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. :)

Destruction.. ergo Construction

Mom posted a new montage on her blog yesterday that I must share. It's an excellent view of the state of things here in Pascagoula 1033 days post-Katrina... And an interesting look at the various house styles under construction here in the aftermath. (There's even a picture of this house thrown in there somewhere if you watch carefully... That is, more carefully than me... I missed it the first time.)

From I Will Make Everything New: "Yes We are still rebuilding!"

Check out the montage ---->here<----

Paradise by association

Congratulations to my sister, Peggy, and her husband, Bruce, for getting their freshly-completed house featured in this week's Sun Herald Home section! From the article:

The house is a Florida-style design with stucco exterior, big rooms, big windows and a tropical flavor everywhere. Floors upstairs are bamboo and on the ground level, they're stained concrete.

"We did it ourselves," both Peggy and Bruce will say at different times.

"He loves to build and I love to plan," Peggy said.

More from the article here: "Welcome to Paradise"
And be sure to check out the photo tour as well!

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.

Little patch of tarry heaven

Back in February of 2007, I had blogged a link to the local newspaper for an article entitled: "Promenade a sign of progress in Pascagoula". The article has disappeared into the murky depths of broken internet links now... The title alone remains. Literally - the title alone remains. Because you see -- there was no promenade built in Pascagoula as the title had suggested. That article referred to plans to build a beautiful promenade along Pascagoula's waterfront. There is no promenade... The city did hang some banners on the broken street lights (those that weren't broken off at ground level anyway) along the waterfront... but it's not quite the same as the vision they had given us all back in 2007.

Mom had blogged about this one back in 2007 as well. Of course that article is gone as well -- but it outlined a four-year repaving plan for Pascagoula's city streets. I don't think our neighborhood made it into that four-year plan. At least... now I hope not - for this wonder of municipal beautification appeared directly in front of our house sometime yesterday:

Yes - our concrete slab streets are in bad shape... Just driving around the block out here is something like the kiddie-rides at Disneyworld. The enormous amount of water back in 2005 took the sand and clay right out from under our roads and dumped it somewhere in the bayou, I think. But, still, I fail to see how anyone could think that patching cement streets with asphalt would be a good idea. So much for curb appeal.

A roof over our heads

Eep. The siding repair didn't blend as you can see in this picture.

It became pretty obvious as the months went on following Katrina that the roof patch-job was not enough and we needed the whole thing re-done. However, we admittedly put it off as long as we possibly could. Now that the leaks are threatening to destroy the work that we have actually completed inside -- the time has come to bite the bullet and tackle the roof.

Wind-damaged shingles.

First, we called all the numbers on the roofing estimates we have received over the last two-and-a-half years. Approximately 90% of those numbers were now disconnected. The messages we left with the other 10% went unanswered. (The same held true with numbers in the yellow pages, incidentally.) One exception was Shelter Roofing. In February of 2006, we hired this company to replace the missing siding and fascia on the house following Katrina. (It was another company that actually did the roof repairs -- one of the companies with the now-disconnected number... So much for warranties.)

Eep again! The shingle patches didn't blend either.

Shelter didn't actually show up as scheduled back in 2006 -- but then... No one showed up as scheduled back in 2006. And can we really blame them for just how bad the siding job looks today -- knowing that it would have been best (had we the money at the time) to replace ALL of the siding on the house? We don't have any particular love or loyalty for Shelter Roofing - but they did eventually show up and do the work in 2006. And they did return our phone call this time.

As you can see - our roof is huge. Plenty of places to leak. Lots of shingles to get torn off. Plenty of pitch to slide any roofer right off into the garden below.

They even sent someone out (We'll call him "Brian" - because that's his name... "Brian") to give us an estimate this afternoon. The damage: $16,000+. That's for 50-year architectural fiberglass shingles on 66.5 squares. Oh - and don't forget the 12/12 pitch that makes even the boldest of men a little squeamish.

Building South Mississippi Together |"Phenomenal" Biloxi Bridge Completely Open

Biloxi Bay Bridge on our visit to Ocean Springs in August 2007.

