Drive through Rockville, Kensington, Silver Spring or Wheaton on a Saturday and you'll pass a dumpster in a driveway every other block. Montgomery County's housing stock is mostly mid-century — ramblers, split-levels and colonials built between the 1950s and the 1970s — and much of it is being opened up and added onto rather than torn down. Kitchens get gutted. Basements become in-law suites.

What almost nobody does before the first sledgehammer swing is call their insurance agent. And that is the moment when a renovation quietly becomes the most under-insured period in the entire life of the house: the property is worth more, more people have keys to it, and the policy still describes the home you had last year.

Here are the six gaps worth closing before work starts.

1. The Vacancy Clause Nobody Reads

If your project is big enough that you move out — a whole-house gut, a second-story addition, an extended kitchen job — you may trip a provision buried in your homeowners policy called the vacancy clause.

Most standard Maryland HO-3 policies reduce or suspend certain coverages once the home has been vacant for a defined stretch, commonly 60 days. The coverages that typically fall away first are exactly the ones an empty construction site is most exposed to: vandalism and malicious mischief, theft, glass breakage, and water damage. A pipe that lets go in an empty house in February can run for a week before anyone notices, and the denial letter will cite a clause the homeowner never knew existed.

The fix is straightforward and cheap: ask for a vacancy permit endorsement before you move out. It keeps the policy responsive for the duration of the project. It has to be added in advance — it is not something that can be applied retroactively after a loss.

The one-sentence version: tell your agent the house will be empty before it is empty, because the coverages that disappear are the ones an empty job site actually needs.

2. Materials and Work in Progress Are Not "Your Home"

Homeowners insurance covers your dwelling. It covers a half-built dwelling poorly, and the pile of cabinets, lumber and appliances waiting in the garage barely at all.

For anything beyond cosmetic work, the right instrument is a builders risk policy, sometimes called course-of-construction coverage. It insures the structure while it is being built and the materials intended to become part of it, including theft of materials from the site — a real and rising problem on unattended residential projects along the I-270 corridor.

Terrapin places builders risk through US Assure, one of the carriers we're appointed with, and it's usually written for the length of the project rather than a full year. The two questions worth asking up front are who is responsible for buying it — you or your general contractor — and whether the limit reflects the completed value of the work, not just the receipts to date. Our builders risk overview walks through how the policy is structured.

3. Your Contractor's Insurance Is Your Problem Too

This is the gap that turns into the largest claims, and it's the easiest one to check.

Every contractor who sets foot on your property should hand over a certificate of insurance showing two things: general liability, and Maryland workers compensation. General liability responds if the contractor damages your home or a neighbor's. Workers comp responds if someone on the crew gets hurt.

If a worker is injured on your property and the contractor carries no workers compensation, that injury has a way of finding its homeowners liability coverage — yours. Homeowners policies are not designed to function as a construction company's workers comp, and the limits were never priced for it. Maryland has an active enforcement posture on comp coverage, and Chesapeake Employers is the state's largest writer of it; if a contractor tells you they "don't need" comp because everyone is a subcontractor, treat that as the warning it is.

Three practical rules:

4. You Are About to Be Underinsured on Purpose

Coverage A — the dwelling limit — does not update itself when you add square footage. Finish 900 feet of basement, add a bathroom and a bedroom, and the cost to rebuild your house goes up materially while the limit on the declarations page sits exactly where it was.

That matters at total loss, obviously. But it also matters at partial loss, because many policies require you to insure to a stated percentage of full rebuild cost. Fall below it and the settlement on an ordinary kitchen fire gets proportionally reduced.

Have the replacement cost re-rated when the project is done. In the higher-value pockets of the county — Bethesda, Potomac, Chevy Chase — a substantial renovation can also push a home past the point where a standard carrier is the right fit and into high-net-worth territory, where Chubb writes true guaranteed replacement cost and covers custom finishes at what they actually cost to reproduce.

5. Ordinance or Law: The Old-House Surcharge

Here is the one that specifically bites Montgomery County.

When a home built in 1962 suffers a covered loss, you don't get to rebuild it to 1962 code. You rebuild to current code — which may mean new egress windows, updated electrical service, insulation standards, sprinklers in some jurisdictions, and an accessible path where none existed. A standard policy pays to replace what was there. Ordinance or law coverage pays the additional cost of complying with the code that applies today.

Most of Rockville, Kensington, Silver Spring and Wheaton predates 1980. If you're renovating an older home, you're also proving that its systems are original — and a renovation is the natural moment to add or increase this coverage. Our post on insuring older Rockville homes covers the knob-and-tube, fuse-panel and galvanized-plumbing questions carriers ask.

6. Permits, and Why Adjusters Look Them Up

Montgomery County permit records are public. So are Rockville's and Gaithersburg's.

An adjuster investigating an electrical fire or a structural failure can and sometimes does check whether the work was permitted and inspected. Unpermitted structural, electrical or plumbing work is one of the more common reasons a claim gets reduced or denied outright — not because the policy excludes "unpermitted work" by name, but because the resulting loss traces back to work that was never inspected.

Pulling permits is slower and occasionally maddening. It's also the cheapest claim insurance you'll buy on the whole project.

One More Thing: The Liability Side

During a renovation your property sees more foot traffic, open excavation, ladders and materials than at any other time. Neighbors' kids included.

Maryland is one of the last states to apply pure contributory negligence, which cuts both ways: if an injured party is even slightly at fault they generally recover nothing, but if a jury finds they were not, your exposure is uncapped. A personal umbrella policy sits above the homeowners liability limit and is inexpensive relative to what it does. A renovation is a good moment to add one.

A Checklist Before Demolition Day

  1. Call your agent before work starts and describe the scope, the timeline, and whether you'll be living there.
  2. Add a vacancy permit endorsement if the house will be empty for more than a few weeks.
  3. Settle who buys builders risk — you or the GC — and confirm the limit reflects completed value.
  4. Collect certificates of insurance for general liability and Maryland workers comp from every contractor, direct from their agency.
  5. Pull the permits. All of them.
  6. Re-rate the dwelling limit when you finish, and ask about ordinance or law coverage while you're at it.

The Bottom Line

A renovation is one of the few moments when a homeowner voluntarily increases the value of the asset, empties it out, and hands keys to strangers — all at once. The policy that was correctly written for the house you bought is, for a few months, describing something that no longer exists.

None of the six fixes above is expensive. Most are endorsements or a phone call. The cost of skipping them shows up only once, at the worst possible time, in a letter that starts "we have completed our investigation."

If you're starting a project in Montgomery County, we're an independent agency in Rockville and can look at the whole picture — homeowners, builders risk, umbrella — across the carriers we represent rather than one company's shelf. It's a fifteen-minute conversation that's worth having before the dumpster arrives.