Home improvements and the implications for home insurance
Making improvements to your home can be rewarding on several levels. The most basic is of course the sense of satisfaction that can be gained from simply making your home a nicer place in which to live. And we can’t ignore the fact that the more pleasant your home is, the more valuable it will become. While this increase in market value can only be a good thing, it can also have a knock on effect when it comes to home insurance. Here we look at some of these general implications of home improvement, which tend to apply across the board, regardless of whether you take home insurance from established providers like Santander home insurance, or have a policy that you picked up at the local supermarket.
Naturally, the effect that home improvements have on home insurance will depend on the nature of the alterations. Re-decorating and perhaps the addition of some new ornaments may seem a fairly superficial change, but can in fact mean that you need to alter the provisions of your home insurance cover. If you have put down new carpets, for example, or spent a bit on your new ornaments you may want to upgrade a basic policy to include accidental damage cover, particularly if you have small children or pets that live in the home.
If you’ve purchased some valuable paintings to liven up your walls, you should make sure that you check the value of the single item cover limit set out in your home insurance policy. And if you have given the home a significant makeover involving the introduction of valuable items throughout the building, you may also need to adjust the overall level of contents cover. In fact, a significant number of homes underestimate the value of the belongings kept within. This has no impact until things go wrong and a claim on the home insurance must be made, so this is something to keep an eye on, as the accumulation of valuables over the years can see the overall value of the contents in your home creep up unnoticed.
If you have gone in for some serious home improvement, and modified or added to the structure of your home, you may well need to adjust the buildings element of your home insurance cover. While this may make regular premium payments a bit more expensive, this update to your policy is crucial. The risk of having inadequate contents cover can be bad enough in the event of a big claim, following an event like a house fire. When it comes to the buildings element of home insurance, however, being underinsured can be simply disastrous. The worst case scenario can see you unable to afford to rebuild your home, and so if you follow only one piece of the advice set out here, it should be to make sure that your building is properly covered by your home insurance at all times.
