Insurance paid up when I had a loss. Fortunately my insurance agent had explained the need for cataloging so at his suggestion I allowed him to hire a student ,of his choice, to create an alphabetical list (I paid of course) with details. I only lost a few, to a city caused sewer back up; but one was a 'very' early and rare Elvis Presley. Due to the independent documentation I was properly compensated. Prior documentation is essential for insurance. Perhaps a good summer student opportunity for those of you with valuable collections and gear.
Oops, HOUSE FLOOD!! Audiophile vinyl collection got soaked. Where do we go from here?
I guess the lesson is you never can store things too far off the ground. We had a house flood, and our late-70s-early-80's audiophile vinyl collection got soaked. We removed platters and spread the covers throughout the house (pics are enough to make a collector cry), stuffed and dried them, re-glued parted seams, and then pressed them for several days. Cover art itself survived mostly in good shape, but the cardboard stock pretty much all shows effects, varying amounts of bent corners and wrinkling, none of it good. So we're left with a collection of pristine platters, about 50 never played, the remaining roughly 125 played once for transcription to tape. We still have all displayed (but on higher shelves, lol), but the brand-new cover look overall is gone. We're in our 70s, at the point where divesting is more on our minds than continued investing, so any advice on how we might market all this would be appreciated. We'll obviously suffer a huge discount from what we had, but have emotionally gotten past that, and life moves on ...