Call now: 651-703-2336 Request service
Contents are the hardest part of a flooded basement, and not for technical reasons. The material decisions are straightforward. It is that basements are where people store the things they could not throw away, and a flood forces the decision anyway.
Triage in three piles
Discard. Porous items that contacted contaminated water, and anything that has been wet long enough to grow mold. Cardboard, particleboard furniture, foam, and most soft goods.
Clean and keep. Non-porous items — glass, metal, glazed ceramic, sealed plastic, solid wood in many cases. These clean up with detergent and appropriate disinfection.
Stabilise and decide later. Irreplaceable items where the decision should not be made in the first hour. Photographs, documents, textiles with real meaning. There is a specific technique for these, below.
Photograph everything before it moves, including the discard pile. That pile is part of the claim, and once it is at the kerb it no longer exists as evidence.
Freeze anything paper
This is the most useful thing on this page. Wet paper, photographs, books, and documents deteriorate fast — ink runs, pages fuse, and mold starts within a day or two.
Freezing stops all of it. Put wet paper items in plastic bags, separate photographs with wax paper where you can, and put them in a freezer. Frozen material is stable indefinitely, which converts an emergency into a scheduling problem.
From there, either dry them slowly yourself in small batches, or use a document recovery service. Vacuum freeze-drying is a real service, it works, and it is worth asking about for genuinely irreplaceable material. Most people never learn it exists until after they have thrown the box away.
Category by category
- Upholstered furniture and mattresses. The foam core is the problem — it cannot be dried reliably. Rarely worth saving beyond brief clean-water contact.
- Solid wood furniture. Often recoverable with slow, controlled drying. Drying too fast causes splitting and joint failure. Keep it out of direct heat and sun.
- Particleboard and MDF furniture. Swells irreversibly, starting at the base where it is out of sight. Almost always discarded.
- Electronics. Do not power anything that has been wet, including to test it. Have it assessed. Residual moisture causes corrosion failures weeks later.
- Clothing and textiles. Clean-water items usually launder normally, hot where the fabric allows. Contaminated items need professional cleaning or discarding.
- Tools and metal. Dry immediately and oil. Surface rust is manageable; a week of dampness is not.
- Toys. Hard plastic cleans. Anything soft or absorbent that touched contaminated water goes.
Storage lessons worth acting on
Most of what is lost in a basement flood was in cardboard on the floor. Cardboard wicks, collapses when lifted, and transfers contamination to its contents.
Sealed plastic bins on shelving raised several inches off the slab is the cheapest prevention measure available in any basement, and it is worth doing after a loss even if you never expect another. Keep irreplaceable items out of the basement entirely — photographs, documents, and anything with no replacement value belong above grade.
Related pages
For structural materials, see wet basement drywall. For contamination categories, see is the water contaminated. For claim documentation, see filing a basement flood claim.