Does my home insurance cover renovations?
Yes and no. When you begin renovating your Nettleton, MS home, you need to obtain construction insurance from Sprout Insurance to cover the changes in effect and the added liability of the workers completing the task.
Once the workers finish your renovations, you need to update your home insurance. When you purchased your homeowners’ insurance, you bought the policy predicated on your home as purchased. Once you change anything to upgrade it, you make your home more valuable. That means you need to update your home policy to cover its increased value.
If you read your homeowners’ insurance policy carefully, you’ll note that it insures your home for a specified value, even though it may not express it in a dollar and cents figure, such as $250,000. Look for language that describes the insured value in replacement terms. These include:
- appraised value,
- market value,
- assessed value,
- replacement value,
- agreed value
- actual cash value.
Unless you apprise your insurance agent of the changes to your home, they have no documentation of its value beyond the original one from when you purchased the policy. The most commonly used valuation method in home insurance, replacement value, is based on existing information.
Your existing policy doesn’t cover your updates to your home until you update it. The same is true of big-ticket items you purchase that you don’t add to your home inventory filed with the insurance agency.
Contact Sprout Insurance serving Nettleton, MS for more information or to talk about your planned renovations. We’ll help you add construction coverage to your policy package, then update your home insurance when the work crews finish your home renovation.
