Damage Ahoy
Bailing out the ship and battening down the hatches
When I do one of my big buys, like the Chicago trip I talked about recently, there’s a time when the whole house resembles a flea market, and it feels like the inventory is a snake that just ate too big a meal. I do my best to keep piles of CDs and records out of the living areas of the house, but sometimes they encroach. Like stray Christmas paper or a stack of folded towels, the last vestiges of media from a buy might sit on the living room floor for a week or two until I round it all up.
Adding a thousand or so classical LPs wasn’t gonna go easily on my full shelves, so I did some condensing and sorting. I zeroed in on an area in the War Room, a space where I typically won’t keep sale inventory. Under one bay of tables, where my Commodore Vic 20 and Apple II setups reside, there was a mishmash of empty totes, catch-all milk crates and boxes. I pulled all that out, repurposed the crates for vinyl, and got something like 500 records neatly stashed in a dry, climate-controlled spot for later listing.
The sale shelves accommodated a few more boxes, but realized I was out of room and needed to finish emptying the van. About 300 records wound up lining the very front of the garage, almost too close to the automatic door for it to shut. Cardboard on cement is never a good option, and when the forecast this weekend called for rain, I knew it was time for a real plan.
Water creeping into my domicile has been a recurring frustration in my life (and possibly yours!), because it’s so good at it, no matter how well you’re living. There’s an episode of Doctor Who where a waterborne virus mutates a space station crew one member at a time, and the Doctor intones “water always wins” as things spiral out of control.
I’ve never worried about turning into a flesh-eating monster thanks to a roof leak, but I stood on the stairs in our old house and watched helplessly as boxes of books and papers took on rainwater pouring in through our century-old foundation. I’ve watched rusty water drip in around the shower fan and pool in the tub, before we replaced our roof. One corner of the basement here will take on water if we don’t have the downspout positioned right.
And, once or twice when it’s rained really hard and the wind has kicked up, water has come in under the garage door. We keep a pile of disused bath towels on a shelf in the basement for just this sort of occasion, and I’ll occasionally lay them along the bottom edge of the garage door, just in case. Almost every time, they’re bone-dry when I pick them back up.
But if it’d flooded under the door this time, all those boxes of records would have wick’d up that water and transformed themselves from a few years’ worth of small-time occasional record orders to a pile of black mold and failure. It would have been especially awful given that I’d just hauled them a couple hundred miles in a vain attempt to save them.
As the forecasted storm system moved closer, I started transporting armloads of records upstairs to the office, reconciling myself to a few crates on the floor of my office in the near term. I got the rest into a couple more stray spaces on the sale shelves, and the front of the garage was clear again. I started picking an LP out of the crates each time I walked past them, listing them one at a time, sort of nonchalantly, and sold a $25 record the next morning, which was a motivator.
December was one of my best months on record, so I’m not worried about eventually pushing out more of this inventory and getting the stragglers into an organized collection on the shelves. I’ve sorted and filed the CDs and tapes from that buy and I’m pretty proud of how well I’ve managed to organize the classical music on those formats, so I can find and ship it quickly when orders come in. Doing the same with the classical vinyl is gonna take more Tetris skills, and hopefully the luck to avoid any natural disasters, but my goal for 2025 is good sales, clear walkways, and enough planning and organization to keep the elements at bay.