Now comes the fun part, trying to get the insurance company to properly reimburse us for the damage the plumbing leak caused.

A particular point of contention are the personal items.  Insurance companies don’t want to pay for something new.  In cases like this, they claim to reimburse for cash value of the affected items.  So, we have to accept some nominal value for an item (like a couch and a sectional) that we will then have to go out and spend3-5 times as much (if we are lucky) to replace.  This is where all the negotiating happens.

One bummer was a box of books we recently discovered had taken on water, that we didn’t notice before.  These books were from my late father’s collection, and some were rare old books.  As you can see, they got went enough to promote significant mold growth.

The plumbers insurance company says they won’t pay for mold issues, but this box of books would certainly have been ruined by water alone.  I haven’t yet generated a list of what books were affected, and checked on their market value.  My father had a collection of over 2,000 books, some of which were rare first editions, and I suspect a couple of those were in this batch.