After an hour on the phone yesterday, I have finally dealt with our home insurance.  It’s content insurance only, which is all we can get even here, since we do not own the property.  I cancelled our previous content insurance and, since we left almost 2 months ago, will be getting a credit on that.  We were still paying for an address we weren’t living in anymore.

New content insurance for our current location was set up at the same time.  We now have the same coverage as before, with only minor differences due to location and zoning (we can’t, for example, get sewer back up insurance here.  We have no sewers), and it’s going to cost us about $20 a month less than the new charges would have been with our previous location’s insurance, which was on automatic renewal, and was in the process of rolling over for another year.

Which led me to talking to my older brother, who had to get the property insurance on behalf of my mother, this morning.  Oh, the hoops he had to jump through to get it done!  No company wanted to touch an unoccupied property, for starters, and the amounts things are covered for are woefully inadequate.  No where near replacement value, if something happened.  Not all the buildings are insured, either.  It took him weeks just to get what coverage there is, so this is certainly not a complaint.  Any insurance is better than no insurance.

One of the things we agreed to do in exchange for living here is to take on the expenses of the place, including the insurance.  It will be up for renewal in the spring, so we have some time to figure that out.  A lot will change, with the place being occupied again, but we are also going to make sure there is adequate replacement value coverage.

Among the questions I was asked while getting our content insurance was how old the house was.  I couldn’t actually answer that.  I know the new part was built in the late 70’s, but the original, log cabin part of the house is far older.  I’m trying to figure it out, based on what little I know about when it was first acquired by a family member, then by my father.  It may well be 100 years old!  I wonder who in my family would know?  I’m now very curious.

The important thing is, it’s done.  We’re insured.  As it stands right now, it looks like we’ve got better content insurance than my mother was able to get for property insurance.

Meanwhile, I may have found out about what those seeds were that we’ve been finding in our linen closet and the couch.

My brother wasn’t sure, but his best guess is, it’s poison.  It seems there’s a type of mouse poison you can get that is in seeds that gets put where the mice might go. No photos I’ve been able to find match the seeds I’ve seen, but the pictures I’m finding are all much newer products than this would have been.  They now come in pellets or blocks, and/or are brightly coloured.

This would explain why it was found under the couch cushion, and under the linens, along with the mouse shit. It’s possible that my late father had sprinkled it under the couch cushion, though considering how long the stuff in the linen closet has been sitting there, whoever put it under there did it many, many years ago.

It’s a good thing I was already planning on taking precautions when cleaning up that linen closet.  Also good that I had made sure to vacuum up the seeds that had fallen onto the floor as I took things out of that linen closet so quickly, and that it’s currently so blocked off, the cats can get into it.  They have certainly been trying.

I have to admit.  Poison is not one of the things I expected to deal with while cleaning up and packing.  Not that I didn’t think poison was ever used; I know it was.  I just didn’t expect it to be sprinkled about so generously in the couch and closet.

The Re-Farmer