Moving right along...

I talked to a sad lady tonight on the phone. She had posted a message on a discussion board asking for help cleaning out her house. She said she had four feet of water through the house. "There's nothing left," she said. "I only have the structure of the house left..." She is afraid of the mold that is growing on the stud walls and is looking for someone who can help her clean it and assure her that the house will be safe for her baby again someday. I gave her the number for CAM and told her they may be able to help her.

The call gave me that familiar eerie feeling -- recently familiar, mind you -- of something like isolation. There are many times lately that I feel disconnected. From my neighbors, from the coast, from the world... All at once but for many different reasons. Katrina herself brought on the initial disconnect with the rest of the world: Beginning with the total lack of communication and then, most recently, with the feeling that the rest of the world has moved on... but here it may as well be August 30th. Our neighborhood is more literally disconnected with almost half of the houses going up for sale... Some of those remaining have been abandoned and only time will tell how temporary the arrangement is... But even those who are here are strangely quiet. It is a ghost neighborhood.

As I look around our home tonight, I suffer a thousand mixed feelings. I still feel the pain of its initial destruction. I am proud that we decided to stick it out and that we have made it this far. I feel so lucky to have come out of this with a roof over our heads -- it could have been worse. I am thrilled to see our progress - real progress. But I am also indescribably confused because I do not understand why we have moved forward while so many seem to be standing still.

For weeks - even months - after the storm Dave and I felt that we must be at a huge disadvantage being young and inexperienced. We assumed that others had more of a clue as to how to handle such a disaster. We assumed that everyone had more resources -- more money in the bank -- and we assumed that it was our lack of money that would keep us from rebuilding. We assumed that we would never be able to get as far as we already have. Looking around now.. at the houses still sitting in their original state of disrepair.. Speaking to neighbors who still have stud walls and don't know where to begin.. I have started to understand that in something as shocking and unprecedented as this disaster - somehow being young and inexperienced becomes an advantage. We had no preconceived notions of how to go about doing things... All we knew is that we should figure out what needed to be done and just start doing it.

And perhaps our relative youth made it a lot easier for us to get past the initial loss. We were not dealing with a lifetime of work and dreams lost in a day. A few years worth, yes. We encountered so many people who told us about the years of patience and work and savings that went into remodelling their family home... The overwhelming depression and the feeling of "We simply can't bring ourselves to do it all again..." For us, this is new. It is possible for us to shake off the sadness and take this as an opportunity for a brand new start.

Immediately after the walls were completed and textured, I started painting. Before we picked up the first paintbrush we were feeling overwhelmed... Knowing that every square inch of the house would need a coat of primer and sealer and at least two new coats of paint. We knew we could not afford the estimates we had been given for painting (between $8,000 and $12,000 just for the walls - not including trim and cabinetry)... So we decided to take it one wall at a time and do it ourselves.


Now in less than two weeks we have completed painting in the babies' room, our bedroom, the kitchen and the laundry room.


The wood floors throughout the downstairs have finally been completed (other than a couple trim projects around some doorway thresholds and around the tile at the fireplace)...


And we have the first coat of paint more than halfway completed in the living room and hallway as of this morning.

The Carpet & Tile store has informed us that someone will be out either this afternoon or tomorrow morning to put down the carpet in the babies' room - and we are so looking forward to Yvonne having a relatively safe place to play. We have also purchased a remnant of carpet from another local carpet store and are having it bound to use as an area rug in the living room which should be available in about two weeks... (This means we have two weeks to figure out how to get the thing home.. It will be quite entertaining trying to stuff it in our mini-van for sure...)

After the floors and walls we will find ourselves looking at a few complicated projects again.. baseboards and trim... cabinets to be repaired and painted... plumbing to be reinstalled in the master bathroom... missing shelves and window sills... countertops and tub surrounds... the broken oven... We have no idea how we will manage to get it all done - but we are confident that we will find a way.

I'm not going to rush ahead though -- I will take this New Year's Day to give thanks for just how far we've come. Happy New Year to everyone out there... to our friends who have made all of this possible for us... to our family who have suffered along with us... and to our neighbors on the Gulf Coast -- Here's to one of the newest years we will ever experience!!