Sunday, January 20, 2008

House update...plus an added bonus of some political talk

Before I get to the house update, maybe someone can help me out regarding the primary process we are going through. If the Iowa / N.H. thing is SO important that the candidates start campaigning there 6 months before, why are Fred and Rudy still considered viable candidates when to date, after even more primaries, they haven't won squat? Ron Paul has THREE times the delegates that Rudy has, but he is a "loony fringe" candidate. Are Fred and Rudy just putting all their hope on Super Tuesday? If they are, and that works, doesn't that make this whole 2 year-before- the-election-start-campaigning theory worthless? And how do these Senators do the peoples business when they spend all their time in diners, homes and schools in the middle of Iowa and N.H.? I didn't care for Bob Dole, but I respected him for resigning from the Senate before starting his campaign.....

As for the house update, the contractor FINALLY finished the insurance portion on Jan 4th. So almost 4 months!. It was very frustrating near the end trying to get them out to finish. We never knew when they show up, so I had to stay at home all day. I got cabin fever BIG time. And for the most part, the insurance company has been great. The only bone of contention we've had is over cleaning the house. Our understanding from talking to them in Oct. was that they would pay for a cleaning of the house once all the repairs were done and we could use the cleaning people that we normally use. They cleaned the house over 3 days- downstairs (except the kitchen) 1/2 a day; upstairs 1/2 a day; kitchen 1/2 a day. When we submitted the bill to the insurance company, they told us that they would only pay for 1 day of cleaning, not 3 - and that was what they had told us back in Oct. We argued that (1) it wasn't 3 days of cleaning, it was cleaning over 3 days and (2) the house hadn't been cleaned since the day of the event and it unrealistic to assume the house could be cleaned in "1 day". The claims person told C and 1 days was the policy and how long should it take to "clean up a little dust". THAT statement pissed us off. How do they know how messed up the house is/was? No one from the insurance company ever came out to the house after 9/21. They still haven't been out. We could have, and probably should have, left during some of the repairs, but we didn't. For a couple of weeks, we couldn't use the kitchen. We stayed with ripped up floors, no furniture downstairs. When they were drying out the house (which took 10 days), we didn't leave, even though with all the fans/dryers going 24/7, it was so loud you had to yell to talk to someone. I understand that many people try to rip off insurance companies - but not us. That being said, the process wasn't bad and from the horror stories I've heard from others about water claims, ours was (for the most part) pretty stress-free.

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