Friday, February 6, 2015

A card collector's worst nightmare - I've had a water leak

So frustrated right now. For the past two hours I've been dealing with the after effects of a major water leak. I've lost cards, some of which I've had since 1988, when I began collecting. I've lost books, my #2 passion behind cards.

I can't even bring myself to go through the water damaged cards yet to find out what I lost. It's at least 300 cards. Some are worse than others, but I know some are going to be a total loss. Topps base cards on white card stock have been turned brown, for example.

I did find out, however, that when a Panini Prizm card gets wet, the color actually runs. I will get a picture of that tomorrow and post it when I post the list of what was lost.

My trade stash for NASCAR got hit hard. I lost about 300 more of those. They are all duplicates, but I still hate to see any cards get damaged. And now I have to go in and remove them from my tradelist, which I put so much effort into in November and December, which I've talked about in a few posts.

I know I lost some vintage, too. I saw several 1974-75 Topps NBA cards that were in a box I had just gotten out to scan last week, but hadn't gotten to yet.

I know it could be worse- just a few months back I was doing a large sorting project with the majority of my collection in the area that the water hit- but it's not much of a comfort.

There were a couple of instances where the box got wet and the cards inside didn't- thank God! One of those instances was one of the mixed boxes that I love so much. When checking them to see if there was damage, a purple sparkle caught my eye- it's a parallel of 2013-14 Select numbered to 99.

It appears that nothing serially numbered got damaged....which means everything is replaceable. But I can't be sure until I go through the stack of damaged cards. I will do that in a few minutes. I'll post a list of what I need to replace after I can cross check it with my duplicate stash- my NBA and Star Wars duplicates stayed dry.

And to add insult to injury- my all time worst day in the hobby comes 13 years to the day after I lost my dad to cancer.

Just needed to vent.

7 comments:

  1. Just finished typing out the list of damaged cards. 217 cards took damage, it looks like all but one of the vintage Star Wars cards from Topps are going to dry out without any real damage.

    Some of them are going to be total losses, some are just minor damage- but all are damaged enough to see it clearly at a glance.

    Tomorrow I will check them against my duplicate stash. I know I should have a couple replacements in there already.

    What a lousy day.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry to hear that. That is every collectors nightmare. Hopefully you can salvage some of them.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Let me know what you lost as far as the 74-75 Topps basketball. I have some dupes email me
    markhoyle913ATyahooDOTcom

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Mark, I sent you a message, but then my browser crashed, so I am not sure if it went through. If it does not show up I will try again.

      Delete
  4. Thanks guys...it really was the worst day I've ever had in the hobby.

    It turns out that the Star Wars cards DIDN'T dry out well, so it brings the number of cards lost to 253, not even counting the trade stash that I lost. A couple of them are some of the originals my brother gave me in 1988 that got me started collecting. That hurts...

    Mark, I will send you an email shortly, thank you! I only lost four from that set.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sorry to hear about the water leak. I felt sick just reading this post... and can only imagine what you're going through.

    ReplyDelete