“You’ve been quiet…”

Yep. I’ve been busy coordinating my insurer’s supply chain.

“What? Why? Surely they should be doing that?”

You might reasonably think so…

Cue dreamy twinkle sequence and wobbly lines as we travel back in time 25 weeks…

Earlier this year, I noticed some wallpaper warping above one of my kitchen cupboards. This was particularly irritating because the kitchen had only been redecorated relatively recently, so initially I wondered whether the paper simply hadn’t adhered properly.

I touched it.

Damp.

Oh no.

I called my insurer, explained the problem and assumed somebody would be sent out to investigate.

Nope.

Apparently, I needed to arrange the initial trace and access myself.

Fair enough. Did they have an approved or preferred supplier I should use?

“Check Google.”

Excellent.

And so began my introduction to the wonderfully coordinated world of escape-of-water insurance claims.

About £500 later, my independently sourced Bob the Builder arrived and started investigating. Unfortunately, finding the leak involved removing part of the ceiling and plaster from the walls, although “removing” rather overstates the amount of persuasion the plaster required by this point.

Eventually, we found the culprit.

An old lead water pipe had been joined to copper, and the connection had failed.

Not dramatically. There was no cinematic burst pipe, water cascading through the ceiling or paddling pool appearing in the kitchen.

It had simply been quietly leaking at around five to six litres an hour, according to my water company’s usage data.

And it had apparently been doing that for roughly five weeks before there was finally enough visible evidence for me to know something was wrong.

That’s somewhere in the region of 4,000–5,000 litres of water, around four to five tonnes of the stuff, quietly escaping into the structure of the house.

Suddenly, that slightly wrinkled piece of wallpaper didn’t seem quite so insignificant.

Enter the supply chain

Back to the insurer.

By this point, solid-wood worktops had warped, cupboards showed signs of water damage and there was clearly considerably more going on than the small damp patch I’d originally discovered.

Then waited… and waited… and waited… and…

It took around three weeks for the insurer to appoint what I would once have called a loss adjuster, although apparently “Field Engineer” is the terminology now.

After the “Field Engineers Approval”, a specialist drying company was assigned and after further wait arrived.

And, to give credit where it’s due, this bit was impressive. Their equipment could detect moisture behind the ceramic tiles and begin mapping how far the water had travelled.

The answer was basically:

Everywhere.

The wall was saturated. The floor was affected. Moisture had travelled behind surfaces that, from the outside, looked perfectly normal.

A large industrial dehumidifier was installed while waiting for the necessary strip-out work to be approved.

And waited… And … (Are you sensing a theme here?)…

Interestingly? A friend suffered a similar escape of water around the same time. Their insurer had drying equipment on site within 48 hours.

Mine was beginning to resemble a particularly slow-moving infrastructure and transformation programme.

By now, I’d also discovered there wasn’t really an insurance company dealing with my claim.

There was the insurer.

Then the loss-adjusting company.

Then another company in the chain.

Then the drying and restoration specialists.

Then the strip-out contractor.

Then, eventually, the reinstatement contractor.

Presumably, somewhere there’s also a bloke called Dave whose sole responsibility is forwarding PDFs from one inbox to another.

The problem wasn’t necessarily that any individual company was incapable of doing its job. In fact, many of the individual people I’ve dealt with have been perfectly pleasant and, in several cases, genuinely helpful.

The problem was that nobody appeared to own the whole job. Absolutely no co-ordination or communication between the parties involved.

One company needed approval from another. Someone else needed a report. Another needed instructions. Somebody was waiting for somebody else to do something that the somebody else apparently didn’t realise they were supposed to be doing.

Emails disappeared into the ether. Voicemails went unanswered. Dates weren’t communicated. Plans weren’t shared. Information so guarded that GCHQ would be impressed…

And somehow, despite being the person whose kitchen was slowly dissolving, I became the person coordinating everybody else.

At one stage, the insurer effectively told me that I shouldn’t be chasing them because the loss adjuster had delegated authority to manage the claim.

Splendid.

There was just one small problem.

Nobody appeared to be managing the claim.

Strip-out, take one

Eventually, some strip-out work was authorised.

Except the contractor didn’t complete everything the drying specialist had specified because they apparently decided some of it wasn’t necessary.

This resulted in more chasing, more conversations, more stress and, eventually, a complaint.

The complaint was upheld.

The remaining work was done.

I was reassured that things would improve from here on in.

Narrator: Things did not improve from there.

By June, further moisture testing produced the next plot twist.

The targeted drying wasn’t working. The tiled floor and layers beneath it were effectively acting as a vapour barrier, trapping moisture below.

The initial floor reading?

999 REL.

After weeks of drying?

999 REL.

I’m not a professional drying technician, but even I could spot the lack of progress.

