The new normal

You know, I'd really love to say something cliche like 'Gee - I can't believe it's been almost five years since Hurricane Katrina destroyed our section of the world' - but I can't. The fact is, I have been pretty aware of every moment that has passed. Time drags. Still waiting. Forgot what we were waiting for now.

We had decided for sanity's sake to stop pushing to complete repairs on the house that we couldn't afford... Well, actually, we didn't need to stop pushing to complete those repairs because not being able to afford them did the stopping for us: What we were trying to do is stop worrying about the repairs we couldn't complete and just live. The worrying thing is much harder to stop.

At the end of March of this year we received a letter from MetLife informing us that they were not going to be renewing our wind coverage. (They call it 'wind coverage' now. Pre-Katrina they had the gall to call this coverage our 'Hurricane Policy'. It's good of them to clear up the terminology -- albeit a little late...) Dave spent the entire 30 day transition searching for replacement coverage. Very few companies were willing to offer 'wind' coverage for our address - not a lot of competition going on out there on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Eventually Dave was able to secure some specialty coverage. I'm not even sure of the exact figures because any time the exact figures are given to me I block them out like the trauma victim I have become. All I know is that our premium is somewhere around $6000 per year now. Six thousand dollars per year so that they can find some way to avoid paying us (again) in the event of an actual loss.

Wait - no - that's wrong. Our premium was somewhere around $6000 per year a couple of weeks ago. Since that time - our new insurance carrier sent out an independent inspector... I was pretty nervous about the unfinished repairs as we're in no position (see above $6000 per year...) to finish up a clump of repairs at once to satisfy the insurance company. Luckily for us - they didn't ask us to make a single repair! Nope. Instead they declared the replacement value of our home to be upwards of $451,000 - putting us on the hook for $407,000 worth of coverage (it was previously $290,000) and an additional $1700 in premiums annually. Oh yay for us!

There's not a lot of incentive here to repair or maintain the house at this point.... If we're stuck with $407,000 in coverage as is -- what happens when it's complete??

Let's follow up that happy bit of news with the discovery that we have now been placed in a high risk flood area on the FIRM map and our flood insurance premium is expected to triple at some unexpected but surely inconvenient time in the future. (Yes that's right.. the seven or eight thousand dollars above doesn't include the NFIP premium.)

Hey - did anybody see the news about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? *twitch*

In the meantime - we're going to fix our porch columns. It's an exercise in insanity. We were briefly happy to find that the only rot going on with the columns involved the trim pieces at the top of the foot of the columns -- untreated wood had been used there previously.

All we'll really have to deal with is lots of sanding and scraping and painting and a few mitered cuts. Easily done with a few minutes here and there over a few weekends. And when we're done our porches will look pretty good again... And we'll probably add $100,000 to the replacement value of our home.... And our insurance premium will go up another $1000.

Maybe we should just leave them as they are. :)