Renovating? The Call to Make Before the Dumpster Arrives

By The NMH Agency Team, Licensed Agent

Every renovation has a call list: the contractor, the lender, maybe
the county permit office. Your insurance agent is almost never on it,
and the omission works out fine right up until it doesn’t. A renovation
changes what your house is worth to rebuild, who’s walking around your
property with power tools, and occasionally whether your policy even
matches your house anymore. All three are insurance events, and all
three are cheap to handle in advance and expensive to handle after.

Here’s the before-during-after checklist we wish every renovating
customer ran.

Before: three
questions that take ten minutes

Is your contractor actually insured? Ask for
certificates of insurance showing general liability and workers’
compensation, and verify they’re current; certificates are free and
legitimate contractors produce them without flinching. This matters
because of what happens without them: a worker injured on your property
without workers’ comp coverage may look to your liability
coverage, and an uninsured contractor’s mistake (the fire, the flood,
the crane through the neighbor’s roof) becomes a fight involving your
policy instead of theirs. This single verification is the highest-value
item in this article.

Does your policy know about the project? For modest
cosmetic work, usually nothing changes. But bigger projects raise real
questions: some policies have provisions about structural work, and if
you’re moving out during the renovation, the vacancy issue enters (empty
houses trigger their own policy clock, which we’ve written about
separately). Major structural projects sometimes warrant builder’s risk
coverage, which is designed for buildings under construction, materials
on site, and the specific ways half-finished structures get damaged. A
two-minute description of your project to your agent sorts which bucket
you’re in.

Where will the materials sit? Twenty thousand
dollars of cabinets in the garage, a pallet of flooring in the driveway:
theft of building materials is a genuinely common claim, and coverage
for materials varies by policy and situation. Worth one question,
especially for driveway-stored anything.

During: the boring vigilance

Keep receipts and progress photos; both help enormously if anything
goes wrong mid-project and again later for documenting the finished
value. If the project scope grows (they grow), or the timeline stretches
past what you told your agent, update them. If you’ve moved out and the
“few weeks” is now month three, that’s a call, not a shrug: vacancy
provisions in standard policies can start affecting coverage after 30 to
60 days.

And keep the jobsite civilized from a liability standpoint: fencing
or barriers where kids could wander in, because an open construction
site on your property is exactly the sort of thing liability claims are
made of, and the attractive-nuisance doctrine does not sleep just
because you’re excited about the addition.

After: the step everyone
skips

Here’s the quiet financial mistake at the end of most renovations:
the house is now worth meaningfully more to rebuild, and the dwelling
coverage doesn’t know.

Your policy’s dwelling limit was set to an estimate of rebuild cost.
The new kitchen, the added bathroom, the finished basement, the extra
400 square feet: they might add $75,000 or $150,000 to what
reconstruction would cost. If the dwelling limit doesn’t move, you’re
underinsured by exactly that much, and underinsurance doesn’t just shave
the big claim; on partial losses, some policies’ coinsurance-style
provisions can reduce payouts when the home is insured well below its
rebuild cost. The fix is a five-minute call: describe what was done, and
the dwelling limit gets trued up. Yes, the premium rises a bit; it’s the
price of the addition actually being covered, which was presumably the
goal.

Two happier afterthoughts. First, some renovations lower
premiums or earn discounts: a new roof most famously, but also updated
electrical, plumbing, and HVAC (which can reverse old-home surcharges),
impact-resistant shingles in hail states, alarm and water-leak
monitoring systems, even whole-home generators with some carriers.
Report the upgrades; the discounts don’t apply themselves. Second, if
the renovation added specific valuables, a built-in wine collection,
high-end appliances, an art wall with actual art, review your contents
coverage and special limits while you’re at it.

The pattern

Notice what every item above has in common: none of it is
complicated, all of it is a phone call, and every bad outcome in the
category comes from silence. Renovations are one of the handful of life
events, like new drivers and new businesses, where your policy needs to
hear from you to keep working properly. Put us on the call list,
somewhere between the contractor and the countertop people. We’re faster
than both.

Project on the calendar? Call 800.388.6780 or request a homeowners
review and tell us what you’re building. We’ll run this checklist
with you in one conversation.