Basically, I want to know how exactly renter’s insurance would apply in a situation such as this. My landlord decided suddenly that she wanted to replace the carpets in my apartment, and I reluctantly agreed to let her. As a result of a number of factors, the people installing the carpet ended up damaging several pieces of furniture and some relatively expensive festival tickets are now missing. My landlord gave me the typical runaround, saying that stuff was already damaged and that I should just file a claim with my renter’s insurance… basically telling me to shove it and make someone else deal with it.
However, the total cost of the damage is probably <$300, and I was under the impression that a deductible for renter’s insurance would be higher than that anyway, not to mention the fact that it seems to me that she should deal with this problem in the first place. Needless to say I probably should have gotten renter’s insurance, but am I wrong in thinking that she should be the one to cover the damage caused by a service that she shoved into my house?
Unless you bought insurance from Joe’s Incredible Insurance Barn, any decent carrier would deal with this. That’s (basically) how renter’s insurance works: “My personal property was here / not broken, and now it isn’t because something outside of my control happened.”
Of course, the insurance carrier is most likely going to harass the landlord or carpet company’s insurance carrier for the actual payout, but the actual renter isn’t.
It isn’t unheard of to have a low or zero deductible policy, especially on renters insurance, because it tends to be ridiculously cheap to begin with.
But in any case, having the landlady summoned to small claims court is probably all it would take to get the problem resolved.