"Phenomenal" Biloxi Bridge Completely Open: "After 31 months, one week, and two days, Biloxi and Ocean Springs have been reconnected, by a $338 million concrete marvel. The federal government paid for the replacement roadwork, just like it paid for the $283 million bridge that reconnects Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis."



Biloxi Bay Bridge before and after animation from the SunHerald: http://www.sunherald.com/images/beforeafter/biloxibridge.html

For more info, the Mississippi Department of Transportation maintains a website for the Biloxi Bridge project at http://biloxibridge.com/index.php

For continuity's sake....

First, the good news: I finished the basecoat for what will someday be Yvonne and Emily's upstairs bedroom.

Very pink room.

Next step for the room: Colorwashing. The texture is subtle and will look something like this test board when complete (I hope).

Pretty test board.

Now, I shall continue to chronicle the bumps in the road on the way to recovery.....

It rained yesterday. I quickly discovered that the leak that has developed in our North and South windows has not effectively been stopped (at least in the North windows.... I can only make assumptions about South windows until we get a storm from that direction). The dripping water ruined the greeting cards I had so optimistically placed in the kitchen window.

Ruined card.

Mid-afternoon it was realized that we'd received no word regarding Dave's Jeep which ended up in the shop Tuesday after not starting in the parking lot of the grocery store (while Dave was picking up William's birthday cake to deliver to the house). When Dave called the shop he was a little irritated - borderline angry - that no one had tried to contact him. Of course, we should have realized that they had indeed tried to call but Dave's cell phone wasn't working.... but let's not go off on that tangent right now. The repair shop was calling to tell Dave that they had lost the keys to his Jeep and had not been able to work on it at all during the week as a result....

Missing Jeep.

Next I realized that I was spending far too much time running to the breaker box resetting a circuit breaker when the lights and monitor in the girls' downstairs room kept going off. On the same circuit -- the entire south side of our Christmas light display. I assumed of course that I had simply overloaded the circuit, but unfortunately the breaker still tripped within 5 minutes of resetting when all of the extra load was removed. Therefore, Dave will be spending some of Friday replacing the circuit breaker as well as the GFCI outlet on our front porch which we just remembered was at least four feet underwater in August 2005. Let's consider the reminder a bright side.

Dave and a breaker box.

Finally, a glance at the ceiling in the girls' room last night left us in a bad mood for bedtime. This was a spot that leaked last during Katrina and was attributed to missing shingles by our insurance company. Apparently, they were wrong.

Another roof leak... more ceiling repairs.

And this brings us to the end of our update for this afternoon.... Let's hope there aren't too many follow-up posts to this one .... At least not before Christmas.

For a brief moment today I could actually imagine our entire house repaired and restored. In that moment I felt at least five conflicting emotions: joy, sadness, guilt, relief, and fear.

I suppose the 'joy' part is obvious. Eighteen months - almost nineteen months - since Hurricane Katrina happened. Long stretches of no hope or uncertainy followed by short stretches of slow progress or disappointments. Finally, here we are at a point when it seems entirely possible that we will come through all of this with our home once again intact - and our finances not totally wrecked. We'll be normal again. We'll sit on furniture and hang pictures on the walls. We'll cook dinner and eat at the table and play in the yard on long summer evenings.

The sadness comes mostly from thinking about how we got here in the first place. Anything at all that reminds me of that fateful day in August and that horrific week that followed calls up a wellspring of dark and miserable emotions. I feel desolate. I mourn for the lives that we all had before August 29, 2005 because they are gone forever... no matter how hard we try to piece them back together. Katrina is our only reference point here now. Every event of our lives is cleanly fit into one of two categories: before Katrina and after Katrina. Beyond that - nothing matters. We are changed people. All of us.

The guilt has always been there. Guilt because we survived and so many didn't. Guilt because our home stood and so many didn't. Guilt because we received assistance before others did. Guilt because we didn't lose our loved ones and so many others did. Guilt because Dave never lost his job and there are so many with no income now. Guilt for having the means to help ourselves a little and there are those who simply never stood a chance. And now we will be faced with the guilt of moving on while others are still waiting for some hope.

