Before you make the decision to remodel your home, you need to consider your insurance coverage. You may find it tempting to remodel your kitchen, bathroom or even the entire interior of your home, and you may want to fix up paneling on the outside. Before you make any rash decisions, however, you need to consider how your homeowner’s insurance is going to be affected by the decision.
Coverage During the Remodel
During the process of remodeling your home, it is possible that your specific homeowner’s insurance plan might not cover your home during the renovation. The homeowner’s insurance policy that you have is likely to include certain parameters. This means that your home is covered under certain conditions, and under other conditions it is not. You may need to look into whether or not your home is covered while you are doing renovations.
Should your home not be covered while you are remodeling, you could put yourself at risk. This is something that you do not want to do, and you want to make sure that you are always secure in your decisions. To this effect, it is smart for you to refrain from doing remodeling on your home until you discuss with your homeowner’s insurance policy broker options for a policy that will cover your home during remodel. You should be protected from storm damage, natural disasters or earthquakes during the time that your home is being remodeled.
Rebuild Cost
One thing that your insurance broker takes into consideration when assessing the value and cost of your plan is the rebuild cost of your home, which is the amount of money it would take to rebuild the home in case of a disaster. When you remodel your home, you will potentially change the rebuild costs for the space. If you increase the rebuild cost by doing remodeling, your insurance policy is likely to increase in cost as well.
If for some reason a natural disaster strikes your home, your insurance company would then be responsible for the cost of rebuilding your home. When you renovate your home, it makes it so that the overall value of your home is increased. This means that in the case of a natural disaster such as a hurricane or tornado, your insurance company would have to pay more to rebuild your house than they would have paid before you remodeled it.
You want to avoid these type of problems. You will want to make sure that your renovations are done only to the extent that they do not drastically increase the rebuild costs of the home. Make subtle additions to the home, such as metallic cabinets or new countertops. Doing this will make it so that the aesthetic appearance of your home’s interior is improved without adding exorbitant costs to the rebuild. If the renovations do drastically improve the value of your home, make sure you have your insurance adjusted to cover the increased value.
Preparation is the Name of the Game
Natural disasters do happen, and they should not be taken with a grain of salt. It is perfectly possible in many areas of the country for you to experience damage to your home from a natural disaster. If this natural disaster is so harsh that you’re home is left needing to be rebuilt, you need to ensure that your insurance company will cover that rebuild. You want to make sure your insurance company is prepared to do that for whatever value your home will be assessed at after the remodeling.
