Yes, eight years; that's how long we've owned our house. Here's today's story.
The picture above is during a nor'easter in 2004, when yes, we did have water in the house. Normally our first floor was safely above high tide.
Mark and I bought our house about Memorial Day 2000, almost eight years now. The people we bought it from neglected it terribly. In their 20? year tenure they did only the work absolutely necessary to keep it from falling into the bay, and that work was shoddily done with the most inferior materials. By the time we got involved, its life as a rental cash cow was over and it was empty and forlorn (at least the neighborhood stray cats had a place to hang.) Pardon the extended exposition but just one more thing-the house sits on pilings on the water, so if you need a mortgage flood insurance is mandatory. I'd have insurance even without a loan, though, it just makes sense.
So- a couple weeks ago we recieved a notice from our flood insurance company that our policy was cancelled effective MAY, 2007! WTF-they cancelled us a year ago and just getting around to informing us?!! Several days later, another interesting piece of mail-the insurance was now reinstated. Huh?!
Normally I am the one to take care of such matters, but Mark took pity on me and called our agent. It turns out that we were cancelled for excessive claims on our insurance! We have never filed a claim (although we could have) but there were so many paid claims on the place that FEMA decided we were too risky and cut us off!!!
Turns out that not only did the former owners derive retirement income from their careless and destructive tenants, they also drank from FEMA's well (aka taxpayers) at least once a year-but NEVER FIXED THE HOUSE!
This place was in such a deplorable state when we bought it (admittedly "as is") that clearly none of the flood insurance dollars were used to keep it habitable-I won't go into the machinations involved in convincing the AC powers-that-be to give us a CO.
The icing on the cake, though, is the fact that it took FEMA eight years to catch up and cancel the insurance-what a joke!
Below is evidence of what we did to hopefully ensure that we're safely above the water (and decrease our flood insurance premiums).
New pilings
Lifting
No comments:
Post a Comment