alt Hacker NewsJust went through this. Sample size one:
While the fire resulted in the total loss of the house it was actually the water from the fire department not the heat that did proportionally more damage.
As a mental model you shouldn’t think of it as “what if my house burns down?” so much as “what if nice strangers roll up to my windows and chainsaw through my roof and spray 50,000 gallons of water in here?”
Yes everything in the mechanical room melted but everything in the rest of the house got hot, smoky, soaked and then moldy.
For root of trust materiel like social security cards, cash, passports put in a ziplock bag in a fireproof, waterproof safe. But for other storage I use clear “Ezy Storage” brand stackable 50L tubs labeled with Homebox QR codes. In the US, Target and Home Depot frequently stock them. I am very anti black and yellow tubs.
The majority of work post-fire goes to itemizing your house inventory for insurance. Even cataloging all your bathroom’s soaps by brand name rather than generic can make $100 difference. Multiply that by 500x different things.
From a threat model perspective I look at rooms from a “what would be salvageable in here if I emptied a swimming pool’s worth of water from some fire sprinklers”. Furniture and TVs are easy to replace. Other stuff less so.
Replies
This is very interesting and will inform changes in how I secure some items. Thanks for the new perspective.
We did that with major hail damage a few years ago. I learned that in a disaster, you should count on everything being junk, and you're lucky if you can salvage anything. We also learned the value of itemized lists.
1500/piece for 20 junk windows I was building a greenhouse with that I dug out of the trash the year before. $250 for a bird feeder because they couldn't find one outside of specialty stores. $40k instead of 10k for a new roof on the shed because it was heavier gauge metal than standard.
Exact replacements can be expensive, but you need to make sure your insurance has 100% replacement instead of adjusted for age or like-kind replacements.
After that experience, we itemized EVERYTHING in the house with make, model, serial number, and color. It was a bitch to get set up, but took the value of our home contents from around 75k to over 250k for exact replacements.
Copies of these records along with our master password for our keepass database are in two bank deposit boxes about 45 minutes apart. For $50/year we can sleep easy.