The covered scope
Paid by Your insurance company
On a covered loss this is most of the job. We bill your carrier directly for it, so it never comes out of your account and you are not waiting on a reimbursement check to get the work started.
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Restoration Payment Options for Michigan Homeowners
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.
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How a Michigan restoration job actually gets paid
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.
Your deductible
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.
The held-back amount
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.
What the policy does not reach
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
Four ways Macomb & Oakland County homeowners pay for this
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
We bill your insurance directly
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.
- No payment from you for the covered scope
- We handle the estimate, photos, moisture readings and documentation
- Coverage and payment decisions are always made by your insurance carrier
Pay as we go
Milestone billing
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.
- Nothing due before we start on an emergency loss
- You initial the drying log and sign off on each completed phase
- Itemized line by line — the same price list your adjuster uses
Tight budget
Stabilize now, rebuild later
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.
- A much smaller first ticket that ends the emergency
- Written phase-two scope you can hold, compare, or shelve
- No obligation and no pressure to schedule the rebuild
Out of pocket
Card, check or bank transfer
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.
- Itemized written estimate before any work is authorized
- No charge for the estimate and no obligation
- Nothing added to your price for how you choose to pay
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
About your deductible
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: bill your carrier directly 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
Five things we will never do
A restoration company is easiest to judge by what it refuses to do when nobody is watching.
We will never waive or absorb your deductible
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.
We will never tell you what your carrier is going to pay
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.
We will never charge you extra for how you pay
No card surcharge, no processing fee, no financing markup. The price on the estimate is the price.
We will never ask you to pay for work that has not happened
Emergency mitigation is billed when the structure passes final moisture readings. Reconstruction is billed against completed phases you have signed off on.
We will never leave a house wet because of money
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.
Michigan Restoration Payment Questions, Answered
The money questions Macomb & Oakland County homeowners ask us most, before they call.
Today the payment options are direct billing to your insurance carrier for the covered scope, milestone billing so you pay for each phase as it is completed, a phased scope that lets you stabilize the damage now and rebuild later, and standard card, check or bank transfer for uncovered work. We are in the process of adding monthly payment options through a third-party lending partner, and this page will be updated with the actual terms when that goes live. We do not advertise a payment term before we can actually deliver it.
Free estimate · No obligation
Tell us the situation. We'll tell you exactly what it costs.
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.