When weather threatens your eBay inventory!

I so thought I had my act together back in July when I wrote this blog post.  Who knew that a short month and a half later, a hurricane and tropical storm would threaten my business!

I have my eBay inventory stored in what, up until now, was always a clean and dry basement.  I never imagined that my basement would flood.  While I was on vacation in mid August, my neighbors told me how it rained like buckets when we were gone…they were kind enough to cut my grass because it had grown so long in a week.  Then the following week came Hurricane Irene, two weeks later came Tropical Storm Lee.

With the first storm we lost power and in came about 5 inches or water (covering 1500 square feet of basement space).  Anything in a bin started to float and then tip over.  Our shoe bins on the lowest shelf were threatened so we quickly started to move that inventory first…in the dark.

My hung clothes did not get wet as I thankfully did not have anything hanging that low, however I did have to raise them to a higher bar just in case.

The “just in case” came the following week with Tropical Storm Lee who gave us a total of 8 inches in our basement.

The stress of seeing that much water coming dangerously close to our stock was immense.  I put our stores on vacation as I couldn’t imagine finding anything while trudging in boots to search for inventory. It felt unfair to my customers.  I worried about the smell of water…..

Here you can see the water line.  This was about 5 inches of water.

The next storm would be worse bringing in 8 inches.

Here you can see some of my inventory hovering precariously over the water resting on my boys weight bench.  Yes, that's debris floating off to the right....

The next day we were able to rent a powerful sump pump and get out the water.  My husband and our boys worked tirelessly in cleanup and we purchased two heavy duty dehumidifiers to get the dampness out of the air.  Fortunately, that worked and my clothes were not affected.

Since the storm, we have moved things higher “just in case”.  We plan on investing in a heavier duty sump pump for our home.  Hopefully, this will never happen again.

All is back to normal now and my husband and I feel as though we've learned a valuable lesson.  Moral of the story, if you have items stored in your basement, be wise and plan for things like this.  There is nothing worse than scrambling in the dark with water all around your feet and ankles trying to save your personal belongings.