is billed against completed phases you have signed off on.
If the full scope is not affordable, we phase it and stabilize the damage first. Walking away from a soaked structure is how a $4,000 problem becomes a $40,000 mold problem.
The money questions Macomb & Oakland County homeowners ask us most, before they call.
Free estimate · No obligation
An itemized written scope, priced off the same list your adjuster uses, at no charge — and a straight answer about what your policy covers and what it does not.
