House Fire in Boddington Crescent

On Goes the Roof

Late in December 2005, the builders Niko Constructions, started putting on the roof. Finally the house starts to take on a feeling of coming together. The bricks are a rather unique high-density, double height sandstock brick that have a mild "handmade" appearance.

Re-do The Slab

As you can see this is a rather "odd" situation. The frame, newly completed, has been jacked up in preparation for the cutting out of the new slab. Yes, You read correctly. The "new" slab. The new bit is a 1.5 m extension to the west and a 1m extension to the east, adding an extra 12m2 to the house size. It seems that when the slab extension was poured it was faulty. The whole sordid tale goes something like this.

On Melbourne Cup Day (2 November 2005) a load of concrete was due to be delivered to the building site. According to my recollection the truck arrived late, got bogged and could not reach the building site before the concrete started to cure.

Rather than cancelling the load and writing-off the job, the concreter accepted the load and started to wheelbarrow the load in from the closest point to which the truck could get. When he realised that the concreter was curing faster than he could unload it, he called the Project Manager who pitched in and heroically helped barrow concrete into the formwork for the slab.

Unfortunately is was curing quicker than it could be poured and the slab extensions cured before they could be worked clear of air pockets and smoothed over. Fortunately, Meryl happened to be in the neighbourhood and inspected the work. It was so bad that it was obvious to a novice that it would not meet specification. I referred the matter to our independant certifier, who ordered work on the site halted and concrete samples taken for testing. The samples failed, not reaching the required 20mPa. Even after 1 month of curing, the samples reached only 14mPa!

We asked that the builder fixed the problem promptly , but the concrete supplier insisted on waiting a full month before they would reinstate the works. Eventually they came to the party so this photo, taken in December, shows.

Up goes the House Frame

On 5 November, the carpenters arrived to put up the house frame. In just three days they had managed to frame up the entire house. They started with a pile of timber (no prefab here), and sawed and hammered their way with deceptive ease. It was such a relief to see it all come together.

Furry Friends

These little girls are our new ratties. We got these from a local pet shop when they were only a few weeks old, barely weaned. These girls are very friendly, and companionable. They know who their owner is, and settle on her shoulder in preference to others. However, they will happily go to anyone, just for a change. Their names are (L-R) Ebony, Sophie and Hazel (because she is a nut!). They are posed on top of the Rat Hilton Hotel in which they live (a 300-litre capacity canary cage replete with walkways, hammocks and ropes).

Original House Plan

This pic is a scan of the plan of our original house

New House Plan

This pic is a scan of the plan for our new house.

Receiving H.E.L.P. When You Really Need It

After the last post, a friend wrote a short letter of encouragement to me and I replied with the following text (now abridged). Thanks for your inspiration!

You know, it is funny, but I never once thought that the insurance company was out to rip me off, but I continue to believe that it is just that the company has its own internal workings that are, accidentally or deliberately, opaque to the customer. There's an easy way to get what you need. You just have to discover it.

In our case, we had the expectation, (set by many years of watching the company's "We're here to [assist]" adverts), that we would be treated compassionately and with enough professional assistance to help us lodge, and successfully press, our claims against our policy. After all these guys do this stuff every day, they must see what happens to people like us, and understand our needs.

The reality, however, fell short of the rhetoric. Our assigned claims manager said that he had never processed a total-loss claim before, and while he behaved as though he were personally sympathetic and quite conciliatory on many matters, also seemed to be very overworked. His business card shows that he was one of a few responsible for claims in the entire SE corner of NSW, from the mid-west of the state, right down to the VIC-NSW border.

His inexperience led to him not giving us a new copy of our insurance policy to remind us of our rights and obligations for a very long time (we burned the original, after all). It took nearly 4 weeks before we even saw a claims kit (filled with handy information). It may not have done much good before that because I can tell you not a lot of information was staying in my head in the first two weeks, we were so shocked.

Suffice to say that eventually we did get our act together and used the information provided in our policy and claims kit to put together a cogent, conservative case. What was the real disappointment was that we had to be totally focussed and determined to receive the benefits of our claim. We mapped out a course of action to press our claim, and decided in advance the thresholds for escalation to higher authority, with the ultimate goal of seeking a decision by the Insurance Industry Ombudsman.

