Insurance Claim - is this going to sound dodgy to insurers?

[peggotty]

Our garden shed burnt down at the weekend, also burning out 3 panals of our fence. (Apparently it was quite exciting, 2 fire engines out, all the neighbours rubber-necking, our dcs woken up and bundled into our neighbours house, dh ineffectually hurling basins of water onto 10 foot flames et etc etc. I was out )
Anyway, I rang our insurers on yesterday to ask if we could claim and we could so I had to tell them off the top of my head what had been in the shed, what damage has been done. Since then, we've discovered that quite a few other things were in the shed that I didn't tell them about. I'm going to have to ring them up tomorrow and say 'oh by the way, I'd forgotten about these 50 other things that were in the shed..!' Are they going to think we're taking the piss?!

I suppose it will depend what your record for claims is like, how much you intend to claim and what proof you have of buying the items, having the items and any remainder of them.

Also, it might not be worth claiming for every last thing if they are not worth much. You could always say I've just claimed for X,Y,Z as the other things weren't worth much and I'm prepared to replace them myself.

THanks for replying! We have only ever claimed once on our insurance, when our ceiling collapsed. THe items that were in the garden shed, garden tools etc, they are just replacing directly so it's not a case of them giving us money for them. We have the charred remains of most of the things we want to replace. I think I just feel a bit embarassed ringing them up again to say we want more! If they did decide to send someout out, there is proof that nearly all of the things were there (except some plastic/cloth things that had totally gone).

Don't worry, Peggotty, they are used to people adding to their list. The initial conversation you had with them would just have been for them to get a rough idea of the total value of the items involved so they could work out if they needed to send out a loss adjuster. They will expect the final written list you send them to include more once you get a chance to think about it. As you still have the remains of the items you have proof you had them, though I can't imagine that the value of the claim is high enough for them to get too interested in that.

By the way, don't dismiss claiming for smaller items just becuase they are not worth much individually. If there were a lot of low value items it is surprising how much the replacement cost adds up. We had a fire in our meter cupboard which had quite a lot of toys in, most of which we had had for some time and were not individually worth much. However, when i sat down, listed it all out and added up the replacement cost of everything it came to over £4,000. And the insurance company paid out in full with no questions. Remember, most policies pay out the cost of replacing the item as new, not the second hand value.

You might also want to consider that as you are presumably going to make a claim, which will screw up your NCB, then you'll want to get everything including the kitchen sink included and miss nothing off which was destroyed in the shed fire. There is no point in under claiming as the damage has been done by your claim.