Yet I feel so relieved today to have gotten this far, knowing that the rest of the ride is downhill.
All of these months of worrying about whether or not we could pull this off stand a chance of coming to an end. I will be able to sleep again. The hardest part for us has passed.

And that's where the fear comes in. We have lived like this for so long now - it is hard to imagine anything else. Every day and every night has been consumed with planning and praying for the next step - the next solution. We have lived and breathed the restoration of our home ever since we shovelled the first glob of goop out of our house. Now I'm asking myself: "So what am I supposed to do now?"

It's not that we won't have home improvement projects to do for the next few years... It will be a long time before every single repair is complete. It's just that the doom has lifted and normalcy is knocking at the door. What is the price of normalcy? Will I have to face all of the mental and emotional recovery that I've neglected while feverishly focusing on fixing our house? I'm not ready.

I had hoped that fixing the house would feel like fixing myself. I had believed that with each completed room I would start to feel whole again. I'm not so sure that will happen now.... It seems like the house is much more complete than I am at the moment and I don't think I'll be catching up anytime soon.

Or...

Maybe I'm wrong and the return of cabinet doors to the house will make everything better.

The Sun Herald | 02/13/2007 | Promenade a sign of progress in Pascagoula

The Sun Herald | 02/13/2007 | Promenade a sign of progress in Pascagoula

We have baseboards...

I've done a lot of soul-searching over the last few days about the house and repairs and Dean, our contractor... And I remembered the things I promised when all of this began, I think. It has been so very, very long now that I lost sight of our goals and priorities.

When Katrina destroyed the house almost eighteen months ago - we agreed that God wanted us to learn from the experience. We accepted that He had His reasons for taking so much away... and believed that He would take care of us. That was the source of our patience back then. Little by little He gave us so much. Through our insurance settlement, FEMA emergency money, kind folks from all over helping out in His name, and the miracle that is the Homeowner's Assistance Program -- we have escaped ruin. We promised that this house would forever belong to Him.. and that whatever repairs we made would be for His glory rather than our own.

Yet, just like the ungrateful human being I am... As soon as things start to get a little more comfortable - as soon as the end is in sight - my patience wears thin and I start forgetting the lesson and the promises I made.

My blog readers know just how angry I was about our contractor and the slow pace of repairs... and the movement of signs and just about everything else. At the same time, however, I had this nagging voice booming in the back of my head saying "Patience.. patience.. remember patience?" I kept telling that voice to be quiet but it never listened to me. This weekend I finally gave in and prayed about it.

It's so strange how we can pray every day - and, therefore, feel as if we have never stopped praying... Yet sit down one day and pray with our hearts and realize immediately that we've been fooling ourselves all along.

This weekend was real prayer. Not whining, complaining prayer. Not selfish 'okay so I'm doing what you want - what gives?' prayer. Real prayer - as in: "I give up. You take care of it."

Dave and I are big C.S. Lewis fans.. and we have copies of the Chronicles of Narnia scattered throughout the house at all times, so it was not all that odd that I had picked up a copy of "Prince Caspian" late one night over the weekend and started idly thumbing through it to pass the time until I felt sleepy. I found myself at the part of the story when the children had been enduring many hardships in the wilderness during their search for the prince. They had little to eat and it was cold and they were sleeping on the hard ground night after night... but they were doing Aslan's bidding. Then they encountered the green lady and the silent knight - and she promised them great feasts and warm beds when they made it to the city of giants. From that point on they lost sight of all they were to do. They found everything unbearable... they argued and complained... and they missed every sign that Aslan sent to them.

And that's how my prayer was answered.

We have baseboards... Lots of baseboards! "Bob" and "Slim" installed and awful lot of them Monday and we're now only missing a few here and there where other work has to be done first.

