On the horizon

William's room is being used for storage at the moment.

Materials for the roof have been ordered. A tile sample for the bathroom is waiting for us at the Carpet Cottage. I feel like a thoroughbred bucking at the starting gate.

Since we can feel the impending home improvement chaos looming again - we decided to throw our next project into the mix: William's bedroom. I realize that the normal procedure is to complete a project and move on -- but normal procedure hasn't been the procedure around here since Katrina. Normal for us is having at least 3 or 4 things being ripped out and redone at a time.

The plan for William's room is to remove the chair rail which visually shrinks an otherwise large room. Replace baseboards and window and door trims with something that matches the rest of the house. Replace the overhead light fixtures which are water-damaged. Repaint the room with something a little more sophisticated for our growing kid... And possibly two more larger projects...

The larger projects all revolve around the removal of the wall adjoining the dormer area in the photo. We would very much like to take that wall out and extend it back to match the slope of
the roof. Of course if we do this we will need to do something about flooring since we would be adding new subfloor to the space -- that makes new floor covering the second larger project.

We were feeling pretty confident about all of this just a few days ago... but then an article in the local newspaper dampened my spirits. From the Sun Herald: "The three Coast counties will mail notices beginning the end of this month to let homeowners and businesses know how much their property values have increased since 2002, the last time property was reappraised.

Jackson County notices will go out at the end of the month, Harrison County plans a June mailing and Hancock County hopes to send out the new values by the end of June.

Values have increased an average of 42 percent across Jackson County and 15 to 20 percent in Harrison County, according to the tax assessors' offices."

(Full article here.)

Of course we've once again hit the jackpot living in Jackson County. Our property taxes are already enormous.... And I've already blogged about our staggering home insurance premium....
It seems like every day we take one step closer to not being able to pull this recovery thing off at all. Today I can't shake the feeling that we have been fighting a losing battle here.

With the number of homes destroyed -- and the value of the associated properties decreasing... We all knew that eventually those of us 'lucky' enough to have homes that initially at least partially survived the storm would have to foot more of the bill. Then there was a wave of ridiculous home sales as folks forked over 2 and 3 times more than a given home was worth just to have a roof over their heads... This in addition to the already present and swelling housing bubble everywhere else. We received three offers to buy our home right out from under us during the first three months following Katrina. If you remember at that time our house was still gutted... full of mold.. and we were living on concrete floors. In addition to these things - Pascagoula took a hard hit last year when a measure was passed which would force Chevron (the refinery is less than 1/4 mile from our home) to no longer pay tax benefits to Pascagoula alone and instead spread them out over the entire county (most of the residents of which do not suffer the risk of living near the refinery of course). We knew we'd be footing the bill for that deficit eventually as well.

I told you that was gonna be an expensive patch of pavement in front of our house.

Hurricane Katrina was horrifying... devastating.... tragic. But this... this slow and agonizing death of the Mississippi Gulf Coast is sheer cruelty.