Did We Survive Hurricane Katrina or Not?

The Katrina Homeowners Assistance Grant Program is still stalled indefinitely due to the controversy with the Mortgage Lender folks... The drought is still on despite a bit of rain yesterday... There is still rubble and trash and post traumatic stress disorder everywhere you look... We're in a blog-killing rut.

Dave's father and uncle drove down recently to help and the gesture has motivated us to stop waiting for a sign from above to tell us when to get started again and just.. well.. get started.

First, we decided to tackle the sheetrock in the kitchen closet....

What we have learned is that I am pretty decent at measuring and cutting sheetrock... and Dave can rather skillfully attach it to the wall after that... But neither of us have a future in taping and mudding. We are quite glad we chose to practice with a closet...

William & Yvonne get in the picture-taking action in the kitchen closet.

A bit crestfallen about how the mudding is going so far ... out of sheer desperation we had started filling our free time by tapping up the old mortar on the kitchen floor with a hammer and chisel. At some point this morning we felt a little overwhelmed and started looking for a place where we might rent a tool to speed up the process...

This is what we got:

It's a big nasty noisy thing and it makes a huge mess.... It's only slightly more efficient than the hammer and chisel method -- but since we paid for the rental... we aren't giving up.

William helps clean up some of the mess.

It is now 11:17 pm. We are still making lots of noise and a huge mess in the kitchen. In our excitement upon finding a place that rented a 'tile stripping' tool this morning we sort of forgot that tomorrow is the 4th of July... So we are staying up much too late trying to finish the job.

Hmm.. You know it really doesn't look like we've spent the last
eight hours scraping the floor...

Night has fallen on the floor scraper thing... Yet it spins on -- mercilessly slinging gobs of mortar all over the house.

A thick layer of irritating powder -- eerily similar to the sheetrock dust we dealt with so many months ago -- covers everything. (Hey! That's some of our emergency drinking water for this hurricane season in the background... )

I could probably go on and find many profound things to say about scraping the kitchen floor and using very large rented power tools in the middle of the night on the eve of a holiday celebration... But I won't. Mostly because Dave just informed me it's bad ju-ju to blog about a project before it's finished.

I'll leave it then - til tomorrow and the 4th of July. We are planning to do something tomorrow.. Mom has already fried some chicken for us all .. and I'm going to run out in the wee hours of the morning to grab a watermelon and some waterguns for the kids. We'll catch the fireworks, I'm sure... Er though I hope not literally. I'll try to nab some pictures to share....

Until then... I've got some dusting to do....