There have been a number of diaries here on DK that contain personal stories of how to deal with traumatic weather events, earthquakes, and fires, but I haven’t seen any that deal with one of the most predictable consequences of a disaster. Whatever catastrophe causes massive damage to your home, at the very time you are going to be most focussed on trying to put your life back together you’re going to have to produce all kinds of data about things you probably haven’t considered.
I’ll tell you about how it happened to me after one of the more mundane forms of disaster – a smash and grab burglary many years ago. While my roommates and I were away from our home, some teenagers came through the kitchen window and decided to steal anything that looked valuable. They had some idea that people might have hidden guns or other valuables in drawers, so they grabbed every drawer in the place and dumped the contents in the middle of each room. They didn’t get much from that, but from elsewhere they got several expensive cameras, two guitars, the antique swords we had displayed on the walls, some jewelry I had inherited from my grandparents, and two nice leather jackets. One of my roommates was a mechanic, and he lost some tap and die sets and specialty tools, and another lost two guns.
When we came home, we were traumatized. Everything was chaotic, and we couldn’t move anywhere without stepping on piles of stuff that might have fragile items under the surface layer. It took days to even sort the debris into cardboard boxes so we could try to function, but in the very first hour after we discovered the theft the police were were asking us for a list of everything that was missing. We happened to have renter’s insurance, so we were asked the same thing again later, but in greater detail. What was the value of each of those cameras? Where are the receipts for those swords? They seemed skeptical that we, a couple of guys in our 20’s, had these valuable items, and they obviously suspected us of inflating their value or making stuff up.
The place was so chaotic that we were still discovering losses over a month later. I remember the sickening feeling of looking up at a pair of pegs on the wall and trying to remember what had been there. Once I did, it was time for a call to the police department to add to their list and another to the increasingly skeptical insurance company.
Since then I have developed a habit: sometime early in each year, I do a walk-through of every room in the house with a camera recording video, and as I come to each item I say what it is and give any important details. The resulting visuals aren’t going to win any awards, and they have an odd soundtrack, me chanting a narrative that goes something like this inventory of my workspace:
“Pendulum schoolhouse wall clock by Maruzen made in the 1930’s bought in Hong Kong in the 1980’s, Macintosh 16 inch desktop with external speaker set, Epson 550 scanner, Brother 6450 printer, Turkish carpet from the 1930’s about four feet by three feet, civil war foot officer’s sword with reproduction scabbard, three Indonesian boar spears with shields, antique Tyrolean hats, South American native bow and eight arrows mounted under glass, Schroter flintlock pistol with antique hand-carved powder horn bought in the 1970’s, vintage curved edge oak desk,...”
(Yes,I decorated my home office to look like a Victorian gentleman’s study. Since I spend so much time there it’s important that it’s a place where I feel comfortable, and I find this kind of place cozy. Don’t judge me.)
That litany of items needed the details I gave there. Over the years I acquired some very odd items, some of which actually are valuable, but which would be very hard to document unless I had that recording. Receipts for the carpet I inherited from my grandfather? No chance, and if it did exist it would be in Turkish and would represent its value then, not now. I flipped over the corner to show the tag as I filmed so the maker’s name could be seen, just to prove its authenticity. If I ever need to assess its value, I have as many details as are needed.
There is a separate video for every room in my house, including the bathrooms and all of the closets. (Why the bathrooms? We remodeled awhile ago and put in upgraded fixtures, and if something happens to that part of the house I want the same quality. Also, while the electric toothbrush and my wife’s various hair items may seem small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, they’re still things we’d replace if something happened to them. Why the closets? Think about how much it would cost to replace your nicest jackets and any hand-tailored items you may have.)
It is particularly important to document any collections you may have. I have a few rare books and lingered over my bookshelves to capture them, and my wife laid out all of her jewelry on a tablecloth so it could be easily seen and as I recorded she said what each piece was and where she got it. I also documented some art, antique cookware, and tools that most people wouldn’t recognize as valuable, but that I would find expensive to replace.
Doing all of this, from one end of the house to the other, the garage including all the tools on the shelves, and then a walk around the outside to get the garden tools, barbecue, and suchlike, took less than an hour. I made separate videos for each room partly so that if we buy new furniture or acquire something new, we can reshoot only that space. At the beginning of each segment I started with “This video of my living room was made on March 20th, 2019,” so there is documentation of what the house was like at that moment in time.
After reviewing each video segment to make sure that the items are visible (and that may mean shooting one side of the house in the morning and the other side in the afternoon when the light is better), I then put all of the files into a folder. I put that on a thumb drive to take to two relatives who live a distance away and asked them to download the files onto their computers.
Should another burglary happen, or something destructive like an earthquake or fire, I can retrieve those files and use them to both remind myself what was lost and prove to police, insurance companies, or any other interested party what I owned. Had I done this before that burglary long ago I might have gotten thousands of dollars more on the insurance settlement – I lost some items that I didn’t realize were gone until much later. Making those videos each year has given me peace of mind. Each year when I share them with relatives it reminds them that they should do the same thing, and some of them now share theirs with me. Thanks to modern cloud storage they’re available to me too, even if my computer is destroyed or stolen, so I have an added level of data safety.
While we made these videos for insurance purposes, they have a secondary effect – since I am giving copies to my children, after I am gone they will have a list of the things that are heirlooms with at least a brief summary of their provenance and value. They will know things I did not about the items I inherited from my parents and grandparents.
An hour, more or less, of taking that video and then distributing it to friends could save you heartache as well as money. You will be less likely to wake in the middle of the night, weeks or months after you thought you were done dealing with a traumatic event, realizing something else important that you lost. You are more likely to be able to put it behind you sooner and get on to the rebuilding phase. It doesn’t take anything you don’t already have if you use the camera in your cellphone – though a dedicated video camera with a good zoom lens makes things much easier and produces a higher quality video. Either way, it’s a small investment of time that can pay a big dividend in time of need.
****And something I originally forgot — as long as you’re putting that info on a thumb drive and giving it to someone trusted, it’s also a good idea to scan or photograph all your utility bills and your passport so you have the numbers, and also make lists of your credit cards including the phone number on the back so you know who to call to cancel them. Save that list as a PDF rather than a Word doc for higher security. It can be a real headache to try to cancel a card when you don’t have that information.