Epic Beanie Baby Cleaning

10/7/2019 (Permalink)

There are over 2,000 different types of Beanie Babies in the world today.

We were called out to an apartment complex that had a fire. The fire originated in one unit but then spread to common areas. During the initial walk through, one of the condo owners asked us to check out her unit as well.  She did have minor soot damage but the majority of the problem was the strong smoke odor.

Upon walking into this unit, I instantly knew that this was going to be a job that required an insurance adjuster.  This was a hoarder situation, but luckily for us, this person was actually a very clean and organized hoarder.

This person collected Beanie Babies.  There were Beanie Babies from wall to wall.  They were in bags on the stairs, in kitchen cabinets, in drawers, on the couch, anywhere you can envision, they were there. 

I called the adjuster out to make sure that this type of cleaning was truly was covered.  Once I described the situation, the adjuster agreed to come out personally to view the damage.  Within the next day or two, we met onsite.  When he walked in and saw the hoard of contents, he was shocked.  But, to our delightful surprise; because the tenant had the proper insurance, she was fully covered. So we got to work.

SERVPRO was tasked with doing a full pack-out.  In addition to the pack-out, we also had to clean and deodorize each Beanie Baby that was in that unit.  As these Beanie Babies are considered “collectors items,” they all had that heart-shaped tag still attached to them.  Because of that cardboard tag being attached, we were unable to clean them with water and detergent.  As a result, we had to hand-clean each individual piece…..approximately 75,000 Beanie Babies.

This is not an exaggeration.

  If, on average, each stuffed animal was $6 to purchase, the value of her total collection was around $450,000.  That is almost one-half of a million dollars. 

This was probably one of the most time consuming and detailed jobs that we have ever experienced, as it took us over a month to complete. Though the satisfaction of a job well done, will always be incomparable.