When the family-owned manufacturing company in southern Ontario tallied the cost of rebuilding its automated packaging line following the fire that gutted 8,000 square feet of its 45,000-square-foot production facility, the figure that emerged was $2.8 million. That number represented the price, confirmed through quotations from 2 industrial equipment suppliers, to engineer, fabricate, deliver, and commission a modern packaging system capable of matching the throughput and product specifications the destroyed line had delivered before the loss. The insurer's adjuster, reviewing the same invoices and engineering assessments, did not dispute the arithmetic. What the adjuster did dispute, and what transforms this claim into a textbook study of valuation wording, was the premise that a $2.8 million modern system qualified as replacement cost within the meaning of the policy. The packaging line that burned had been installed 3 years earlier for $2.8 million, yet the equipment itself was a purpose-built assembly of refurbished machinery with a 1970s original manufacture date, components the insured had painstakingly restored over 15 years of refurbishment to integrate with contemporary controls. Whether $2.8 million measures the loss depends entirely on how the replacement cost clause is construed, a question this lesson addresses through close analysis of standard policy wording, the statutory overlay that governs Ontario property insurance contracts, and the particular facts that complicate any straightforward reading.