You said the key word: tile. Tile, like brick, is hard to color match. The color differs from firing to firing. Usually, all the tile for one roof comes from one batch of kiln firing. Look into other tile makers to see if they can come close to matching the style and color of your tile. You'll need to take along a sample tile. One alternative would be to remove all the tiles from the roof section that will be rebuilt and mix the old tiles with the new tiles. The roof will have a shingled effect rather than a continous color. However, this is a lot of work and it appears that your insurance company will not cover the extra labor. You may have to hire a lawyer or offer to pay for the extra labor. There is an upside. From your description, your house may have been saved because it had fire resistant roofing material. Remind your insurer that they could have been paying for an entire house, not just a roof repair.

Well, this has definitely been a learning experience for us! We've not been happy with the level of responsiveness from our insurance company although it supposedly is ranked as one of the top companies in the country. In many ways they have screwed up from the get go. So, we've been feeling that we are definitely on our own on this one. After more than a month of hassling this, we are starting to think that perhaps we should have just hired a GC. But, at the start we didn't realize that the scope of the necessary repairs would keep expanding into the realm where a GC might be necessary. Our adjuster just told us to find some companies to bid on the heating and plumbing work (all that we initially thought was involved). As we get further into this, we are realizing all of the additional things that will need to be worked on. I guess we are lucky in that we have the funds in hand to pay for some of the initial expenses such as temporary lodging and initial diagnostic work on the house. A number of times we've talked about how in the world people who don't have the extra money would be able to handle making these payments and then waiting for reimbursement. Our insurance company didn't even step up and offer any assistance with finding temporary lodging until more than two weeks into this. And, then, they didn't have any better options than I'd managed to find after hours and hours of searching on my own. I think some of the issues we are having are due to our wanting to do things our own way to make sure they are done correctly and in a manner suitable to a 100 year old house. The insurance company has four approved contractors in our city, and if we had chosen to work through them all of the money would have gone directly to them through the insurance agency without us having to be involved at all. But, we started looking into reviews of those companies, and they weren't great. So, we opted out of using those approved contractors. We are ending up acting as our own GC, but it is a lot of work! We are lucky we have the time to do this. Yes, we have just considered paying off the rest of the mortgage and could do that. But, we live in a pretty pricey house and that is a good chunk of money that we might want to have available elsewhere in this entire process. So, we are sitting on that idea for a bit. And, when asking about pocketing some of the money by doing work on my own, my intent is not to defraud or raise rates. I just want to know why I could not do the painting myself since I am as capable as the professional that I know the insurance company will be paying a pretty penny to do the same work. So, are some of you suggesting that we just hire a GC, have the GC make a bid for the entire project, and then make our own arrangements with the GC on how we could save some of the total sum by doing the work ourselves? Thanks for all of the advice and personal experiences.

"I feel like my premiums are paying to insure claims against somebody else's use of a snowmobile, boat, pogo stick." Our current house was built (and we bought it when it was in the framing stage) in 1990. All of the houses around here were built with wood shake roofs. (Not wood shingles - heavy shakes.) A couple of years ago when we were going to be getting a new roof, I contacted our homeowner's insurance agent to let him know, and I asked him how much of a discount we'd get. Bear in mind that wood shake roofs are generally unrated, meaning unless they are treated with fire retardant, they are going to burn like crazy. A composition shingle roof is Class C rated, meaning that it is somewhat fire resistant, but they will burn. Our new roof is a Gerard stone-coated steel roof, which is Class A rated - one of the best roofing materials you can have (which would also include concrete or clay tiles). Anyway, our agent said that the new-roof discount would be very minimal because we do not live in a fire danger area. The risk of there being a fire was so low as to make a substantial discount not possible. That was January 2016. In 2017, as everyone knows, there were horrible fires in California. And when our policy renewed towards the end of 2017, our premiums were increased by 17%. Hubs and I have owned three homes together for a total of 37 years (6 years for the first one, 3 years for the second one, and 28 years for our current home). I have made ONE claim against my auto insurance, and that was back in 1979 when someone smashed out the rear window of my car. My husband has never made an auto insurance claim. No one has ever made claims against us/our auto or homeowner's insurance. And in 37 years we have never made a claim against our homeowner's insurance. So, I asked our homeowner's insurance company why our premium increased 17%. Yep, you guess it. It's because the insurance industry is trying to recoup the losses they suffered by paying out claims to the people whose homes were lost/damaged because of the fires. There is no fire danger to our home so we don't get a decent discount for having a brand new Class A roof, but we live in a state that suffered devastating fires so we have to help bail out the insurance company. Don't get me wrong -- I have extreme empathy for the folks who were (and are now) affected by California wildfires, but shouldn't insurance companies do a better job of investing their assets to have funds to cover payouts, rather than placing the burden on the folks who don't make claims?

@vinmarks Interesting with the line of sight point. But from what line? You can see it in the first photo which is standing near the fridge, but you wouldn't see it from the other side of the island. I'm for sure going to fight it, but likely a public adjuster would know best. I figured a few people here might have some more knowledge than I.