Daughter lives in a top (2nd) floor flat ina converted Victorian place.
She's Having a new kitchen fitted at the moment and is living with us.
This weekend we'd piled up to B'ham for other daugther's birthdy and this morning I got a call from the flat property management people (- I'm emergency backup contact - and daughter's phone being OOS) that there was water leaking through a ground floor ceiling, and she was considered the likely culprit as she has the builders in.
Anyway we dashed back and long story short - it's not her flat, it's one of the 1st floor ones.
So we were discussing insurance. She has contents and in her service charge there is house insurance.
If the leak had been hers and damage caused to other flats, which insurance would have paid? Or is she missing an insurance?
|
Ground floor insurer would pay even if different insurer of contents.
In a managed block of flats the insurance is normally a block policy paid through service charge
|
|
And I thought Smokie was going set this one to music.
|
This thread is giving me dreadful flashbacks to the Grove, water seeping through party walls, ceilings coming down on the bed - fortunately unoccupied because that was some heavyish rubble - and other problems. The next door house was some sort of charity for unwed junkie mothers.
Actually their sleepless all-night lifestyle and native intelligence saved our bacon when some toerag arsoned us with a bottle of petrol through the basement window late on Christmas eve. We weren't aware of having any enemies and the crime went unclaimed. (Standing in the torched front basement room with a local CID man the next day, yes Christmas day, I had to go to London for that) he got the shivers in there and asked politely if we could go into some other room. You could see where the ceiling paper had started to peel off and catch fire for real. Perhaps it had reminded him of some frightful day at work.
The sleepless junkie mums dialled 999 and the fire brigade charged out of its kennel just a couple of hundred yards up the road and put the fire out quickly, although messily.
I took that fire brigade watch a bottle of nice malt whisky.
No culprit was ever identified, but suspicion fell heavily on some idiot toerag's girl friend, a very unprepossessing woman.
Don't get me started on closing leaks in lead pipes with a judicious glancing hammer-blow, leading to further leaks and cracks until, well really, things get beyond a joke and you have to pay for new steel and plastic pipes. Even a bloke doing a big fat wipe joint only gave temporary respite.
|
Gaff looked like Redcliffe Square to me.
I remember those houses divided into flats too, sometimes with shared bathrooms and other potential bones of contention. Lived and stayed in a good few of them. It was an interesting time.
|
I enjoyed that. Some memories of those times still lodged in my brain somewhere....the heavily nicotine stained finger of the rent-payer...seems every working man and woman was like that. Me ole mam certainly was......his teeth, like Timothy Winters...teeth like splinters.
The aging dance teacher living on memories with her one young pupil...not very good ! The short show they put on where Helen May danced a piece she danced on Broadway in 1920.......she could hardly balance.
Like so many of the big Victorian houses all over the land fallen into disrepair, time expired and waiting for the bulldozer...........................sadly!
|
>> big Victorian houses all over the land fallen into disrepair, time expired and waiting for the bulldozer.................
Perhaps, but I doubt it really. Are we deep down that philistine and money-grubbing? Not everyone may have noticed what a bunch of capitalist Stakhanovites the Victorians were, but I certainly have. They have left us with a Victorian country, a great privilege it seems to me.
I lived for a while in a basement pad in Redcliffe Square. Not all that nice, dead pigeons coming down the airshaft.
|
>> >> big Victorian houses all over the land
Pondering further on this, I note that vast areas of Victorian urban Britain don't have big imposing gaffs like the ones in Redcliffe Square, but small working-class terrace houses sometimes very closely ranked.
The majority indeed. But all those industrial towns had a sour bourgeois suburb for managers and owners and the like.
We are fortunate to live amid industrial history. It reminds us of who we are.
|
>> No culprit was ever identified, but suspicion fell heavily on some idiot toerag's girl friend, a very unprepossessing woman.
You can sublet a flat to reliable friends, or even stretching a point friends of friends. But when it comes to friends of friends of friends and even further afield, things can get very pear shaped without anyone noticing until it's too late.
Believe me if you like. I've been there.
|
>> So we were discussing insurance. She has contents and in her service charge there is
>> house insurance.
If the workman had caused it, their indemnity insurance would have paid. If it wasn't the builders, and there is one house insurance (that she is contributing to) that would have paid.
No she isn't missing insurance
|
|
Ta, that was what was bothering me...
|
House insurance in a flat - Falkirk Bairn
