Review Your Home/Apartment Homeowners Insurance / Don’t Let This Happen To You
About a month ago I had just completed a Virtual Tour for my mother as a sample for her friends, family and Real Estate Agents.
My mother had just purchased a condo that was totally renovated and had lived there less than six months. About two weeks ago she returned home from work around 11:00 p.m. and opened her front door to six inches of standing and running water throughout her new renovated condo. Needless to say she was frantic and upset and called the fire department. They came and shut the water valve off. Around 12:00 midnight, a water restoration company arrived and started extracting all the water. They set up about 20 fans and humidifiers to extract any moisture and remaining water. After 5 days of running fans for 24 hours, all the flooring and baseboards had to be torn out and furniture had to be moved into a pod. Needless to say, the condo was gutted out.
The cause of the water damage was a water hose that busted on the wash machine. She didn’t have the washer running when she was at work. A total fluke accident.
After insurance appraisals, total loss was about $16,000. Her home owner’s insurance had coverage for $10,000. She had to come up with the remainder of $6,000 on her own for flooring, carpet and miscellaneous items.
The water restoration company charged her $8,000 for the emergency service and all the equipment, running 24 hours for five days and for moving furniture into a pod. Luckily, the furniture didn’t receive any damage.
Lesson here is make sure you have enough home owners’ coverage for accidents like this. This can happen anytime even if you don’t have the wash machine running. Also check your hoses on washer. Plumber mentioned that one should change hoses every two years and spend the extra $20-$30 for steel or better quality hoses than the flimsy rubber hoses. Also, if you know you are leaving town, turn your water off. Not a bad idea to have a virtual tour of your home’s contents in case you need it for insurance purposes of what could have been damaged.
More people choose www.realtourvision.com virtual tour company than any other virtual tour provider on the market.
Brenda Stewart
Accents Virtual Tours, LLC
http://www.accentsvirtualtours.com
Peachtree City/Atlanta GA