Eight months... but who's counting?

I was reading Mom's blog earlier where she pointed out that today is the eight month anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. If only I had remembered -- I would have baked a cake or something...

The weather seemed to pay her own tribute today -- with a decent sustained wind and some impressive gusts. I asked my mother today if maybe Katrina's winds got here a few months behind schedule.... I decided to go out and take a little video of the current weather conditions to share with my blog audience. Okay, I admit it.. I was fairly tempted to try to pass this off as Katrina video just to see if anyone would buy it. But then I'd have to go back to the one hundred other posts throughout the blog where I mentioned there wasn't much wind... So here it is... Saturday, April 29th - and no hurricane (uh, at least I hope not...):

I really feel for all those people in tiny travel trailers tonight. The winds have been strong enough to break the rope that was holding up our birch tree in the front yard free... and I'm sure it's wreaking havoc on shingles and construction projects tonight -- let alone the remaining blue roof tarps. Oh.. and, yes, that is Yvonne wailing in the background.

Instead of cake - we celebrated this anniversary by ripping up our house a little more. Dave finished removing the leftover baseboards...



Complete with mold. Which - by the way.. is an oddly welcome sight.... Or at least it is when you've taken a hammer and chisel to what appears to be perfectly good trim. It's almost a relief to find something awful behind it to justify the destruction.

Dave's discoveries led me to finally take a utility knife to the carpet on the stairway this afternoon as well... If the baseboards hide that much yuck -- that carpet cannot live with us any longer.

The greatest discovery on the stairway was yet more confirmation that we are not insane and the water had risen as high as we remembered: The carpet pad on the bottom four steps was badly bleached by the water.

The carpet-ripping is still not complete as of this writing... Apparently it takes an awful lot of staples and carpet tack to attach carpet to stairs.

Dave and I compare carpet-removal injuries.

But Dave and I also have the attention span of gnats... (Hmm.. wait... I don't think I understand that analogy anymore.. gnats are tenacious little buggers... but ah well you know what I'm trying to say) So I spent a good chunk of the afternoon packing books from the book shelves to clear them for demolition. Uh.. and we started demolishing the fireplace.

Now the fireplace was definitely one of the things we were most reluctant to touch. Afterall it looked perfectly fine on the outside... There was no obvious warping or bending or flaking.. The tile had not fallen off - and the metal insert was not even showing signs of rust... But, still.. we wondered.. and wondered....

I was the one to take the first blow and crack the tile surrounding the insert. Behind the tile was the first discovery so far that made me audibly gasp. The black mold was thick and gruesome and growing from the floor to just over two feet up.

Some of the fireplace mold.

The insert itself was rusted beneath the tile edges and all along the top along with the nails and screws holding the hidden sheetrock and studs -- suggesting that the entire fireplace had at some point been submerged. It took us a while to figure out the mystery behind so much water in that area as opposed to the others.. but we have a working theory. You see... As I have said before -- the water level outside the house was at least three to four times that of inside our house during the hurricane -- however, the fireplace is housed in a hollow box on the exterior of our western wall.. meaning water would have been building up behind it at a much faster rate than it was actually spilling into the living room.

Of course what this means is.. there is no doubt in our minds now that all of the cabinetry (which also happens to be adjoining exterior walls) will have to go -- even if just to get to what we are sure will be mold-laden sheetrock behind them.

We put William to work on the stairs while we flitted from project to project...

At least we won't have a hard time finding something to do with our time for the next few weeks.

Hope everybody else out there had an equally fantastic Katrina anniversary today. More to come...