The walls weren’t exactly racing towards the finish line either, with readings barely changing despite weeks of drying.

The conclusion was now unavoidable: the rest of the kitchen needed to come out and the floor needed to come up.

Fine.

At least we finally knew what needed doing.

All we needed now was a plan.

That was in June.

Ten weeks later…

Still no plan.

No programme of works, no dates and no coordinated schedule. Emails, once again, disappeared unanswered and voicemails went unreturned.

So I escalated it back to the insurer.

By this point, around ten weeks had passed since everyone agreed what needed to happen, yet nobody had been able to tell me when it was actually going to happen.

This is where an irritating administrative problem starts becoming something else entirely.

When it’s your home, it gradually consumes your life.

Rooms become storage areas. Kitchen contents migrate into boxes. Furniture gets displaced. Appointments have to be accommodated. Other plans are put on hold because you don’t know whether somebody might finally turn up next week.

In my case, I also had a new kitchen installation planned for September. That had to be cancelled because there was no realistic prospect of the room being ready.

And every few days, the same thought:

I suppose I’d better chase them again.

You’re not simply making an insurance claim anymore.

You’re running one.

Welcome to Week 25

It is now 23 September.

170 days since I discovered the leak.

24 weeks and two days.

We are officially in Week 25.

This week, after almost six months, the kitchen units have finally been removed.

A temporary kitchen pod has been installed in the garden, which sounds rather grander than the reality.

The fridge-freezer is now a prominent feature of the already overcrowded dining room. Boxes are everywhere. Most of the ground floor of the house seems to contain something that used to live in the kitchen.

But at least I’m finally getting somewhere.

Except…

The floor still hasn’t come up.

Because during the strip-out they discovered asbestos in the bitumen beneath some old flooring.

Of course they did.

So now we need another specialist contractor before the floor can be removed.

Only then can the saturated material underneath finally be exposed.

Only then can we properly dry the part of the building we’ve spent almost six months trying to dry.

Only when that is dry can reinstatement begin.

And the reinstatement contractor currently has a lead time of roughly four to six weeks.

The bit that stopped being funny

I’ve tried to retain a sense of humour about all of this. Sometimes the sheer absurdity makes that relatively easy.

But today, the timescale finally got to me.

It’s September.

Even once the asbestos is dealt with and the floor finally comes up, the structure still has to dry. Nobody can tell me how long that will take because, understandably, they won’t know the true extent of what’s underneath until the floor is removed.

Only then can reinstatement begin.

For months, I’ve kept focusing on the next milestone: get the first strip-out done, get the drying underway, get the rest authorised, get the kitchen out, get the floor up, get the house dry, get the kitchen back.

Today, I stopped looking at the next milestone and looked at the calendar instead.

I don’t realistically see this being finished before Christmas.

Even if the house somehow gets dry and ready for reinstatement before then, add another four to six weeks for that process to begin.

So what started with me touching a slightly wrinkled piece of wallpaper on 6 April 2026 is now, realistically, a 2027 problem.

That’s surprisingly difficult to accept.

Nobody owns the chessboard

Perhaps the strangest thing about the last 25 weeks is that the underlying problem isn’t particularly exotic.

A pipe leaked.

It was found.

It was repaired.

The resulting damage needs to be stripped out, dried and reinstated.

Yet I’ve spent almost half a year living around an insurance claim, not because the original leak continued for months after discovery, but because a supply chain containing multiple organisations repeatedly struggled with one of the most basic requirements of any complex operation:

Someone needs to own the outcome.

Maybe it’s my professional background showing, but I can’t help looking at this as a systems problem.

If you designed a service involving multiple suppliers, dependencies, approvals and hand-offs, but nobody had clear end-to-end responsibility for delivering the outcome, you’d identify that as a risk immediately.

Yet that is precisely what this process has felt like.

Everyone owns their little square.

Nobody owns the chessboard.

Without really noticing, I seem to have become the unpaid programme manager for my own insurance claim: identifying stakeholders, mapping dependencies, chasing actions, escalating blockers, maintaining evidence and trying to work out the critical path.

That shouldn’t be the customer’s job.

The customer shouldn’t need to understand the insurer’s organisational structure. They shouldn’t need to know which subcontractor reports to which supplier, who has delegated authority, who needs whose approval, or which organisation hasn’t sent which document to somebody else.

When something goes wrong with your home, you’re already having a fairly bad day.

Insurance is supposed to help put things back together.

The process shouldn’t become another thing that needs fixing.

So here we are.

Week 25.

No kitchen.

No floor.

Still wet.

Asbestos.

A temporary kitchen in the garden.

And 2027 increasingly pencilled into the project plan.

Merry Christmas to me.