We met Jim Campbell after a flood in our basement. The flood occurred after three inches of rain fell in a half hour. I went downstairs to check on everything and I had water coming up from the drain pipe in the basement floor, literally shooting up two to three feet in the air.
I am an artist by trade, and this is where my office is located as well as all my storage. I had an upcoming exhibition so there was a scramble to save many items. We had owned this home for twenty five years and never had a drop of water; we now had raw sewage coming up into the basement. It was just awful. Jim responded immediately. It was a very difficult time for us, and a disaster could not have come at a worse time.
Jim helped us immensely; he took a lot of the pressure off of us and stepped in to handle things that I could not physically handle at that time. He was very generous with his time. Jim had a crew at the house the next day; they basically had to gut the basement, down to the brick. One positive that came out of this disaster was that we were able to get all our utilities up to code during the rebuild. Our insurance company did not want to pay for this, and that’s where Jim’s expertise came in handy.
He worked as a mediator between our insurance company and the township, not only making sure that the work we had done was compliant with village code, but also that the insurance company would pay for it. Jim balanced all this and made it work; we could not have done it without him. The insurance company had offered us $12,000.00 to cover the loss.
Jim scrutinized the policy and said “I think we can do better than that, and you deserve better than that”. Jim was able to get us $50,000.00. And the end results were spectacular!