I guess they sensed our determination, and within the bounds of their internal workings, gave ground.

It was the fact that we had to be so steadfastly determined that gave me such bad feelings about dealing with the insurance company. We felt that we were just case URASK4MM3R, being processed by a hardworking person who was not being paid to care. It seemed too, that he was not being backed up by a supervisor who could help him make tricky judgement calls, timely decisions, or even encourage him to contact us regularly to inform us of the progress of our claim. It was truly exhausting emotionally, and at one time we even thought we might need the services of a solicitor (ugh)! Thankfully, we just took stock of our situation, planned and executed that plan.

But seriously, what else could we have expected? I think that I will write to their public affairs office, maybe I can H.E.L.P. them improve their service focus.

Have you had a bad experience with an insurance company? Leave a comment.

A New Beginning

Well, as you can see from the notes below, we have, at last, made a fresh start on rebuilding our house. In the intervening FIVE (yes 5) months, we have:
a) been getting our collective heads straight, while we shelter in temporary accommodation;
b) figuring out how to get money OUT of an insurance company. (Luckily for me I have seen "The Incredibles" many times and picked up a few pointers), and;
c) figuring out what kind of house we would like to rebuild.

The temporary accommodation we are staying in is the kind of place we lived in while we were students. In other words, basic, honest accommodation. It is a much smaller house than we had, so we fill this place to the gunwales even with our meager collection of stuff.

Mind you, at this point it isn't so meager. We have managed to wheel and deal a nice collection of whitegoods at a reasonable discount, but probably not as good as the one you could have negotiated! :-)

The insurance company was able to pay us out completely on our contents insurance, as we turned out to be about $50k underinsured on contents. The payout was way more than strictly necessary, because most of the underinsurance was in the area of "Wiggles" audio cassettes, "Bananas-in-Pyjamas" videos, and about $30k of "Barbie" dolls. Most of these qualified for some kind of "disabled" dolls house because most were missing some appendage or other.

Admittedly, all my old Apple II stuff went up in smoke too. I just hadn't the heart to toss it all when I upgraded to Macs. Having it go up in smoke was not inappropriate and very... hmmm... cleansing. No trip to the dump for me!

In contrast, the house building was overinsured, which meant that the insurance company was intending to repair (rather than replace) our house for some $40k short of its insured value. We were more than a little shocked at this because our expert advice was that entire sections of brick wall would have to be replaced. This would, in turn, mean that the replaced sections would never ever match the existing bricks. The tumbled-bricks that the house was originally constructed from, made even rendering an impossibility. Who would want to live in a patchwork house? Certainly this was probably the biggest concern that we had. The other concern that we had was that all the houses that we saw that were repaired, rather than reconstructed, after the Jan 2003 bushfires had some issues of quality with the repairs not quite blending in with the pre-existing house. This would mean a huge loss of value, one that we did not want to tolerate.

We researched all our options and put a conservative case to the insurance company to pay us an extra $19k to cover the extra work to replace all the walls and other matters. After a month of it kicking around with our claim manager, we decided to ask for a management review with a view to getting a decision, one way or another. Surprisingly, it only took 10 days for the company to rule in our favour. It was like a weight was lifted from our shoulders. All at once we could actually afford to replace the house entirely!

It took another 10 days before we got official confirmation, but by 30 September 2005 we had the money in the bank, a new house design, and a builder to take on the job of building our new home. For those familiar with our old place, we are basically doing 3 things differently this time. We are moving our master bedroom, ensuite and walk-in-robe to where my office was (NE Corner), moving the laundry into the main entry corridor (hidden behind two bi-fold doors), and putting my office in where our master bedroom was and creating a fifth bedroom in the space vacated by the laundry, ensuite and walk-in robe. (OK, that's four things) The living space of the house will also increase slightly to 225 sqm.

I will soon post a scan of our new house plans. Stay tuned to this blog.

Anyway the posts below are from the first day of demolition. We expect it to take about 18 more weeks before we can move in, so hopefully you will enjoy lots of postings as our new house slowly takes shape from the ashes of our old one.

Cheers, Michael