Marimont Manor House Fire

As many of you reading this may have heard Kristina and I (Johnathon) had a house fire on Sunday March 26th. We were out running errands, I was gone maybe 45 minutes and got home just as the firefighters got there. We're safe and so are our pets. We had a decent amount of damage to our garage and basement from the fire, a lot of water damage to the basement, some heat damage, and a significant amount of smoke damage throughout our house. The house, and most of the contents, are insured. 

That being said, in order for insurance do all the things insurance does they have to inventory everything in our home. Take a look around whatever room you're in and any furniture, appliances, things in drawers, wall art, etc... is included in that. That takes time. They then determine what can be cleaned/refurbished and what is going to need to be replaced. We have full replacement value insurance. How that works, they give us current cash value based on age and depreciation. We then go buy as close to the same thing new as possible, we give them the receipt and they reimburse us the difference. We'll have to float that difference until the reimbursement occurs though. We also will be paying utilities on two properties for the next six months. In addition to that, there are a number of immediate expenses we've had to take on insurance either won't cover or won't cover in full. For example, we took ours dogs and our cat to the vet to be sure they were okay given the amount of smoke in the home. We need to replace Arlo's crate even though they'll likely be able to clean the one he had and return it to us in a few weeks/months, simply because if we don't have a crate one of us is always going to have to be home. There are also things like shower soap, laundry detergent, skin care products, and so forth that we also need quicker than insurance can do their due diligence, and we may just get a single payout on a lot of that then replace what we can. 

We both still work full time and while we certainly haven't lost everything, we also want to be sure that we don't put ourselves in a financially unstable position while dealing with all of this if we can avoid it. Thank you for any help you are able to provide us, if anything has become clear to us since the fire occurred it's that we are truly lucky to live in the community we do and have the friends that we have.