I had a fire in my workshop in which was stored a few hundred
reproducing piano rolls.  I had hoped to find the time to sell these
on E-Bay because I use computer controlled valves and rarely play paper
rolls.  The very best were in the house.

The rolls were smoke damaged and could probably have been cleaned and
sold but I took advantage of the opportunity to have the insurance
company pay for them.  This was fortunate because they had depreciated
all of the tools I had collected, over many years, to almost no value.
I made some of it up on the rolls.

I learned a lot about what to tell an insurance company.  This is
no place to brag about your good buys.  Over-value everything and in
the case of antiques and collectibles, do not allow depreciation.
On a few items I had to fight with the adjuster and finally got
reasonable compensation.  Overall, the whole process was very
arbitrary.  Some things were overvalued while most were valued at
extremely low values.

I found comparable sales on E-Bay (unfortunately this is almost
impossible now because E-Bay is only concerned about their Chinese
partners and does not bother to maintain useful tools like keeping
track of closed auctions for more than a few weeks) which justified
the value of my lost piano rolls.  In the end I got something like $20
each for them, which included good rolls but also several copies of
Paderewski's Minuet and Silver Threads Among The Gold and the like.

This is a link to one of my blogs that has an entry on a few things
I learned about insurance companies.  It has been a while so I have
no idea what I wrote at that time:

http://spencersviews.blogspot.com/2010/09/insurance-claim-hints.html 

Best regards, Spencer Chase
Garberville, Calif.
http://www.spencerserolls.com/