Protecting all your work – experience, insurance and questions

A more wordy entry than normal – how do you protect or insure your models, paint jobs, artwork, verbiage and other precious things ?

As noted earlier, I’m a bit distracted currently with a building insurance claim (and also as of yesterday an insurance claim issue at the village hall). The boiler is now at least working:

However, the surveyor came back with a builder in tow…and today I got the list of repairs:

Three pages of stuff to do (Excel, landscape). And yes, the kitchen (the location of my games) and downstairs loo as well as the utility room floors are all going to be ripped up and re-tiled. So major upheaval next month and the cats will treat me as person non grata…

So what has this got to do with little toy soldiers ?

I’ve jokingly commented before to friends that we should be insuring our toys as separate items on our contents insurance policies.

With an entire room (and more) currently filled with figures, scenery and accessories it would take me tens of thousands of pounds to replace the collection I have built up over the last 30 years.

Even then:

• I am unlikely to be able to find all the figures, especially the limited edition ones.
• I’d never be able to replace the scenery much of which is scratchbuild.
• I’d never be able to repaint all the figures in time as this would take years of effort.
• The missing magazines, books and rules sets would never be replaced.

Its strange I haven’t done this yet – put a price on the entire collection – and it is tens of thousands of pounds.

In conversation with others over the w/e and before, the need to back up pictures and documents on your computer are something has done a greater or lesser extent. For instance, my pictures are held on my iMac, I’ve got two external hard drives that act as back-up (one is stored in my car) and I have deposited separate USB drives with other people where legally required (eg Village Hall Committee and Parish Council files) and a healthy % of pictures have been uploaded to photobucket, drop bucket and other service providers in the cloud. Then there are the CDs I’ve burnt with chunks of documents.

But for my figures ? Nothing. Not even a separate item on the contents insurance.

We often read of precious artworks, manuscripts etc being burnt, destroyed, rediscovered in attics, but do we wargamers ever do anything to prevent the loss of our little friends ?

Do we have anything to learn from authors and artists in how to protect our property ?

How do authors and artists protect their work from accidental destruction ?

Has anyone tried to add their figure collection as a separate item to their contents insurance ? afterall any art or jewellery collections have to be separate items…

Answers below please…