Yesterday the Blossman guy showed up a day early with our fireplace trim. After about an hour and a half of drilling and banging - he finally took the screen door part of the kit back to the shop with him and promised to order another... The doors didn't line up correctly and we're considering this to be a factory defect. He did hang the arched front in place which we removed about an hour after he left. Not only did he simply not install at least two pieces of the kit for some reason... but it just so happens that I was right and the tile needs to be installed before the trim kit goes on. Thankfully, he did not charge us for installation.

We called Dean immediately to let him know that the fireplace is now ready for tile - and then we made a run for Lowe's in Gautier to pick up a few extra boxes of the marble to allow for cuts. I'm guessing since I missed the tub surround by seven tiles that I probably did the same thing with the fireplace.

Someone might be here today to start tiling then... Might. And I'm ready.

Being obsessive and surviving Hurricane Katrina

What has me pacing today? Eighteen months have passed since the day of Hurricane Katrina. We have food, water, and ice. We have electricity and working plumbing. The house smells good. We have floors and walls. We even have one and a half working vehicles. (Sorry, Dave - the truck doesn't count as an entire working vehicle.)

Having the house fixed is frustrating, yes... But if I'm honest then I have to admit that most of the time it is more exciting than frustrating. We have the chance to redecorate. We have the time (plenty and plenty of time) to make choices and do things exactly the way we'd like to do them. For the moment at least -- and I do try to stay in the moment as much as possible -- we have enough money to finish the tasks at hand. So, yes... having the house fixed is actually a good thing.

So what's up with my anxiety?

The little things. The little things make me bite my nails and keep me awake at night. No exaggeration here -- this stuff really, really gets to me. I think before you could totally understand why the simple lack of finished baseboards is eating away at my very core -- you would have to know me a little better.

Yesterday, Mom told me that my sister, Peggy, is currently fighting a losing battle against her new driveway and some clay. Apparently, they just had one half of their new driveway installed at their new house - and this is a good thing. The bad thing is that the as yet incomplete yard is mostly clay.... and it has rained a lot lately. Sticky clay + new driveway = crazy-making This equation holds true if you've got some of our blood running through your veins, I think. Poor Peggy now finds herself pressure-washing the driveway constantly to remove the red clay and has resorted to washing car tires before they are allowed on the drive. This is bad. But I understand. See - Peggy couldn't live without baseboards for long either.

This afternoon as I lay sprawled on my living room floor checking for smudges on the hardwood finish... I thought to myself: "I think I have some sort of obsessive disorder." If I can't see my reflection in the wood floor - then I haven't cleaned it enough.

I don't even think these floors are meant to shine like this. As a matter of fact, the floor- refinisher guy (who incidentally didn't ever call us back) who was here a couple months ago said he'd never seen this kind of floor with such a shiny finish. Ha! And it looked smudged to me.

What did you see in this picture? I snapped it while critiquing the shine on the floors... But when I actually uploaded the picture all I could see is the lack of baseboard, the drywall mud around the electrical outlet, the missing cabinet doors, the old carpet scrunched up against the wall in the background, and a lump of something black on the kitchen floor (I think it's a sweater. I hope it's a sweater because we don't own a black cat). Please save me.

If you're familiar with Mom's blog then you are aware that there may well be a genetic component to this sort of thing. As I was backing out of her driveway yesterday afternoon, she was furiously sweeping away at tiny leaves that had gathered near her garage door. "I remind myself of Peggy," she said. "And me!" I shouted back. Yeah. I wonder where we get it from.

Thank goodness we never got a FEMA trailer. I would have killed myself trying to Clorox the thing to remove the mildew. That is, if I had survived it being not perfectly straight in the yard... or a cinderblock out of place underneath. And the pipes that they run from the trailer to the water and sewer lines... OH what a bad idea! The grass grows up around them in our warm weather and they're much too low to the ground to allow lawnmowers to pass under. What this means is that if we had gotten a FEMA trailer - I would have spent the last 18 months outside cutting the grass with scissors.

I think Swapna understands. Or at least Swaperfectionista would understand.

