Harvey +10, Monday September 4, 2017

What a day, what a day! 

Again, today was a day where we really took the bull by the horns and put ourselves on the road to recovery and rebuilding.  We spent the day, again, working on clearing the house, getting our belongings aggregated, and preparing for the next stage.  Given our situation it is easy to look at the negative but having so many friends around and being grateful for what we have vs what we lost has kept us on the lighter side.  Yes, there are down moments but not often.  Especially when we had another awesome crew show up to help out – see pics below (two different teams today).

An example of the lighter side - I woke up this morning and was complaining to Charlie (my friend of 20 years  and with whom we are staying) that my back was killing me and complained that I wasn’t built for this and Charlie’s response – “Are you kidding me, your people built the pyramids!”  It was just what I needed in the morning, a good laugh to start the day.  For me, it is the joy and humor in the small things  that pushes me through the day.  To demonstrate here are a few things that I found joy in today – wearing sneakers at the house instead of the rubber water boots/waders I had been living in, people just showing up to help us out, the selflessness of our volunteers, and the emails and texts of support.  Our day becomes so much easier when we focus on these small acts of kindness as opposed to bigger picture.  We see the big picture everywhere, all around us, in big piles on our and our neighbors lawns and we need to acknowledge joy – stop and smell the roses but not too long, right now, as the water still smells like you know what.

The process of demoing our house is a completely new experience for me and I thought I would share some of the details for those, like me, that are not familiar.  It is a lot of work both broad and fine strokes.  So yesterday was the broad strokes – we knocked out the bottom half of all the walls, cleaned up the debris, got rid of the mattresses, large pieces of ruined furniture, and moved more stuff upstairs.  Today were the details – Melissa took ALL the hardware off the drawers/cabinets through the out the house (all the cabinets are ruined), JP and Vanessa packed up all the dishware, pantry items, pots and pans, books, and Tupperware (think like packing for a move), Todd and Jason pulled cabinets off the wall to get to the wall behind them, and Jeff and Mike spent time sweeping out the space between the floor and studs.  Once the space between the floor and studs is cleared you need to spray mold killing mixture along the floor and on the building studs.  All this work is new to me and I am so grateful there are people here not only to help me, but also to teach me.  And trust me, I need to a LOT of teaching – when it comes to this stuff my grade is equivalent is Pre-School.

Our neighborhood is surreal.  The water was so low in front of our house, Lisa was able to drive her Mini out of the driveway and to our home (our new home).  However, out our driveway and 50’ to the left people are still putting in boats as there is still 4-5’ of water in parts of our subdivision.  As I am writing, I am trying to describe the area around our home it is hard to write Catastrophe Zone – just hard to admit that we live in a Catastrophe Zone.  Harder still because when we take a right out of drive way and go 500 yards you can are in a different world.  Where there are no boats being put onto streets, where people don’t have half the guts of their house on their yard, where people don’t wear waders all day, and where there is, oddly enough, less comradery.

While not always easy, we know we are laying the foundation to rebuild our home and that is always good news although it might be a while before we get to move in.  We met with our contractor today and he said it could be 6 months before we move back into the house.  In addition to the rebuilding time we will need to wait about 3-5 weeks before we can begin because everything needs to dry out – studs and floors.

As always, thank you for your emails and texts of encouragement.

Pics – The two volunteer teams, one of me about to take a team pic, one of Jeff prepping for wall mixture.

Nat