Chuggin' Along

Tomorrow will start week 5 since we've been "homeless" (we left mid-day four Thursdays ago), and I think we're in pretty fine spirits considering. :)

Benjamin is doing GREAT at school - and in fact seemed pretty disappointed to not be going to school on Saturday - and was not shy to let me know! He fussed whenever we went back upstairs after being downstairs (ie instead of heading out the door), brought me his shoes several times and mine once, and even tried to hand me my work briefcase. Sorry Ben, I had to keep saying, no school today. You're stuck with me. I didn't quite know whether to be happy that he enjoyed going to school so much, or somewhat sad that he quite markedly prefers school over hanging out at home with mom. I'm going with happy, because I feel zero guilt dropping him off each morning. And he has yet to shed a tear over my departure.

We've made some progress with the house. The contractor we hired to complete the flood remediation piece (dry wall tear-out and "microban" application (to halt any mold growth)) began work last Thursday. Through them, we hired movers to box up our stuff and put it in a storage locker - and they did this on Saturday. It's the first time we've done this (ie instead of packing it ourselves) - wish we could have enjoyed the experience a bit more. :) Mark was there for the first couple of hours giving guidance to the flood remediation workers, who were still working around our stuff and around the movers. But they did much of the packing without us there, so I'm hoping our stuff is in good shape when we get to it - which will likely not be for a number of weeks yet. It makes me a bit nervous about what condition we'll find stuff - and it will be hard to sort through since we have no idea what stuff is in which boxes. But in the end it's just stuff, I suppose, and we're looking at this as a good exercise to rid ourselves of non-essentials. In fact, I'm probably going to want to clean and sanitize just about everything before bringing it back into the house - as I don't know what was touched by flood waters, and the stuff that wasn't touched may be boxed up with stuff that was... Our plan is to try to find our bed (or borrow an air mattress) and bring Ben's pack-n-play with us when the house is ready to be inhabited again and slowly bring over a car-full of boxes each day to sort and clean - eventually renting a truck for the final furniture. Not going to be an easy process, but I'm looking forward to a much simpler household in the end.

Right now our house has been completely gutted, and the air movers are blowing air around our house. I'm not sure how much longer they stay. Mark met with the first contractor for the repair/rebuild today. We had been really close to hiring this contractor to do some work in remodeling our carport/garage - so now we'll divert the funds to home repair. We already know that insurance will not cover all the necessary rebuild pieces, and we want to make a few upgrades as well (flooring and bathroom, primarily - but also possibly some electrical re-wiring). We'll get an estimate when he has the dimension information from the insurance company (about a week), and I'm a bit nervous about what the final price tag will be. Mark is meeting with this contractor's flooring subcontractor tomorrow, and with an alternate prime contractor on Friday.

Our Contractor (Chris is his name - probably should start just calling him by name, as there may be many more entries that refer to him!) gave us an initial ballpark estimate of 6 weeks - 2 months to complete the work. So Thanksgiving will be the earliest we could be back in the house. I had my eyes on Thanksgiving, but I may need to re-adjust to Christmas to make it more realistic and not be disappointed.

So below are some pictures from various stages of our house

These first few pictures were what the house looked like when I returned from Oregon. As you can see, our stuff was everywhere and Mark had begun cutting away the bottom few inches (then finally bottom foot or so) or the drywall. Little did I know this was just the beginning!

Then the professionals came and removed even more wall. This is my favorite picture to just show how weird this all was. Four feet and down the wall was cut away, but then everything higher was left in-tact. Notice the quilts on the wall in this picture below. They normally hung above our bed. The contractor originally thought they could work around our stuff. So they piled it all in the middle of each room and draped a tarp over it to protect it from dust.

These pictures show our house getting closer to finished as far as the remediation goes...

Here's our kitchen. Yep, this is the kitchen that Mark personally remodelled just two years ago. They ripped out the base cabinets, but were able to salvage the granite. A separate contractor was brought in to remove and store the granite. Hope we can find his phone number when it comes time to put it back...

Here is a shot from Ben's room looking towards the guest room. We had wood floors over concrete slab - and apparently this was how wood floors were installed in the 50s - the boards the flooring was nailed to "floats" on tar on top of the slab. Interesting.

Here's a shot from our Den looking towards the percussion studio. In this room we had paneling, so the entire wall had to come down. You're looking at the back of the top half of the drywall from the studio. That paneling is one thing we won't miss.

And finally here's a shot in our master bathroom. This is where the sink/vanity were - and the tile did not extend behind it, so the entire thing had to be removed. They actually found mold behind the tile too, so pretty much all the bathroom tile had to come down. We're not terribly disappointed about that, as we had intended to remodel the bathrooms eventually, just not right now and not in this manner.

And what blog entry would be complete without a few pictures of the B-dogg?

Daddy and Ben snuggling one morning soon after our reunion as a family post-hurricane

Ben recently discovered the joy of "folding" laundry. He spent a good twenty minutes sorting the laundry when I captured this picture. Too bad I had both clean and dirty laundry accessible at this time...

Ben's First Day of School!
Ben and his teacher Ms. Nathalie

Finally, thank you again for all the phone calls and notes - I'm sorry I haven't gotten back to pretty much everyone. Slowly but surely our life is beginning to resemble something normal again. Okay, maybe normal is not the word, as most people don't live on the third story of their friends' home - but as normal as normal can be for a family displaced who is trying to rebuild their home. All this to say, I will get back to you - eventually!