Household mishaps...

[Holdfast]

^ Did your insurance cover any of it or did you have to pay for it all?

Here, most insurance companies won't pay for ANY water damage. Period.

Funny you should ask.

It took almost 3-4 weeks to negotiate with them over what was their responsibility and what wasn't. It was complicated further by the fact that my buildings insurance is separate from my contents insurance, so two separate conversations were needed. And of course, each had their own subcontractors & assessors...

Eventually they agreed to compensate for about half of what I wanted. But when you took my excess into account, the amount I would have got wasn't worth the increased premium I'd have had to pay. And by that stage, I was distinctly cheesed off with the whole process, and basically wanted my house to be nice & pleasant again ASAP so just told them to eff off and got what needed done on my own dime.

Bastards.

 

[Trippy]

About 5 years ago, we had a huge snowstorm, with a quick shift in temperature a few days later, we had a huge melt. The snow on the roof and on my patio melted in a kind of funnel-effect, and the water flowed straight through a crack in the outside brick above my kitchen window. It flooded my living room and soaked the rug, to the point that it had to be replaced.

End of the story, my landlord put down lovely flooring, replaced the windows, and put a new roof on the building

 

[trekkiedane]

That's insurance for ya' - They can employ dozens of people to make life hell for their customers -as long as none of them actually pays out any money




(well, hundreds (thousands?), but dozens per case)

 

[Holdfast]

That's insurance for ya' - They can employ dozens of people to make life hell for their customers -as long as none of them actually pays out any money

It's not that just. It's also that it sucks up enough of YOUR time, that if you could add up the time spent phoning them, waiting for them, negotiating with them, etc, etc and then BILLED them for it at your usual rate, you could earned enough to pay for the repairs a dozen times over.

Insurance is completely cost-inefficient as well. It's designed to make money off people who can't meet capital costs. I wish I was rich enough to be able to ignore it completely but some costs are potentially so high if something really & truly catastrophic happened that I can't do without it. Annoying.

 

[Mallory]

Catastrophic coverage is about all I have them for too. I keep my deductibles fairly high (which keeps the rates down) and only expect to have to use it if someone breaks in and carries off everything. the house burns down, a falling tree cuts it in half, stuff like that.

 

[trekkiedane]

It's not that just. It's also that it sucks up enough of YOUR time, that if you could add up the time spent phoning them, waiting for them, negotiating with them, etc, etc and then BILLED them for it at your usual rate, you could earned enough to pay for the repairs a dozen times over.

Not to mention billing them for damages to your mental health from listening to their telephone muzak

I am so looking forward to the day someone totally innocent sues and is awarded(?) a few million dollars for having to listen to shait muzak while waiting on the phone… Might end the horrors of phone-muzak altogether

 

[Holdfast]

I am so looking forward to the day someone totally innocent sues and is awarded(?) a few million dollars for having to listen to shait muzak while waiting on the phone… Might end the horrors of phone-muzak altogether

Some good news to come out of the recession...

 

[Warp Coil]

I purchased my first home in 2007. A condo, not a house (it's all I can afford in this area on one income). The neighborhood was great. The location seemed good. I was very happy with the purchase, despite the fact that it was a little bit of a fixer-upper. I repainted, gutted and re-did the kitchen, got a new HVAC unit (mostly paid for by the seller), and eventually got new windows. I really improved the place to make it a nice home.

Then, slowly, the bad things started to happen. There was a water leak coming from the upstairs neighbor's unit - he had a leak in his bathroom that was coming down into my kitchen. The guy was in denial and seemed stubborn to accept responsibility for it (he seemed convinced that it might be coming from another source, not necessarily his place). After two weeks of harassment, he finally broke down and had a plumber come out and fix the leak. Put a hole in my ceiling. My neighbor had to pay for everything, but it was stressful and annoying. Everything was fine until 3-4 months later, when the leak mysteriously returned. It happened once, then happened again a week later, then never happened again. A plumber couldn't re-create the leak. I've lived in fear of it returning ever since.

The condo's management company was having some external work done to the building (replacing walkway bridges outside). The bridge outside and above my living room window sat incomplete for a long time while the management company dealt with contractor issues. There must've been a hole or a crack that formed in the building exterior, because it caused water to leak into my place on my window ledge whenever it rained. It took a while before new contractors were hired and the construction work was re-done and completed. Thankfully, there doesn't seem to be a leak anymore.

Last month, several pipes burst within the community. One of them was mine. It was ridiculously cold, and the pipe that leads to my hose bib on the patio burst one day. I had turned the valve off just like you're supposed to, to prevent these things from happening. I thought I'd bled out all the water to make sure the pipe was dry, but apparently there was still a little bit of water still inside. Water was leaking into my bedroom ceiling. The only good news about this is that the management company filed an insurance claim (since so many pipes burst) so I didn't have to pay for anything. I did have to live with a giant hole in my bedroom ceiling for over a week, though.

You may have noticed a trend here... everything is water-related. Yup. I hate life. I live in constant fear that I will come home to some sort of leak, flood or damage. it's happened way too much for such a short period of time (less than two years). I've come to the conclusion that my home is cursed. Not only do I have serious water issues, but I've got a few really weird noises in the walls that I can't identify. Probably pipes that are moving around, just waiting to burst apart, too.

I'd love to unload the place but the market sucks, and I haven't owned it long enough and haven't build much equity. Considering all of the upgrades I've made, it would be a lot easier to sell than the other units in my development (most of them haven't been upgraded at all). But I wouldn't get my 20% down-payment back.

 

[Captain Shaw]

I still live at home but our family home is a bog standard 100 year old terrace house so when they where build they did not have bathrooms.
We notice when we moved in where they had took the chimney out of the back bedroom to make room for a bathroom instead of plastering over the hole in the celling they had put plywood over it and wallpapered over it.

So one day my dad takes this bit of wood down to see if the hole could be patched being a British bloke he goes down stairs to make a cupper before starting work when all of a sudden we hear the all mighty bag.


It turns out for last x amount of years this thin piece of wood had been holding the middle part of the chimney in place right above the sink what they must have forgotten to take out.
Lucky no one was hurt and all though the sink was chipped it did not crack so we did not have to rush out and buy a new sink.

We all so had a chimney explode and part of a chimney fall off because of a earthquake and the guy who fixed it manged to cause more damaged to the house and we ended up with water coming in though the roof windows and wall which had to be fix.
As i type this we have water coming from the bathroom in to the kitchen and my dad can't see where its coming from.
God we hate this money pit at times