continuing on.......

After my neighbor brought over the pizza, I realized that the power was not going to come back on and the food in the deep freezer had to be cooked or thrown out. I opened the freezer and got out a few things that looked easy to cook, like sausage and cube steaks. I cooked up those on the grill and invited everyone over to help eat it. I left the rest of the stuff in the freezer to clean out later. (That will come back to haunt me). We all drank some warm beer, ate tons of meat, and then walked down to the house of a neighbor who had left after the storm. She had a pool that was not quite as green and debris filled as mine. We had a nice cool swim. I went home and used some melted ice from the cooler to rinse the slime and possible spiders out of my hair, and felt almost human again. I decided to be brave and sleep with my windows open for the first time since the storm. I slept 5 hours that night. It was wonderful.


I have to go back a little and document some of the damage to the house and my continued clean-up efforts. This was important since the clean-up of the house was one of the things keeping me on the coast.
We already knew we had roof damage and would need roof repairs and the whole thing re-shingled. A few days after the storm, I went up in the attic and realized that I could see daylight the entire length of the garage. We had not noticed that damage before and it looked like major structual damage. We also knew that we would need almost all of the ceilings in the house re-done . Luckily none of them collapsed, but they were sagging from the water and had holes in the sheetrock where the water broke through. Every day, I would get a bucket of water with a lot of bleach in it, and start sponging the ceilings to keep the mold away. The was so much water in the attic and in the insulation, that the water stains kept spreading for days after it had stopped raining. It took a couple of hours to do all of the ceilings, but I kept it up every day. The paint and "blown" ceilings would fall off with every stroke of the sponge, so after I bleached all the ceilings, I would go back and wash the floors where the paint and sheetrock had fallen. I also used bleach on every surface where the water had come through the ceilings. The water was a filthy brown color and I was worried about health problems from it. When I need a break from the bleach fumes, I go outside and pick up debris from the yard. There was a lot of it from all over the neighborhood and I made several large piles by the road. It seems like the amount of debris in the yard never changes because I pick up stuff each day, but then overnight, the wind blows more of it in from the around the neighborhood.
After something like this, you realize that damage is a relative thing. I have written estimates for repairs on my house and so far they add up to about 50% of the value of my entire home. That would under normal circumstances, be a huge amount of damage, but compared to all of the people who lost their home and everything in it, I never forget how lucky we are.
When I finally got up into the attic again, I realized that all of the stuff store up there had gotten soaked too. I have been going up there a little each day, and throwing out the stuff that is ruined, and trying to clean the stuff that I can. It is so hot up there that I can only work for about 40 minutes to an hour.

The picture above is the ceiling over my computer. We covered the computer with plastic and it received no damage. I was very grateful for that.