No.
That’s the short version, and I’d rather lose the booking than give you a longer one that sounds more balanced. People destroy more claims with a mop and a roll of kitchen towel than with any other object in the house. Water comes through a ceiling on a Sunday, the instinct is to make it go away, and by Tuesday the visible evidence of a two-thousand-pound loss is a slightly grey patch and a bucket in the hall.
There is a version of “doing something” that helps you. It looks quite different from cleaning.
Is there anything you should touch before the adjuster arrives?
Yes, and the line runs between mitigating the loss and tidying up after it.
Nearly every household and buildings policy carries a duty to take reasonable steps to prevent further damage. If water is still coming through, you are obliged to act – get upstairs and get their stop tap turned off, or get the block’s managing agent to do it, or in a real emergency get a plumber and keep the invoice. Move furniture out of the wet zone. Lift electronics off the floor. Put a bowl under the drip and empty it. If water has gone anywhere near a light fitting or a ceiling rose, kill that circuit at the consumer unit and call an electrician before anybody stands under it.
None of that is cleaning. All of it is documented as you go.
What you don’t do is scrub the tidemark off the wall, take the sodden rug to the tip, wipe down the inside of the ruined cupboard, or repaint anything. The adjuster only sees what’s left. A ceiling that has dried out and been wiped is, to a person whose job is to value a loss, a ceiling with a small stain on it.
The difference between mitigating and tidying, in practice
On the mitigation side: extracting standing water, lifting a saturated carpet off the floor so the underlay can be assessed, opening windows, running a dehumidifier, isolating power, moving your record collection.
On the tidying side: bin bags, bleach, cloths, a sponge on a ceiling, the skip. Anything that removes information.
The test I give people on the phone is simple. Would a photograph taken before you did it and one taken after look meaningfully different? If yes, don’t do it until somebody with a clipboard has been.
What should you be photographing, and when?
Before you move a single thing, and far more than feels reasonable.
Take video first – walk the room slowly, narrate what you’re seeing out loud, get the date on the phone’s clock into a shot if you can. Then stills. Wide shot of each affected room from the doorway. The ceiling from directly beneath. The tidemark on the wall with something for scale beside it, a phone or a ruler. The floor, including a shot of your hand pressing into the carpet so the water comes up around your fingers – that single image has done more work in disputes than any three others.
Then the contents. Every damaged item, individually, on a plain floor, with any label or serial number legible in a second shot. Receipts if you have them, and if you don’t, screenshots of the same item currently for sale online.
I dealt with a flat in Streatham where the ceiling came down over the bed at four in the morning. The tenant, half asleep and sensible, filmed ninety seconds of it before touching anything, then bagged the bedding and left it in the bath. The claim went through in six weeks with no argument. The identical thing happened two floors below in the same block eight months later, that tenant cleared up beautifully overnight, and the insurer paid for a stain block and nothing else.
The shots almost everybody forgets
Inside the airing cupboard and the built-in wardrobe on that wall – water tracks along joists and comes down inside cupboards where nobody looks for two weeks.
The skirting board joints, which swell before anything else does. The underside of a laminate plank at the edge of the room, lifted with a screwdriver. The electrical sockets on the affected wall. And a photograph of the source upstairs if your neighbour will let you in, because the cause of the leak determines which policy pays and that argument can run for months.
Which cleaning can you safely do while you wait?
Sewage, and standing water. Those are the two exceptions and both are about health rather than tidiness.
If the leak is from a soil stack or a toilet upstairs, that’s category three water and it’s a genuine hazard – do not live alongside it waiting for an appointment. Photograph it thoroughly, then get a specialist in, and tell your insurer you’re doing it and why. Same with any volume of standing water, which will find its way into the flat below yours and turn your one claim into two.
The adjuster only sees what’s left, and a bathroom that has been through a bottle of thick bleach looks like a bathroom with a minor plumbing niggle rather than one that had foul water across the floor.
The awkward middle is timing. Mould gets going on wet plaster and underlay within two to three days in a warm flat, and the honest tension in all of this is that an adjuster may not attend for a week or more. My position: chase the appointment hard, put the pressure on the insurer in writing, and while you wait, dry the air rather than the surfaces. Dehumidifier running, windows open when it’s dry outside, heating on low and constant. That reduces secondary damage without erasing anything, because a dried tidemark is still a tidemark.
On the neighbour upstairs
Be polite and claim anyway. The apology across the landing is worth nothing at all once a floor needs replacing, and I’ve watched too many people accept “I’ll sort you out, mate” and then discover in April that sorting out meant a tube of filler.
Their buildings policy, or the block’s, is there for exactly this. Using it is not an act of aggression, whatever the atmosphere in the bin store becomes. That’s the disagreeable bit and I’ll stand by it – in a converted house in Kentish Town I saw two leaseholders spend eighteen months not speaking to each other over four hundred quid that an insurer would have paid without a murmur.
Who is actually paying – upstairs, your insurer, or the block?
In a purpose-built block or a converted house with a share of freehold, the structure is nearly always covered by one buildings policy held by the freeholder or the management company. Ceilings, plaster, floorboards, fitted kitchens in many wordings. Your own contents policy covers your things – furniture, clothes, electronics, and often the flooring you laid yourself.
So a single leak usually generates two claims and two excesses. The buildings excess on an escape of water in a London block is frequently a thousand pounds or more, which is why managing agents will sometimes try to talk you out of claiming for smaller losses, and why leaseholders in the flat above are often quietly hoping you won’t.
The loss adjuster is not on your side. That’s not a slur, it’s a job description – they’re appointed and paid by the insurer to establish what happened and what it costs. Perfectly decent people, most of them. They are not your advocate, and if the loss is large or the wording is being read narrowly, that’s what a loss assessor is for, hired by you.
The excess conversation nobody has in advance
Ask the managing agent for the buildings policy schedule and the escape-of-water excess before you commit to anything. I’ve been in a flat in Poplar where the damage came to about eleven hundred pounds and the excess was a thousand, and the sensible outcome was a private arrangement with the neighbour and no claim at all. That’s a decision you can only make with the number in front of you.
When does a cleaner come into this, and who should be instructing them?
After the adjuster, and usually not you.
Most insurers appoint their own drying and restoration contractors, and if you’ve arranged your own before anyone has assessed the loss, there’s a decent chance the cost sits with you. Instructed after the visit, with the adjuster’s agreement, it goes on the claim. That sequence is the whole game.
There’s an exception worth knowing about. Some policies include emergency assistance cover with a helpline, and if you use that number the contractor who attends is the insurer’s contractor, which means their bill and their report both land on the right desk. Call the helpline before you call anybody local. It’s on the schedule, usually on page one, and about half the people I speak to have never opened the document.
Where a firm like mine fits is the end of it – the fine dust after a ceiling has been cut out and reinstated, the plaster residue on everything within four metres, the carpet in the room next door that nobody thought to protect. That work is real and it’s specific, and it usually happens six weeks after the leak rather than six hours.
The jobs I turn down at the door
Anyone who rings me on the day of a leak asking for an emergency clean before an insurance visit gets told what’s in this article and no invoice. I’ve done it in Crystal Palace, in Hither Green, and twice in the same building in one winter. It costs me a few hundred pounds a year in work I could have taken, and it saves those people considerably more than that.
The adjuster only sees what’s left. If you’ve already put it all in a skip, what’s left is your word.
Keep the wet bedding. Put it in a bin liner, tie it, and leave it in the bath.
