Michigan licenses residential builders, and the license is verifiable online through the state’s Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. Ask anyone quoting your reconstruction for their license number and check it. It takes two minutes.

This matters more after a loss than at any other time, because insurance work attracts people who follow storms and disappear afterwards. A written workmanship warranty is worth exactly as much as the company’s likelihood of still existing when you need it.

Two other things worth asking for before you sign: proof of liability insurance and workers’ compensation coverage, and a written scope rather than a single-figure quote. Any legitimate contractor will hand over all three without hesitating.

A repair announces itself through texture more than through color. Michigan homes carry four common drywall finishes — smooth, orange-peel, knockdown and skip-trowel — and each one is applied differently, with variations between the builder who did the original and the person repairing it decades later.

Getting it right means matching the spray pattern, the thinning of the compound and the knockdown timing, then feathering the transition far enough out that the eye cannot find the edge. Getting it wrong produces a patch that is invisible until light hits the wall from the side, at which point it is permanent.

Paint has the same problem in a different form. A color match from a chip is rarely a match to a wall that has aged and faded, which is why we often paint to a break — a corner or a trim line — rather than stopping the new paint in the middle of a surface.

This is one of the more common calls we take: the mitigation was done months ago, the building has been open ever since, and the rebuild has either never started or started and stopped.

Gather three things before you call anyone. The mitigation documentation — moisture logs, photographs, the drying certificate if there is one. The insurance paperwork — the adjuster’s estimate, any supplements, and what has actually been paid so far against what was approved. And whatever contract exists with the contractor who stopped.

The usual reason for a stall is that the approved amount does not cover the work as scoped and nobody has written the supplement that would fix it. That is a documentation problem, and it is solvable. Check your policy for any deadline to complete repairs, because those exist and they do expire.

A covered claim restores pre-loss condition — what was there, to the standard it was at. It does not fund an upgrade. But a rebuild is genuinely the cheapest moment you will ever get to change something, because the walls are already open and the crew is already there.

The upgrades that pay for themselves at this moment are the ones that are expensive to do later: insulation and air sealing while the cavity is open, electrical capacity while the wall is accessible, moving a wall or a doorway while the framing is exposed.

The rule is simply that it gets priced separately and agreed in writing before it is built, so there is never a question about which part of the invoice is the claim and which part is yours. Any contractor who blurs that line is doing you no favors.