Can you live in the house during an insurance repair?

This is the question I get asked earliest and answer least confidently on a first visit, because it does not depend on the damage as much as people expect. It depends on which rooms are affected and what else in the house relies on them.

Most of the repairs I do happen with the family still in the house. It is noisier and dustier than anyone wants, and it works. The cases where I say move out are specific, and they are usually about plumbing rather than about mess.

Start with what you cannot do without

Work through the house in this order, because it is the order that decides the answer.

• Bathrooms. One working bathroom that is not in the work zone and you are fine. If the damaged bathroom is the only one, staying gets hard quickly.
• The kitchen. You can live a long time on a kettle, a microwave and a bar fridge in the dining room. People do it through kitchen renovations by choice.
• Sleeping. A bedroom you can close a door on, away from the dust, is enough.
• Heat and hot water. If the mechanical room is in the work zone, there may be days without one or both, and in January that is not a small thing.
• The way in. Repairs to an entry, a stair or a hallway can mean the route through the house changes for a while.

If a bathroom, a bed and a way to make coffee survive, staying is usually the easier choice. It also tends to be better for the work, because small questions get answered the same day instead of over email.

What controlling the dust actually involves

Containment is the difference between living in a house with a repair in it and living in a repair. It is not complicated and it is not free, which is why it is worth checking that it is in the scope.

In practice it means sealing the work zone off with poly and a zipped door rather than hanging a sheet over an opening, covering the floors along the route we walk, taping off the return air vents in the work area so the furnace stops distributing dust through the whole house, and running an air scrubber while cutting.

That last one matters more than people think. A forced air system will take drywall dust from one open wall and put a fine grey film on every surface two floors away. Closing the vents in the work zone solves most of it.

Sequencing around the people in the house

When somebody is living in the house, the order of the work changes. I would rather get the messy, loud, unavoidable part done in one concentrated block than spread it thinly across three weeks.

So demolition and cutting get grouped. If a second bathroom is going to be touched, it gets done and returned to service before the main one is opened. If the kitchen is coming out, the temporary setup goes in first rather than after. None of that is complicated, but it only happens if somebody plans for it, and it is the main practical reason to tell a contractor early that you intend to stay.

Nobody minds a loud week. What wears people down is four quiet weeks of not knowing which room they get back next.

Where your furniture goes

Contents are the part people forget until the morning the work starts. Everything in the work zone has to go somewhere, and if the plan is a pile in the next room, the next room is now unusable too.

On a small repair, a garage or a basement usually absorbs it. On anything larger it is worth asking whether moving and storing contents is in the scope, because it often is, and a container in the driveway for a few weeks is a great deal less disruptive than losing two more rooms to storage.

The things worth separating out yourself are the ones that are hard to replace and easy to damage: anything of sentimental value, documents, electronics, and whatever the children will ask for by Thursday. Put those somewhere that is not part of the job at all.

Pets

Doors get propped open, trades come and go, and a cat that has never gone outside in its life will take the chance. If you have a pet that bolts, tell me, and we keep it to one entry and keep that door shut. I would rather work around a closed bedroom door than spend an evening helping look for a cat.

When I tell people to go

There are a handful of situations where staying is the wrong call and I will say so on the first visit.

• The only bathroom is in the work zone and the plumbing has to come out.
• The damage is structural enough that floors or stairs are coming up and the route through the house is genuinely unsafe.
• The work spans most of the ground floor at once, so there is nowhere to seal off and nowhere to retreat to.
• Somebody in the house has a respiratory condition and the demolition is extensive.

Your policy may cover somewhere to stay while that is true. Whether it does, and what it covers, is a question for your adjuster rather than for me, and it is worth asking before you book anything rather than after.

What to ask before the work starts

Ask which rooms are unusable and in what weeks. Ask whether containment and floor protection are in the scope, because if they are not in the estimate they often do not happen. Ask which days the water or the power will be off. Ask who is coming and when, so you are not waiting in all day for a trade that was never due.

A contractor who cannot answer those on the first visit is not necessarily a bad contractor, but they have not thought about you living there yet, and that is worth knowing now.

Whether any of this is paid for comes back to what was written down at the start, which is why I would read the scope of loss carefully before agreeing to it. What I rebuild is on the home renovation page, and if you want to know which rooms you would actually lose, tell me what happened and I will walk you through it.