Did We Survive Hurricane Katrina or Not?

Sometimes good things come out of having to completely gut your house after a natural disaster makes it uninhabitable. Really. For instance - you get to find all those things in your house that were never quite right and (hopefully) fix them before they cause a problem in the future. Usually these are things that you would not have noticed until they caused a problem. Things like... This box in our attic:

This box is a molded plastic box also known as a 3-gang switch box. This particular box was broken and full of rusty residue (that's the orange stuff in the box). This box was installed on the floor of the attic with no cover to protect the many, many, many (too many) wires that met in this box. This particular box in our attic was also not used to install any switches.... It was instead used (quite incorrectly) as an electrical junction box.

This is what I've always been told is an electrical junction box. Maybe I'm wrong. But I doubt it. This is what we now have in place of the rusty, broken plastic box. Actually -- we now have several of these in place of that one rusty, broken plastic box.

So you see - on the bright side... We discovered this obvious fire hazard before it was able to destroy our entire house in fire. Of course we had to have our entire house destroyed in a flood before we could discover this thing... But it's still a bright side - I think.

At least the wiring in the attic is neat, logical, safer, and up to code now. If nothing else - our ripping apart the roof and ceiling was worth that.

In the meantime - in addition to the cracked skylight... we found a leak during last night's downpour.

That's water on the topside of the sheetrock there. Of course it isn't the cracked skylight that's leaking. That would be too convenient. It looks like the guys will be reflashing at least two skylights over the next couple of weeks. We're wondering whether or not it would be worth it to just reflash the third while they're up there and now that they've gotten through the experimental phase of construction.

It's mostly our fault. We could not get self-flashing skylights in the size that we needed.... But what we didn't know at the time we purchased our skylights is that there are flashing kits available to make the whole process less painful and more reliable (especially when you're clinging to a 12/12 pitched roof 40 feet in the air) since all of the flashing is already cut to size and ready to install. Dave ordered three flashing kits yesterday when he ordered the replacement skylight -- just in case. And it's a good thing knowing we'll have to use at least two of them immediately.