Daily Nuts & Bolts

Dave went in late to work this morning so he could drive the boys to school. It was raining. And for the first time in a long, long time it was really raining. There was even lightning and thunder here and there. It affected me a lot more than I thought it would - and obviously I was not alone.. George was awake and dressed for school by 4 am - he said he just didn't feel like sleeping anymore once he saw the lightning flash and thought he should come tell me it was raining outside.
I wonder if I will ever look at a rainy overcast day the same way again...

Dave emailed once he got to work and this is what he said:

Hi honey. The boys are at school and I am at work. It was raining pretty hard this morning. Not hard enough for flood anything but there were some puddles. Last night I dreamt I was fleeing from incoming flood waters. I survived. Love you! Dave

It was a slow start today. I woke up early enough and waited for phone calls or sheetrock specialists or FEMA inspectors... but for a while it really looked like no one was going to show. Eventually everyone made it here -- and the phone calls came in waves.

Our new sheetrock crew this week are going over the previous crew's work and making sure everything is sanded smooth -- filling in the gaps around electrical receptacles and just generally finishing up for us. I nervously chatted at them for a while this afternoon -- telling them the story and reliving it all with great excitement. I think it really had to do with the weather.... They have asked if I can make a CD with the pictures I took during the hurricane so they can share them with others. (I worked on the CD tonight as a matter of fact.. I should probably include some of the 'after' pictures too I suppose.. perhaps I can get to that in the morning before they arrive.)

Mom spent a while with us this afternoon as well - I know the weather makes her nervous. She went to pick the boys up for us too. It wasn't raining then but it looked like it could any minute.. and it certainly helped a lot. Otherwise, Dave would have had to take another hour off of work just to bring them home.

In other news, it looks like we won't be getting any relief from Dave's employer afterall. He had applied for employee disaster assistance a couple of months ago but never heard anything from them until today. Apparently, phase I of the assistance operation has ended:

Since Hurricane Katrina, the Northrop Grumman Foundation has been providing emergency relief grants between $250 and $700 to employees with immediate needs for necessities of life such as shelter, food, utilities, or transportation to medical appointments or work, particularly in the days immediately following the storm. These “Phase I” grants were made possible through over $1 million donated from generous Northrop Grumman Employees across the company and included a company match of $1 million. The grants assisted needy employees on a case-by-case basis from all affected Northrop Grumman sectors affected by Katrina or Rita. This first phase, which was administered by the Corporate office via a toll-free number, ended on October 29.

Since $0 does not fall between $250 and $700, I think we are to assume that my husband was not considered an employee with any of the listed immediate needs. It was disappointing. Even more disappointing was reading about moving on to phase II... " The purpose of Phase II is to provide a means to make financial grants available to assist employees who had total and complete home/shelter devastation that was uninsured or not reimbursed by federal or state agencies" If we didn't qualify for Phase I - then Phase II is definitely out of the question.

Onward though. Onward. We'll just continue to take this one step at a time. One project at a time. A couple months ago we never thought we would actually have sheetrock again... and look at us now! So there is hope. Tracy from the Carpet & Tile store called to ask if we were ready for them yet... I wish we were! But we're having a lot of difficulty coordinating this stage of repair. We have to have the mudding & sanding finished before we can completely tape off and cover everything to have the texture sprayed on the finished sheetrock... But we don't know when that is going to be done. Then we can't really schedule having the texture sprayed until we're sure we can get everything covered... and it follows that we also don't know when that is going to be done. So when Tracy wants to know when we'll be ready --- that's a really good question. Obviously we need to have the texture blown on before we put finished floors down... But it's anybody's guess when we can get to it. I'm just praying it all falls into place.

If we can get this much done then we will get a chance to actually paint while Dave is home over the Christmas break. (**crossing fingers**)

After paint we'll move on to trim & baseboards. We had salvaged a lot of the trim and baseboards - or so we thought. Most of the window trim is still intact and with a little sanding and a good coat of paint they will work nicely again. The baseboards, however, did not fair so well... It has taken almost 4 months but they have finally begun to bow and twist in ways I have never seen a piece of wood move. So now we'll have to find a way to budget in new baseboards... We already have to stretch the budget to allow for a lot of extra moulding around cabinets and under cabinets - wherever the sheetrock was removed and replaced and there is now a gap between a piece of wood and the new drywall.. and wherever we had the cabinets drilled to air them out.

If we ever get through all of that we'll probably go outside for a little while and try to fill in the holes in the front yard.. and build the raised flowerbeds back to something like they were before. It's going to take a lot of dirt. We'll have to mulch them all as well - we should at least mulch them to keep the dirt in place. I'm not sure if we'll ever be able to replace the lost plants and shrubs though. I'll leave that to something to dream about.

We'll have to come back in and work again though -- the surround needs to be rebuilt and re-tiled. And we'll have to try to restore and refinish the bathroom cabinet that we had to pull out -- and eventually put it back in it's place. We'll hopefully be able to put the bathroom mirror glass back without breaking it (we don't need the 7 years bad luck, thanks) and we need someone to reinstall the toilet.

Since we'll be learning how to tile - we need to tile the laundry room floor and install the cabinets and countertops there.. as well as replace the countertop and backsplash in the kitchen. I almost forgot the garage -- we need to replace the sheetrock in the garage and repaint there as well...

Then we can start working on the damage upstairs!!! :0)