We have petplan insurance for both our dogs (the pedigree lab and a rescue lab cross - pics on my profile). When we got ddog2, I did shop round the other insurance providers, to see if we could get a better price for the two, but we concluded that Petplan were the best on offer.
Our lab puppy slept downstairs in her cage from the word go. The first night she did cry for an hour or so, and the second night for about 20 minutes, but after that she settled into her cage, went there happily at bedtime, and we had no more problems. We were advised not to go downstairs to her, as that would set up a pattern and she'd expect that sort of attention every night. Obviously there's more than one theory on this, as this thread shows - and I'm glad I didn't know that at the time ours was a pup - our approach worked for us, but it's up to you which one you choose. We have a cat, and wanted the upstairs to be mainly his territory, somewhere safe away from the puppy, which was why we didn't want to have her upstairs at first.
I meant to say earlier in the thread that our puppy very quickly came to look on the cage as her place. We had it tucked in under the stairs, so it felt secure for her - if we hadn't had that option, I might have put a blanket over all but the front of the cage, to create a little cave for her, as she seemed to like that. She always got a bonio at bedtime, which helped to endear the cage to her, I think.
We did transfer her into a bed when she was bigger and had settled down (and stopped chewing everything), and now both dogs have their beds next to eachother under the stairs.
The chewing was pretty bad for a while - luckily most of our furniture isn't expensive or precious. We did our best to distract her from chewing the furniture, but some toothmarks are inevitable, I think. There was a stage when she was chewing the bottom of the fence planks until she could get a good grip on them, and pulling them off - so she could get into nextdoor's garden, because they have a labradoodle who she loved desperately and wanted to spend all her time with. She also used to take any toys she got (and any slippers etc she nicked) to the fence, to offer them to the other dog - it was very sweet. She did grow out of this stage when she was about a year old. I have to admit that we probably weren't as strict about distracting her from chewing as we should have been.
Labs are very easy to train, because they are so food-motivated. One bit of advice our breeder gave us was to take some of the dog's dried food out of their allocation for the day, and use that as the training treats - that way they think they are getting a treat but aren't getting more calories than they need - let a lab eat all it wants and it turns into a furry barrel. Ours once got into the cupboard where we stored the big bag of dried food, and ate 4.5kg of it, before she had to go and be sick - at which point we saw what was going on, and stopped her from going back to finish off what was left.