Dave was trying to cheer me up around New Year's this year and told me he wanted to buy me something. Anything. Anything I wanted - just name it. Did I tell him I wanted a mink coat? A new ring? A sequined red dress? Five hundred dollar shoes? Nope. I asked for a Bissell SpotBot. I don't have a jewelry habit. I don't shop at fancy stores. I am not particular about my hair or my makeup. However, I am sure I have more cleaning supplies than Servicemaster. I think I was the first person in Pascagoula to buy a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser -- and this makes me proud.

So what happens to someone like me after a major catastrophe?

I lose my mind, that's what.

Maybe someday when the house... and the town... the county... the entire coastline.. is put back together - I'll be able to settle down. For now though I think I'll go try to get the sheetrock dust out from behind the glass on the oven clock.

Apparently our house made "Clint" sick yesterday. He was up all night feeling rather lousy and won't be coming today to start the tile. This is the fate that awaits anyone who dares to disturb the pre-Katrina stuff in our house.

Dave's feverish bid to complete the pantry over the weekend included foolish attempts to remove old sheetrock dust from top shelves and the actual stuff that was once housed in the pantry... For two days now he's been living off Benadryl and Theraflu.

My own box-emptying project which included sorting through flooded and non-flooded items has only left me with a low-grade fever and a hacking cough... But then I think I've developed a pretty strong immunity to the stuff by constant exposure for 18 months.

Hopefully, everyone will recover enough by tomorrow to start actually laying tile.

How'd you spend Superbowl Sunday?

As for me - I spent the day unpacking dusty boxes. All day. Lots of dust. *cough* *sneeze*

There is a conspicuous absence of stacks of boxes in the living room tonight. We did manage to move a lot of the stuff into the finally-painted pantry. We also moved a lot of the stuff directly to the back of Dave's truck for a trip to the dump. The most foolish move of the day would have to involve filling the kitchen drawers with stuff for the first time in months. It isn't all that foolish at the moment -- but! Said kitchen drawers are missing their finished faces... and those faces will have to be put back onto these drawers at some point in the future... and chances are I will have to remove everything from the drawers in order to do such a thing...

But... I don't know when that will be. It could be months. Months! And I can't live any more months out of boxes. This family of six is tired of fighting over three spoons. I'm tired of using a butter knife to stir soup. Most of all -- I really missed my junk drawers. Oh I know.. you probably groan at the thought of your junk drawers (c'mon.. we all know you have them)... But stop tonight and think what you would do without them. Where are your spare mismatched buttons? Stray rubberbands? Rusty scissors? Where's that needle thing you need to inflate the basketball? The mini-flashlight? A pencil for the grocery list? The ring of keys to stuff that you don't have anymore? Where would they go - if there was no junk drawer? They're good things. And I'm happy to have mine back.

I also foolishly began to sort of decorate the kitchen. Yes - I know - I have no cabinet doors.. and I know it all has to be put away before anyone can finish painting and reinstalling doors... but in the meantime -- I think it will bring some much-needed sanity to our place. Thanks to Mom, Swapna, my sister Peggy, and my childhood friend Dan for my current favorite kitchen items.

The cool beaded lamp from Dan.

The fantastic kitchen utensil thingie from Swapna. (Bad picture - dark corner.. but in real life it sparkles, I tell you...)

My all-time favorite salt and pepper dispensers from Mom.

And shiny sealife courtesy of my sister Peggy.

____________________________________________________________________

In other news -- we mourned the loss of the table saw this afternoon. I can't say we got a lot of use out of it between Katrina and now - and perhaps if we had tried we would have parted company a lot sooner - but... at least it got to take up some space in the garage for a good long while. Farewell, tablesaw. We barely knew you.

Deceased tablesaw in the back of Dave's truck.

How You Can Help!! Volunteer Today

DOLTR-How You Can Help: "Volunteers are still desperately needed in the hurricane devastated area! Both skilled and unskilled workers are welcomed. Just a few areas where help is needed include:

* Carpenters
* Plumbers
* Cleanup
* Drywall

* Tile Work
* Electricians
* Painters
* Loading & Unloading"

"Please understand that you do not HAVE to be skilled to come and you do not HAVE to come with a group. Many individuals have volunteered, and with one phone conversation, we can figure out the best way to use your skills to benefit those devastated by Hurricane Katrina."

