F-DAY PLUS 12
2026-02-25
It's now twelve days since a flood struck my house, causing the ground floor
to be submerged under a couple of feet of water and ultimately leading us to
kick off an insurance claim process.
IMG A home office with its floor stripped down to poured concrete and an industrial dehumidifier running.
And man, a home insurance claim seems to be... slow. For instance, we
originally couldn't even get anybody out to visit us until F-day plus 10
(later improved to F-day plus 7). The insurance company can't promise that
they'll confirm that they'll "accept liability" (agree to start paying for
anything) until possibly as late as F-day plus 17. Nobody will check for
structural damage until F-day plus 19 (I'm totally committed to this way of
counting the progress, which I started on F-day plus 3. I get the feeling like
it might be a worthwhile way of keeping track of how long all of this takes.).
Oh, and the insurance company have advised us to look for something like a "12
month let with a 6 month break clause", which is horrifying. We could be out
of our home for up to a year.
IMG Dan, a white man, stands with his arms raised outside a nicely-decorated converted barn.
Some days it feels like being stuck in a nowhere-place... but simultaneously
still having to make the regular everyday stuff keep ticking over. Visiting
the house- currently stripped of anything damp and full of drying equipment -
feels like stepping onto another planet... or like one of those dreams where
you're somewhere familiar except it's wrong somehow.
But spending time away from it, "as if" on holiday except-not, is weird too:
like we're accepting the ambiguity; leaning-in to limbo. Especially while
we're waiting for the insurance company to do their initial things, it feels
like life is both on hold, and not-allowed to be on hold.
IMG A nervous-looking French Bulldog in a teal jumper looks up from under a desk.
And I worry that by the time they're committed to paying for us to stay
somewhere else for at least half a year, they lose any incentive they might
have to contract for speed. There's no hurry any more. We're expected to just
press pause on our home, but carry on with our lives regardless, pretending
that everything's normal.
So yeah, it's a weird time.
LINKS
HTML My blog post announcing that we'd flooded
HTML My blog post three days after the flood, sharing photos of the disaster
HTML My blog post about meeting with the insurance company and being told to plan on a 6-12 month let elsewhere