House fire in October destroyed the kitchen and 60 percent of the contents. State Farm initial offer was $94,000 on a $312,000 personal property limit. After 7 months of fighting we settled at $241,800 by submitting a room-by-room inventory with replacement cost documentation. Here is the spreadsheet method

Posting the full story because contents claims after a fire are where carriers consistently lowball and most homeowners do not understand how much money is being left on the table. Background: October 2025, late evening grease fire on the stovetop in our home in suburban Indianapolis. We caught it within probably 4 minutes but the cabinets above the range were already involved and the flames pushed up into the soffit. The fire department had it out in about 20 minutes. Structural damage was confined to the kitchen and the adjacent dining room. Smoke and soot damage was throughout the entire 2,800 square foot main floor and second floor. We were displaced for 5 months while the kitchen was gutted and rebuilt.

Policy: State Farm HO-3 with $312,000 personal property coverage (50 percent of Coverage A at $624,000 dwelling), replacement cost endorsement on contents, $5,000 deductible. Their initial contents offer came in at $94,000 after their preferred contents vendor did a walk-through inventory and applied a flat 35 percent depreciation across all items. The inventory itself was wildly incomplete. The vendor spent maybe 3 hours in the house, photographed visible items in the kitchen and dining room, and missed entire categories of contents including the contents of two upstairs closets, the laundry room, the garage workshop, and a hall closet that contained probably $14,000 worth of holiday decorations and stored items.

I requested the inventory spreadsheet and went through it room by room against my own photos and receipts. I built a parallel spreadsheet in Google Sheets with columns for item, room, brand/model, age, purchase price, current replacement cost (with vendor URL and screenshot), and condition prior to loss. I documented every item I could remember from each room. I pulled credit card statements from the prior 5 years and tagged purchases that I could match to specific items. I had photos from a homeowner inventory I did 2 years prior (which is the single most important thing I had done in retrospect) showing the contents of closets, the garage, and the upstairs bedrooms. The final inventory had 1,847 line items totaling $312,000 in replacement cost.

The State Farm adjuster pushed back on roughly 40 percent of my line items. The most common challenge was "no proof of ownership" on items where I did not have a receipt. We negotiated through three rounds with the adjuster, then escalated to a team manager when the adjuster refused to move past $156,000. The manager pushed it to $198,000. I then invoked the policy's appraisal clause in writing which triggered a panel process. State Farm settled at $241,800 within 3 weeks of the appraisal demand to avoid the panel cost. Total recovery was $147,800 above the initial offer. The two things that mattered most were the pre-loss inventory photos and the line-item replacement cost documentation with vendor URLs. Without those, the depreciation argument would have stuck and we would have been stuck closer to the initial $94,000.