CALL FOR INFO:
228-701-0555
-or-
228-701-0618

Sick kids, half-painted pantries, and the tile aisle at Lowe's are quite exhausting....

So tonight I'm directing everybody to Mom's blog for her latest couple of posts of pictures from Gulfport & Biloxi this weekend:

Second Street in Gulfport

Downtown Gulfport

Biloxi

I honestly don't know what to do with myself.

I woke up about three times in the middle of the night last night and went into the kitchen to make sure it was still there.

This morning I'm hoping to hear from the painting guys. The cabinet frames need finishing - and now of course all of the baseboards and trim need caulking and painting to finish... and after all that the walls will need touch up and a fresh coat in places.

______________________________________________________________________

The painting guys arrived nice and early and started caulking trim and priming the plinth blocks. All was well with the world...

So what exactly came over me a couple hours later when Scotty asked me if he could take my paint swatch to Sherwin-Williams so they could match it instead of using the same brand I had previously used? It wasn't an immediate state of panic... The guys had already left for the paint store by the time it came on. What if the color isn't exactly the same as the one I spent months picking? What if I don't like the sheen? What if it goes on too thick? Why did we hire people to paint when painting is the one thing in the realm of home improvement that I can do with complete confidence?

Dave caught the brunt of the panic attack. In an effort to calm me down as quickly as possible he immediately hung up and called Dean. Seconds later he called me back to tell me not to worry -- he told them to use my brand of paint. Poor, poor Dave. This of course sent me into a total tail-spin. I didn't want to argue with anybody about paint brand comparisons... No no.. I just don't want them to paint the walls. At all. With any brand of paint.

Dave hung up again and, this time, showed up for lunch at the house. Done. He has requested that everything but the walls be painted. Phew.

So now I'm happy. But my happiness is mixed with the nagging sensation that I'm over-reacting to something.

Maybe it's a control issue. It's very, very stressful to watch other people do things to our home. It's extra stressful when coupled with experience. Even the nicest and seemingly most skilled workers have left disappointment in their wake. And right now.. after sixteen months of living with things the way they are -- I simply can't handle the thought of reviewing any part of a remodeling project and not being completely elated. The cabinets look great - and the painted trim is looking great. As far as I'm concerned those are two painting elements that cannot be messed up. Why? Because I have absolutely no desire to paint them myself. The trim and baseboards are very well done. I couldn't be happier... even if I had done it myself... But - again - I have no desire to do it myself. The floor.. well we all know I have grout issues... but I couldn't have tiled it myself... and the grout is fixable: by me - no less. It's just that the walls... Ah the walls... I like to paint walls. It's my kitchen. Maybe I just feel the need to reclaim it.

Yes -- I'm sure that's it. Besides, I hate watching other people work. I feel uncomfortable... lazy... inadequate. And that's when they're doing a good job. Throw in a sloppy or incompetent tradesman and I'm impossible to live with.

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The painters didn't return following the trip to the paint store and my change of plans. But someone is here now -- we'll call him "Slim" -- taking down the kitchen shutters. Dean was here earlier as well but now all that remains is his trailer and some saw horses. I think the plan is to install the kickplate under the cabinets today -- or at least get them cut and ready to go since they need to be painted black before installation.

Other plans include caulking the area along the kitchen ceiling where the crown moulding has pulled away from the ceiling and installing some standard crown moulding in our pantry.

No progress yet.. But I should share a few more pictures in the meantime.

Shutters.

"Slim" caulking.

10:38 am Update:

Can you see it?? That's an installed baseboard back there. I had forgotten what it looked like!

Also since my last update - we've heard from Lowe's and the countertop people. Our countertop has been located and, by what I am sure is nothing but complete and utter coincidence *cough cough*, it just so happens that they are working on the fabrication of our countertop at this very moment!! Right! And it should be done today or tomorrow.... We were also told that they see no reason why it can't be installed by the end of this week! They must not be planning on losing it again....

