Home insurance for extended trips.

Yes, I was going to suggest that you should check anyway, but my laptop went crazy mid-post!

We do have high sums insured as we are still in the home we had built 28 years back, which has an integral "granny flat", so quite large and 2 sets of everything.

Still.......we decided the extra cost of staying in the house we designed and had built was minimal compared to the cost of moving!!

Just to clarify,The Caravan Club's home insurance policy gives 90 days unoccupancy cover as standard.  If this needs to be extended, there are certain requirements from insurers which need to be fulfilled in order for the cover to continue.   

Can you clarify further please? Does the 90 days refer to per year of cover, or per trip?

The policy states 90 consecutive days per trip.

Jean, the CC policy is good as was our on-line quote, but the huge hike in premium when OH rang regarding our property being timber frame with brick outer skin, made it very expensive.

Timber frame is a very common construction method in Scotland for properties built in the last  50 years, so you are cutting out quite a fair number of potential customers.

We have never had this problem before.

I will speak to our insurers about this and come back to you,

Jean has now spoken to the insurers and explained to me that timber frame construction is regarded as being more of a fire risk than "traditional" construction.

For anyone not familiar with modern timber frame, the house has an inner  timber structural frame which takes the weight of the floors and roof, the outer walls are consrtucted of facing brick or brick/block with a cement render.

From outside, and indeed inside, these houses look just like a so called "traditional" house, and comply with all the Building Regulations (which are actually stricter in Scotland than in England) including fire protection.

Inside walls are of fire resistant plasterboard.  Floors and roof are of the same construction as other moden houses.

When a house burns, it is the contents, the timber floors and the roof that goes first due to the "chimney effect", so little difference in that respect between different construction methods.

I suspect that for "timber frame" some insurers are reading "timber house".