Beginner Gardening: Bought the farm and a $64,000 chicken coop. LOL, 0 by Equilibrium

Equilibrium wrote:
Oh good morning to everyone! This thread has me giggling.

If you don't want to tear it down right away, I believe the way around having to do so might be to respectfully request of your insurance carrier to exclude the structure from the policy and do so in writing. The underwriters at the company might be able to add a restrictive endorsement listing this structure and that's it. It's done all the time where I come from. And if you tear it down and remove it, they remove the restrictive endorsement.

Me and my kids would get a bang out of taking a sledge hammer to a structure like yours (or like ours) and an even bigger bang burning it... they are all pyros here.

The one problem is the chickens. Seems to me as if it would be nice to have a place for the chickens that is out of the elements where you can lock them up at night until you get around to building a new coop. It's a convenience thing. There's nothing wrong with that structure for now and it buys you time.

We have a structure excluded right now on a summer property. I'll go and try to find a photo of it and post if for you. My photo will make your photo look like a mighty find chicken coop. The kids like ours though. The insurance company found it and told us to tear it down unless we had a structural engineer approve it. How insulting but I was polite and told her that no P.E. would ever certify such a structure and that it was silly of her to even suggest such a thing. She indicated she was just offering up a possible solution and otherwise it would have to go. Guess what, my husband is a structural engineer and he about bust a gut over that one. His solution, move it to where they couldn't see it so the kids could use it which is what we did. We enlisted the help of neighbors and had a tractor drag it on its side up a little hill so it could be a "look out" for the kids. We then told the insurance company it was no longer a concern to them and they could come and take a look. They came it was gone but... then they spotted it up on the little hill. Can we say busted. That was when I told them it wasn't a concern to them and to add an exclusion to our policy or we were changing insurance carriers. About 10 days later we received the exclusion, signed it, and returned it in the provided envelope.

We changed insurance companies to Farmers Insurance Group this year and the agent laughed about the situation. We now have a policy that is not excluding the structure but were told the deductible we had would preclude us from ever claiming it anyway. Touche!