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After fighting a losing battle with the flu all weekend-long -- I am back to blogging (I hope) this week.

I'm sure there's plenty to report - but not a whole lot to show for it.

We got a call early Friday morning from our painters letting us know that they wouldn't be able to make it. We didn't get a call from Dean letting us know that he wouldn't be able to make it though. And so that day dragged by.. waiting.... for... nothing.

Monday morning brought the painters around. There was a phone call from A & E appliance repair to let us know that their technician had the flu (Ha!) and couldn't come out until Friday... A call to Lowe's didn't bring us any closer to finding out where our countertops are... And Dean showed up with some painted trim and his 'trim guy' for a quick walk-through of trim-related work to be done in the kitchen.

In the meantime, we have ordered grout stain in the proper color which should be in at the end of this week.

I just get the impression of having lots and lots of irons in the fire right now. The question is whether or not the fire is actually hot this time. On the bright side -- literally -- the painters have actually applied paint to the cabinets this time around and we're quite happy with it so far.

It's 7:27 am. I am not sure when the painters will be here - or the 'trim guy' either. I am awake. I have coffee. I am ready.

We discovered early yesterday that scrubbing the grout with abrasive pads does not actually change the color of the grout. It is quite seriously beige all the way through. After mulling over countless articles on the internet - we have come to the conclusion that too much water was used in one or all of the application procedures when grouting. (See this article http://www.askthebuilder.com/616_How_to_Grout_Tile.shtml and read the builder's answer about what NOT to do when grouting to get a step-by-step account of exactly what our installer DID do while grouting.)

Would it do any good to argue about the methods used? No. The expected response would be a rather gruff: "That's a bunch of bull.. I've been doing this for(insert fabricated number here)years and I've never had this problem before."

The plan is to wait however many days we are supposed to wait and then apply grout stain ourselves. Since we had already agreed to seal the grout ourselves -- and the stain is also a sealer -- it's not really any extra step for us...

I heard from Dean just a few minutes ago who called to tell me that two guys that he brought by yesterday will be acting as new painters on our kitchen project. They have instructions to call ahead to let me know when they will be arriving this week to paint the cabinets. The trim should be installed at the end of the week.

In the meantime - we have not heard from our countertop people yet. I expect to hear from them this week. And I mean that in a rather demanding school-marm tone: I EXPECT to hear from them THIS WEEK. Like that.

Have I mentioned just how difficult it really is to feed and entertain four kids all day long with no kitchen? We keep running out of plastic cups because the boys truly believe that 'disposable' means they should be disposed of after every sip of water. We have the microwave set up in the laundry room and the refrigerator in the dining room. There are food items scattered around the house -- on the mantel.. the sidebar... the entertainment center.. the pool table...
And finding a fork in this house is a monumental task. We're using the guest bathroom as the kitchen sink... and it's difficult. Does anyone else have a weird feeling about rinsing out dishes in a bathroom sink? I need to add that to my quirks list.

But through it all -- everybody is handling it rather well. I just don't think we're going to be able to handle a Christmas like this. Last year -- all we had was a functional (but not exactly aesthetically pleasing) kitchen.. This year -- we don't even have that.

The break is over...

Cosmo is getting settled in now -- and Judge has already decided a puppy is even better than a boring old chew toy. Three out of four of the kids are sick with the usual seasonal gook - so I can't say that things are calm in the household -- but they're somewhat normal anyway.

And with things back to normal -- that means it is time to start tearing stuff apart again. Tonight -- Project: Countertops.

We worked today on removing the existing countertops in preparation for our new countertops actually coming in when we were told they should. (Ha!) We have most of them out of the way now -- except for the kitchen island and one corner near the oven cut-out.


We talked to Dean tonight about the grout and the weatherstripping on our back door. He said he'll be coming tomorrow around noon to look at it all and also to work on the sheetrock behind our sink so that it's nice and level before counters and backsplashes go in.

Maybe this will be a busy week? Maybe the grout will get dirty enough to look like the right color? Stay tuned and we'll find out together.