Home insurance epic fail

[LupinLady]

I'm after a bit of advice as I feel too much of an idiot to ask people in real life! Last year we had a small single story extension built, it never occurred to me that I needed to let our insurance company know that this work was being carried out so I didn't. The build got finished, everything is fine and nothing got damaged etc.

Fast forward to this year and we changed insurers as the renewal was very expensive. New insurer makes a few assumptions to quote eg, no history of flooding and that house is not under going any renovations and I've answered everything truthfully as nothing will be done to the house. It has got me in a total panic though that I didn't let the previous insurer know.

I was so so anxious about the building work, and now I'm anxious and not eating for worrying about this. Do I need to tell the new insurer that we did some work last year? We have building regs sign off and electrical sign off so in my mind if we needed to claim in the future for anything it should all be fine as no renovations are happening in the time frame of the current policy. There are about 10 basic assumptions that the policy for this year is based on and everything is answered honestly.

I don't want to contact the new insurer if I don't have too, but I'd also hate the thought that they could check back insurance history and find we didn't inform the previous insurer so challenge if we needed to claim! Does anyone have any experience in this field who could advise? I feel like such a fool for not thinking of this before the work started.

Don't worry you are fine.

Quite a number of people do forget you aren't alone.

That requirement is there because having work done makes your house much riskier at the time- eg. water pipe being hit, structural collapse, perhaps more vulnerable to theft, might mean it is unoccupied if you've had to move out etc.

If the work is completed your current insurer will be fine with that. They won't have the history of your policy with the other insurer.

The only thing it means is that if anything was to come up in later years with say shoddy work being discovered on the work you didn't insure that your insurance wouldn't cover it that specifically. You will still be covered for everything else. If something came up later obviously you could still pursue this legally if needed, you would just be doing it with the contractors directly and not with an insurer.

You'll be fine. If you moved to a house with an extension you wouldn't tell your insurance company that the extension had been done last year, would you?

You just insure the property as a whole.
If something had happened while the extension was being done you would have had an issue.

I work in house insurance you're fine with this.
It's just if the previous insurer had found out that you had the work and hadn't told them and had then decided to cancel your policy that you would have had a problem however that didn't happen from the sounds of it.
Because the work is all finished and
Signed off now then you're fine and no building work ongoing

Another insurance expert here. You are totally fine. You are over thinking honestly.

nothing to worry about, you have answered the statement of fact correctly.

all is in order

Thank you everyone, I might actually sleep well tonight now. The builders we used were very reputable, they were all fully insured and I am very grateful nothing went wrong. From now on I'll be notifying the insurers before we do anything, not that I can face the stress of anymore building work ever again!

You’re fine OP. My mum built an annexe in our garden, it didn’t occur to me to tell the insurer (no impact on/risk to our house). When I told insurer to get the annexe added to the policy, they cancelled the policy back to the date works started! 😩

This was 3pm and I had to find another insurer to cover the property, which I did but it was a stressful couple of hours.