Some Unfortunate News And Lessons Learned

As preparation for going full-time we have been downsizing. We started with a three bedroom, two bath house in Imperial (not including my man cave, which I miss!) and downsized to a one bedroom house at Rough Acres when I took the job there.

Now it as time to downsize again. We decided to put collectibles and whatever furniture we were going to need once we set up another home base in storage. We found a nice storage unit and began moving things in.

Lanette has been into miniatures for years. She built a beautiful doll house and furnished it with all kinds of cool furniture, rugs, etc. all through the years. I made a custom box to hold the house, and we moved it to storage.

She also had a huge collection of Boyd’s Bears, high end teddy bears, that I had bought her over the years. Whenever I would travel, I would pick her up a bear and bring it home. She started buying them for herself as well. She packed up all of her bears and other stuffed animals, and off to storage they went.

Along with those things, Lanette had many other collectables; Coca Cola memorabilia, tigers, Thomas Kinkade, and more.

I packed away some of my custom Hot Wheels cars, some of my cigar memorabilia, and Sheriffs Office stuff, and it, too, went to storage.

Then on May 20th I got a phone call. Somebody had been careless in their unit and caused a fire. The caller said we need to come down and inspect our unit as soon as possible.

Here is what we found:

To say that we are a mixture of heartbroken, ticked off and sad is an understatement. We figure that we lost over $30,000 in items. Many of the items are irreplaceable, though. How do I put a price on 20 years of my Grandfather’s sermon notes?

So, thus begins the lesson:

• Have your own supplementary insurance. We are only covered to $5,000, a small, small amount of what we actually lost. If you still own your sticks and bricks home, your homeowners insurance may cover it. since we sold our house, we weren’t covered.
• Have a complete inventory, with replacement value, of every item in your unit. The insurance company asked for us to fill out a form for our loss, and we had to try to remember what was in there. I am sure we missed a lot of things.
• Photos of your items would be really helpful.
• Scan any photos to the cloud or a storage device before you store them. We were fortunate to save some of our photos. We will be scanning them and saving them to Dropbox.

So hopefully our loss can help someone else. It’s always better to learn from someone else’s bruises if you can.

Jerry