Yesterday I met with an insurance adjuster at the home of his client. He was there to evaluate the extent of the loss his clients had suffered due to a broken pipe and the resulting water damage. From the looks of it, it was a fairly small water loss. A pipe in the wall, shared between the kitchen and dining room, had leaked some water into the wall and onto the carpet in the dining room.
The reason I was invited was to look at a rug which had gotten wet from the leak and had bled according to the insured. As the loss had happened several days before, the rug was dry. With the insureds’ permission I carried the rug to a spot in their living room with better lighting and more space to lay the rug out. After unfolding the rug I expected to see a plethora of bled colors, however that was not the case. To the contrary, what I saw was a rug that was in near perfect shape.
After consulting with the insured that I was looking at the right area, they mentioned that they had taken the rug to a rug gallery and had gotten a ”professional” appraisal of the rug. The appraisal consisted of a brief description of the rug in question. (Hand knotted, silk rug with a cotton foundation). It listed that the rug had color bleed all over and that the current value was $2000 and it’s replacement value was $8000. After looking over the appraisal, I took another hard look at the rug and asked the insured to point out where they saw the color bleed. Their response was that they were not specialists themselves and were trusting the opinion of someone who was! And they made it clear that they felt that I was not a true specialist.
Then the situation went from bad to worse. The insurance adjuster who had invited me to look at this rug and wanted my professional opinion if this rug was fixable, came to look at the rug as well. We both made a painstaking effort to find even the smallest, tiniest smidgen of color bleed. No success. By this time the insured was getting annoyed with us. The insurance adjuster tried to salvage the situation by making several different analogies of the situation we found ourselves in, however to no avail. When the talk shifted to “we’re done here, you’ll hear from our lawyer” I knew it was time for me to make a quit and quick exit.
Almost always my clients come to me and trust my professional opinion about the cleaning and restoring of their rugs. This situation was unfamiliar to me and I hope to not have to encounter it again. It did make me feel sorry for insurance adjusters though.
