Home insurance has two big drawers: buildings and contents – and most misunderstandings come from something landing in a different drawer than you'd expect. The TV is contents, a fitted wardrobe typically counts as part of the building, and a bike stored in the garage depends on what the policy wording says. This article is the map of those two drawers.
- Buildings: the structure and everything permanently built in to serve the home – typically flooring and wall finishes, doors and windows, fitted furniture, and fixed building services.
- Contents: anything you could 'carry out' – furniture, clothes, appliances, sports gear, books; high-value items (jewellery, cash, artwork) typically carry their own separate limit.
- Both pillars have their own sum insured – at claim time, what matters is whether the sum insured was enough in the drawer where the DAMAGED item actually belongs.
What belongs to the building?
Buildings cover protects the walls, floor slabs, roof, doors and windows, and everything permanently built in: flooring and wall finishes, a fitted kitchen and wardrobes, the boiler, radiators, a fixed air conditioner, shutters, solar panels. Outbuildings and structures – garage, shed, fence, terrace – typically belong here too, if they're listed in the policy. The exact scope is set out in the policy's "insured property" chapter; we cover building-type questions in our panel, brick, adobe article.
The building's sum insured needs to reflect the true rebuilding cost – not the market price, and not a value set years ago.
What belongs to contents?
Contents means everything that isn't built in: furniture, appliances, electronics, clothing, kitchenware, books, toys, sports equipment. Added up room by room, the total value is usually surprisingly high – experience shows it's well above most people's first guess. That's why I built a room-by-room home inventory template: it gives you a realistic figure in about fifteen minutes.
High-value items – jewellery, watches, cash, artwork, collections, expensive electronics – typically settle under separate limits, and some policies attach their own storage or security requirements to them. Cover for things kept in the garage, a shed or the garden depends on the policy wording – which is exactly the kind of question worth clarifying before you sign, not after.
Why size the two separately?
Because at claim time the insurer looks at the sums insured drawer by drawer. If the building is properly insured but the contents sum is only half its real value, a burglary or fire claim on contents can also be cut in half under the proportional settlement rule – no matter how "large" the policy looked overall. The two pillars are two separate decisions: we match both to reality, and revisit both when it's warranted.
The most common borderline cases
A few recurring questions from practice: a fitted kitchen typically counts as part of the building, but the dishwasher inside it is contents; a fixed air conditioner is typically part of the building, a portable unit is contents; a tenant's own belongings are the tenant's contents – the owner's policy typically doesn't cover them (details in tenant or owner); and anything outside the walls of a flat in a shared building falls under the shared building's own policy (the boundary explained here). If it's unclear which drawer an item belongs in, the policy wording has the final word – worth clarifying before you sign, not at claim time.
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