property insurance

The Continuing Stoooooorry…

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I finally have more progress on our saga with the movers.

A few days ago, I spent some time talking with a lawyer about our options.  One of the things he mentioned was that, usually one would start an insurance claim, then let the insurance companies duke it out.  The lawyer can send a letter to the moving company for me about it, if the moving company continues to give me grief about it.  How the company responds to that would determine our next move.

Hopefully, we will never have to find out.

Making a claim on my mother’s property insurance was not really preferable.  The deductible is a thousand dollars, so if the cost of replacing the pole is close to that, it’s almost not worth it.  However, my brother thought to contact our provincial vehicle insurance company, since the damage was done by a vehicle.  They said that yes, they do cover that sort of thing, so I called and started a claim. I spent some time talking to someone on the phone, then got an email address to send photos to.

As I prepared to send the email, I got an email from the moving company.  This after 10 days of nothing from them at all.

It was pretty short.  Basically, they wanted to know if I’d gotten an estimate on how much it would cost; if it was under $1000, they would cut me a check for it.  If it was over $1000 (the amount of their deductible), they would give me the information for their insurance company, and I would file a claim there.  (I’m paraphrasing a fair bit, since English is clearly not the first language of the person writing to me.)

Which really, the movers should be doing, not me.  Except I think I’d rather deal with the insurance company than with the movers.

No word on the money they said they would pay for our damaged goods a while back, which is a separate issue from property damage.

So I included their email with my email to the vehicle insurance company.  I was told it could take 2 or 3 days before I got a response, but I got one the next day.  Turns out that, because no vehicles registered in this province was involved, it’s out of their jurisdiction.  We would have to deal with the driver’s vehicle insurance company.  And I have no way of knowing who that is, since in the province we moved from, it’s private insurance companies, not one provincial insurance company.

So after I got that response, I got a phone number of a local electrician.  Someone I went to high school with, actually.  He’s a year or two younger than me, but we took the same bus to school for many years.  He has done work here on the farm for my brother before, and was highly recommended.  Since he works in the city, I was given his home phone number, and I left a message for him there.  Much to my surprise, not only did I get a call soon after (my timing was good, I guess; he came home from work shortly after my call), but he said he could come over right away!

He spent a fair bit of time checking things out, including making sure there was no damage to the cable itself.  I will get an estimate from him emailed to me, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be over $1000, so it looks like I’ll be dealing with the insurance company.

One of the things he mentioned was that he likely wouldn’t be able to install a new pole until spring.  The electric company has access to the machinery that can drill into frozen ground, but he doesn’t.  It’s unlikely the electric company would be willing to come out for a customer owned pole to begin with – and we’d have to prune those trees for them to get into the yard!

Pruning is something that’s going to have to be a bit of a priority, it looks like!  I’d like to get that done while the trees are still dormant, so February would be good.  By March, it might be too late.  Hard to know.  We might have a late spring.  Or an early one.

Anyhow, that’s where we are at now.  I will wait on the estimate, then go from there – and will ask about the coverage for damage to our goods in the process.  I’ll update my lawyer about how things are going, too.

What a long and convoluted process this is!

All because no one bothered to look up.

The Re-Farmer

Ensured about Insurance

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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