When me and my wife were purchasing our first home, we had everyone from mortgage people to realtors to our own friends and family that owned homes tell us to never use our home insurance unless it was something truly catastrophic.

Currently our home insurance deductible is $10k. The logic is that anything less than that we can pay ourselves. Home insurance is only there to cover either catastrophic damage or really, a total loss.

We 'pruned' our coverage and put the savings into an account labeled 'self-insurance'.