Three Days Into a Pack-Out and the Box Numbers Are Already Wrong
Day one of a contents pack-out after a house fire moves fast. Restoration crews are working across multiple rooms simultaneously. Smoke-damaged furniture comes out of the master bedroom the same hour that soot-covered electronics are being staged from the office and the kitchen appliances are being evaluated for salvageability near the garage door. By the time Box 47 is loaded and sealed, nobody remembers with certainty whether the framed art from the library went into 43 or 44.
That disambiguation failure is not a minor inconvenience. It becomes a problem when the insured asks where their grandmother's oil painting is during the cleaning phase, when the adjuster needs to match the inventory against the contents claim, and when the cleaning facility receives items and cross-checks against the restoration company's manifest. The Contents template in Memento Database is built to close that gap at the moment of pack-out, not after the damage has been done to the chain of custody.
The Salvage/Cleanable Decision and Why It Has to Be Made Twice
Two separate fields—Salvage and Cleanable—exist because these are two distinct decisions made at two different points in the restoration workflow, often by two different people.
Salvage status (Salvageable, Non-Salvageable, Questionable) is the field assessor's call at pack-out: does this item leave the house or does it go to the dumpster? A couch with full smoke penetration into the foam core may be Non-Salvageable while a cast-iron skillet from the same kitchen is unambiguously Salvageable. Questionable is the field for items where the category decision depends on specialist evaluation—certain electronics, water-damaged documents, textile items with unknown fiber content.
Cleanable (Cleanable, Non-Cleanable) is the cleaning facility's determination after arrival: can this item be cleaned to pre-loss condition within a cost-effective margin? An item can be Salvageable but Non-Cleanable—it made it off the property but the cleaning cost would exceed replacement value. That determination drives the supplemental contents claim.
The Content Cleaning Cost field records the per-item cleaning invoice cost. Across a large contents claim—a 3,000 square-foot house with 400+ inventory items—those per-item figures aggregate into the total cleaning scope that supports or challenges the adjuster's estimate.
Room and Box as the Two-Axis Location System
Room assignment and Box/Crate Number are the two axes that allow physical retrieval of any item during the cleaning and storage phase. Room tells you origin. Box/Crate Number tells you current location. Together they allow a straightforward answer to "where is the Bedroom 2 lamp that was logged on Day 1?" without searching through a warehouse.
The Pack Out Date and Clean Date fields create a timestamp trail. Pack Out Date is when the item left the structure. Clean Date is when cleaning was completed. That interval is relevant for moisture-sensitive items where dwell time in storage before cleaning affects recoverable condition, and for scheduling return delivery against the structure repair completion date.
Pack Out Picture and Pack Up Picture serve different evidentiary functions. The pre-clean photo documents condition at removal—relevant if the insured later claims the item arrived at the cleaning facility already damaged. The post-clean photo documents condition at return—relevant if a cleaning dispute arises after delivery. Both images attach to the item record in Memento, linked to the description, room, and box number, creating a per-item photo audit trail that a paper contents list with attached stapled photos cannot replicate at scale.
The Category field—Furniture, Fabric, Glass, Rugs, Art, Electronics, Keepsakes, Tools—drives cleaning workflow routing. Fabric items route to the textile cleaning line. Electronics route to an electronics restoration specialist. Rugs route to rug washing. Assigning Category at the point of pack-out intake, rather than at the cleaning facility, eliminates the re-sorting step at intake and reduces the rate of items landing in the wrong processing stream.