The cardboard boxes on your basement floor

Good morning. Short one today, as promised, and mostly a scene.

Wednesday, a ranch house in West Seneca, for one of the small mutuals I still take two or three files a month from. I parked the Escape with the dented side toward the curb, out of habit. The owner met me at the side door holding a flashlight, though the power was on. He said the basement light makes it look worse.

The waterline on the drywall sat about four inches up, a brown stripe so even it looked drawn with a ruler. The carpet had already been pulled back from the wall and folded over itself, the way people fold it after they have read something online.

The sump pump was in its pit in the corner, with the float jammed against the side of the liner. He had bought a new one. It was still in the box on the stairs with the receipt taped to the lid, which is the most organized thing I have seen all year.

Most of the loss was cardboard: Christmas decorations, a box of sewing patterns that were his wife’s, two cartons of tax returns back to 2009, and a crib mattress nobody had used since 1994. Everything was soft at the bottom, like bread left out overnight.

I measured, photographed, and wrote down model numbers. Tomorrow the estimating software will turn all of it into line items.

On the bottom shelf were two plastic bins with snap lids. He opened them for me without being asked. Inside were the photographs, his discharge papers and the deed, all dry.

There is no line for that on any form I have used. I mention it because he did, twice.

Whether his policy pays for a failed sump pump depends on an endorsement that may or may not be on his declarations page. That is his question to put to his agent, and I told him so.

On the way out he asked whether he should have moved everything into bins years ago. I said probably, and that I have not done it either.

When I got home I went down to my own basement and lifted the corner of the old rug I have been blaming for the smell for two years. The pad underneath was dark, in a shape that runs toward the floor drain.

I put the rug back down. I know that is the wrong move, and I do not know yet what the right one costs.

Tomorrow
A full issue, and the money meter is back.

Read the policy before you need it. — Rita