Don’t Rush Process of Replacing Belongings

With nearby fires still smoldering and the air heavy with ash, Victoria and Renzo Rossellini combed the remains of their Las Flores Canyon rental home.

Books crumbled in their hands. Fine china lay charred and shattered. The fire took everything except their daughter’s tree swing.

The Rossellinis, who had no renters’ insurance, lost sentimental favorites ranging from antiques owned by Victoria’s 92-year-old grandmother to stuffed animals to family photographs.

In the days after the disaster, friends and co-workers helped soothe the loss. The Rossellinis’ 3-year-old daughter received boxes of toys, books and stuffed animals from school friends. And Victoria’s employer organized a shower for kitchenware and bedding. But reassembling a home doesn’t happen overnight.

“We would start to cook dinner and realize that we didn’t have a cutting board, dish towels or a tea kettle,” Victoria said of their first few weeks in another rental home.

“I was very attached sentimentally to a lot of things and there’s a weight that goes along with that,” she said. “(But) it is, in a way, very liberating not to worry about a chip on a piece of wood furniture or one of my grandmother’s dishes breaking.”

So traditional heirlooms gave way to Italian post-modern furniture in the Rossellini home.

“Nothing will ever replace the sentimental value of my grandmother’s pieces,” she said. “It would almost hurt more to choose things that were similar.”

The recent wildfires and the Northridge earthquake put hundreds of victims in the miserable position of replacing all or most of their furnishings, often collected over a lifetime. Some have tried to fill the void quickly.

“Almost immediately, families and couples came in and bought major furniture, like beds, tables, couches and dressers,” said Leslie Halloran of the Burbank IKEA. “We had people who bought furniture and then realized they had nowhere to ship it. It was like they wanted to have something tangible in their hands that wouldn’t disappear.”

But shopping too soon for too much can be a mistake, experts say.

“People who try to re-create their homes by rushing to replace things overnight can end up disappointed a month later,” said Dr. Mory Framer, a psychiatrist who specializes in disaster counseling. “It’s better to just get the essentials and take one’s time replacing those really loved items.”

Margaret Smith, 74, intends to do just that. Three days after the earthquake, she sat uneasily on the edge of her cot in the Red Cross shelter near her Hollywood home. “This isn’t very comfortable. I miss my bed,” Smith said. “That’s the first thing I’ll buy when this is over. A bed. A big soft one, though not too soft. And I don’t care what it looks like, just how it feels to me.”

With her building condemned, Smith is worried about how she will find a new home and refurnish it. “Starting from scratch is really hard at my age. I didn’t have all that much in the first place, but finding a sofa, a table, a bed--especially a bed--that’s not going to be easy now.”