Getting a Charleston home ready for hurricane season

Before the season: the unglamorous work that saves roofs

• Get eyes on the roof — lifted shingles, soft fascia, and clogged gutters are exactly how wind-driven rain gets into a house.
• Deal with the leaning pine before August. Live oaks shed limbs but usually hold; a tall pine with a lean toward the bedroom is the tree that ends up in storm-damage photos.
• Read your insurance before you need it: find your named-storm deductible percentage, confirm whether your wind coverage is in the coastal wind pool, and price flood insurance if you don't carry it — flood policies typically have a 30-day waiting period, so buying when a storm is named is too late.
• Video-walk the whole house once a year — open closets, pan slowly. Ten minutes of footage becomes gold in a claim.
• Look up your evacuation zone now on the county emergency-management site (SC's "Know Your Zone" maps cover the tri-county) while it's sunny and the site loads instantly.

72 hours out: when the cone includes us

• Bring in or tie down everything that can fly — patio furniture, grills, trampolines, trash cans. In hurricane wind, loose yard objects are what break windows.
• Move irreplaceables, documents, and electronics up off floors. In much of the Lowcountry the loss comes at floor level — surge, tide, and rain-flooding — not from the roof coming off.
• Charge everything, fill the vehicles, refill prescriptions, and get cash while lines are short.
• Photograph the house inside and out one more time — timestamped days before landfall, it's the cleanest "before" evidence there is.
• If officials call an evacuation for your zone, leave. Everything on this list is replaceable.

After the storm: the first 48 hours

The days after a storm hurt more people than the storm itself. Treat every downed line as energized, never run a generator in a garage or near openings, and watch overhead for hung-up limbs before you work under trees.

• Document all damage with photos and video before touching anything.
• Cover breaches fast — tarping the roof opening and boarding broken windows is the mitigation your policy expects, and it can start before an adjuster ever visits.
• Report the claim promptly and keep receipts for every emergency expense — tarps, plywood, even hotel nights are often reimbursable.
• Be careful with post-storm door-knockers: get offers in writing, be slow to sign anything assigning your insurance benefits, and prefer contractors with a local trail.
• Separate the water stories for your adjuster: rain through wind damage is a homeowners claim; rising water is a flood claim. Photograph entry paths for each.

The Lowcountry epilogue: dry it like you mean it

A breached roof in a dry climate is a hole. A breached roof in Charleston is a mold timeline — storm water inside walls starts growing something within days in our humidity. The sequence that protects the house is tarp, extract, dry, then repair; cosmetic fixes over damp framing just seal the problem in. Proper structural drying, verified with meter readings, is the difference between a storm you repaired once and one you'll be re-repairing next spring.