Brace for impact – this is a long one.
FH and I live in a very expensive area where we cannot afford to buy (think New York pricing). My dad has an apartment which we ‘rent’ (we pay the mortgage off) and I will some day inherit. It is, at least for the foreseeable future, our ‘forever home’ unless we somehow can afford to buy a bigger apartment.
The apartment was leased for the last ten years and we recently moved in earlier this year. It became apparent upon moving in that we would need to renovate; there is serious water damage in the walls of the spare bedroom (our eventual baby room), the bathroom cabinetry is falling apart due to water rot, the floors are lifting due to water damage, etc. I told FH we would need to do extensive renovations before we have children and he said he didn’t want to renovate until at least 2022. For context – FH is OCD and has anxiety issues from moving around a lot as a kid, so he wasn’t thrilled that we would need to move in with my parents while renovating (unavoidable with the extent of the renovations we’d be doing).
Anyhow, we recently lodged an insurance claim for our floors. Although we weren’t going to change them until 2022, for insurance purposes we’d be at risk of not being able to claim (or having our claim reduced) if we didn’t claim soon after noticing the damage. Insurance will cover the cost of replacing our floors but we need to replace our floors in the next few months at risk of the damage worsening or mold developing. Because floors need to be done last, we need have a need to bring forward our renovations to start in January.
FH is pretty annoyed that we are going to be renovating soon and he finds it ‘convenient’ that this need to renovate sooner rather than later has come up. The way I see it, is while I could’ve held off from renovating until 2022, if we don’t do it soon, we can’t recover from insurance and will be out of pocket the $12,000 that insurance would otherwise pay us to cover the cost of the floor replacement.
I completely understand FH’s annoyance given how serious moving homes is for him due to his anxiety and OCD but I am frustrated that he isn’t on board with these renovations. He keeps saying how the apartment isn’t in as bad condition as I say, but given we have water damage, the way I see it is we might as well do everything at once.
Anyone else been through this?
