Insurance during building work

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Building work on the extension started today. I rang my insurance company to notify them and found they won't cover us (I contacted them last week and chased up today as they hadn't got back to me).

So I need new building insurance that will. Any suggestions?

I’ve never bothered telling them, in fact it’s never crossed my mind to be honest.

If it's over £20k of work you aren't covered under normal home insurance, whether it is to do with the building work or not.

This is something I discovered too - because I always read the policy documents.

I am insured via www.acorninsure.co.uk and they do provide SOME cover whilst you have building work going on, but they don't cover everything.

As for not telling them? It will only matter when you need to make a claim. "House burnt down? Sorry, we don't provide cover during building work."

It’s not always £20,000 - we are with Lloyds and covered up to £75,000 but yes it’s definitely sensible to let your insurer know before embarking on anything significant.
We did a loft conversion and when it was finished and I notified them our 4 bed house was now 5 bed they told me we would not have been covered if anything happened during the work.

We had this as well. Our policy was cancelled by our provider, but noted with no fault on our part - so wouldn't effect future quotes.

We managed to get a policy with M and S in the end, they were happy to cover the building works, the only caveat was that if the property was left unsecured and we had a break in then we wouldn't be covered. It cost more then my standard policy, but as I left it till quite late I went with it, it was very good cover..that of course we never needed.

There is a company called Plum who do insurance for this type of thing. You’ll need to use a broker but you can contact them directly and they’ll refer you to a broker

wow this never even crossed my consciousness!!!

My home insurance is with Churchill... I told them via online chat that we were starting an extension... they asked a series of questions and then asked for an extra £16 or so and increased our excess by £500 for fire and flood since we would have some materials on site.

I have always found them fab to deal with, they don't seem to ask all the catchy out questions and policies are more lenient (for example they don't make you stop driving for 6 weeks after c section). Never (touch wood) had to make a claim though.

They obciously won't cover issues as a result of the work, i.e. builders accidentally knocking down the house etc... but your builder should have insurnace for that.

I suspect it also helped that we will neither be leaving the property unattended nor giving the builders a key (both questions they asked on the chat).

Thanks, I'll try some of these. The work is costing around £90k so lots of places won't insure us and it policies that will are about £600!

I used JL.

You'll need the details of your builders insurance policy when you set it all up.

We have just finished our 100k extension and used Admiral for the insurance. Just had to keep them updated with any delays, new completion dates etc

Happened to us too, but with a few weeks notice. Very stressful. We ended up using a broker who sorted it out for us! thehomeinsurer.co.uk

LittleOverwhelmed wow. Ok. That makes my £600 for the year seem cheap!

I wasn't asked value of work but its a lot more than 100k (unfortunately).

I have also spoken to a number of people who didn’t think to notify their insurers (about major works). Obviously they have all been lucky, but “what if”...

Exactly. If my tumble dryer causes a house fire I want to be covered!

Hiscox were asking for about £500/month for my project (~£200k). Thankfully we found something cheaper as we're now 14 months until a 6 month project due to pandemic and builder incompetence and that would have been painfully expensive!

I also have friends who didn't notify their insurers but got lucky. I saw a video before we started of someone's back wall collapsing when installing the steel went wrong so I didn't want to risk something like that!

We got a quote from a broker for £2k for 3 months. Then I spoke to our standard insurer I must have got a new person who said there was no need we were insured for accidental fire and i pushed it and asked what about vandalism (we weren't living in the house) and he said yes - well he shouldn't have said yes but they stood by what he said regardless - it was all on tape - of course the house was fine and we didn't need to claim but very glad we didn't need to pay £2k either!

We had this same issue last week. We went with admiral, you can do it all online. Ours was 20k though.

You shouldn’t be insuring your own work - the company working on your property should have their own insurance which would cover damage to your property during the works - this is something you should always check when hiring contractors.

You would only need your own insurance if you were doing it yourself or using uninsured tradesman (which personally I would run a mile from).

As far as informing your own insurers, this would only normally be necessary if the work was to change something fundamental about the property that you had previously disclosed (e.g. adding a bedroom) or adding something of non standard construction.

I feel like there are two things being disussed here?

1 is continued home insurance while you have building work ongoing, i.e. if there is a storm and your house floods or if the tumble dryer sets the house on fire. Making sure your insurnace for normal life events is not null n void as a result of building work.

1. Insurnace that pays out if something terrible happens as a direct result of the building work, i.e. wrong steels, burst pipe that's left over a weekend, etc.

In my mind the builder should have the 2nd insurance and we should be discussing the 1st. But i assume these 2k for 3 month quotes where they are value dependent are actually insuring against the 2nd.

To be clear, my post about Churchill was about the first and I think that is what OP is referring to (given follow up post re. tumble dryer). We are not taking out the 2nd but have checked that the builder has appropriate insurnace.