About a week ago a friend of Dee Williams, Kim Langston had her nearly completed tiny house burn down. Dee wrote to the tiny house blogging community to see if we could help in any way and to let you know about it.
Dee says: The house was in the construction phase, and while it wasn’t quite complete, it was close enough that she felt certain she’d be living in it by September or October. It was completely destroyed in the fire and Kim didn’t have insurance to cover the loss.
Dee continues: I’ve been so racked by this incident, it is so sad. And its brought up a couple of things for me: one is that I’d like to learn more about what sort of insurance options are out there for little hand-built structures. Houses on wheels or built on the ground. I’ve done some searching and it seems there may be some tools but the loopholes are intense; you aren’t insured, for example, if the structure is on the highway or not insured if you don’t personally own the property where it sits.
If you have insurance, or have heard of an option for these structures, could you please contact me at PAD.DeeWilliams@gmail.com. Once I have information pulled together, I’ll offer it back to our tiny house community so we can all understand what’s available. If we discover that traditional insurance is not available, it may be time to start our own Cooperative such as an organization that will help cover catastrophic loss.
Dee also told us that Kim and her friends are pulling together a Kickstarter or Indigogo fund that will help her pay down the debt she incurred through the fire and maybe even help support the dream of re-building.
If you’d like to help Kim get a jump on those fund raising efforts you can donate money through PayPal. I personally am going to donate and will also report on the official fund raising story when that kicks off.
A lot of you have been asking what caused the fire? I have just found out it was a barn fire behind where the tiny house was being constructed.
Here is a photo of the home before the fire.