Warning: this post contains a heated rant. I make no apologies.
Does anyone else hate home insurance as much as I do? Yes, it’s wonderful when there’s a flood that ruins all your things, or T-rex takes a bite out of your roof, but in general, IT’S A RACKET!! Here’s the story…
When we first bought the house and knew it had to be insured, we searched high and low for a carrier that would cover an uninhabited historic renovation. After about 3 tries, we found a builder’s risk policy that would cover us for a few months, and we paid out the you know what for it. But of course, that didn’t cover jack squat, and when we were robbed of the copper in our heating and cooling units, there was no help to be found. So we ended up having to pay an exorbitant amount of money to have the entire heating and cooling system replaced. And that left us asking the question…what are we paying insurance for?
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Earlier this month, the time came for us to either renew the policy or find another one that was better suited. Same problem…no one wants to cover us. We did end up signing for one policy, but there’s been some issues and now instead of covering us for a year, they will only cover us until January. Basically, the addendum in the policy states that they will not cover houses that have “aluminum knob and tube wiring.” Since our knob and tube is copper, we thought, Great! This works! Turns out they should have added the word OR between aluminum and knob…they won’t cover any type of knob and tube. So we went back to the original policy we had, and they said that they don’t cover knob and tube either, and they were unaware that we had this the first time (even though no one ever asked). So here we are.
It looks like we have three options at this point:
1. Replace all of the knob and tube wiring in the house. This doesn’t work because our electrician is basically finished updating the electrical in the house, so we would end up paying double for our electrical work.
2. Claim that we live in the house and get a homeowners policy (which will cover knob and tube). This doesn’t work because it’s insurance fraud, and I’d really prefer not to go to jail. Orange is NOT my color.
3. Go uninsured. This doesn’t work for obvious reasons.
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So what should we do? Any ideas? Does anyone know of carriers that will cover us? The way I figure it, there are thousands of houses all the time that are being renovated and not replacing wiring, so who ensures them? There’s got to be a way.
