Month: April 2005

Here we go! Diving into our week of insanity…

The rental house is packed up and we move out of it tomorrow, into a hotel, clean the rental house, and move back into our house on Saturday!!!

This is all very exciting and overwhelming, I can’t believe it is finally here. We still have not received much of the list of Non-salvageables. So as far as I know, we are moving into a house with mattresses and the kitchen stuff I have purchased while living in the rental.

Hmm… this is kind of like camping, but with air conditioning.

Off to pack up the computer! I estimate that I won’t be checking back in until Sunday at least.

Once everyone was safe out of the house, my second thought was for my pictures. They are the only other truly irreplaceable thing that I have.

But the portion of the list that we got today contains 3-4 photo albums.

One says that the album is damaged but the pictures are not, the others make no comment about different conditions. All say that they will return them to us anyway.

The waiting continues…

Well Friday came and the LIST was supposed to be to us by four. at 4:15 I called and asked. They said they had emailed it to me. I didn’t get it. They (Valleywide Fire and Water Damage Specialists) were not in the office and said they would get it to me as soon as they got back. I called and nagged a few more times – not letting them sneak off for another whole weekend after all, and they finally faxed the list to Jay’s work.

There was one more portion than I had received over the past few days. Bring the total to a whopping 143 line items. (Some lines contained multiple items, but STILL!!!) Did It really take them 5 days to type up a list of 143 items? What the heck are they doing with our stuff?

So, predictably, I sound myself freaking out about it again.

But I calmed down and tried to figure out what the deal was. Why do I need to have this list in my hands? Why is it so urgent?

Ah…. it is all about closure. I want the final tally on the distruction so that I can deal with it and move on. But once I realized that was what I was looking for, it quickly slipped through my fingers. The list won’t give me that. Only a painstaking evaluation of all of our stuff BY US after we receive it all back will reveal the final totals. THE LIST will not make anything final, it is really only a starting place, and a poor one at that.

I can live with that. I just had to know if it was over or not. And, well, it’s not. We are still almost at the very beginning of this ordeal. We have had some down time in the rental house to recover and calm down, but now as we receive our belongings and move back into our home the real work begins.

I feel much calmer knowing what is ahead of me, even if it just means that I know that I don’t know what is ahead of me. Why couldn’t they have just told me that in the first place?

Today we got the first fragments of the “Non-Salvageable” List. The salvage company is scrambling to get our list to us by Friday, and I asked them to email me with parts as it was done.

The first email came through with the contents of two boxes of books. It was strange to think that we no longer have these books. They were really random, books that I know were all over the house, not just in one room. It was a small sample of how widespread the damage was.

The second email contained more books and a couple of boxes worth of random items. One of them was the pineapple clock from the kitchen wall downstairs. It surprised me to see an item from downstairs on the list. It’s not like I loved the pineapple clock. It was on my list of things to replace, actually. But it was mine, it was something I looked at every single day, and it was downstairs where I thought very few things would be destroyed.

It made me cry.

I miss my pineapple clock.

I just got back from Target. I had a whole list of things I was going to buy for the house. I walked through and looked at each one. The bench, the sheets, the pajamas, the picture frames, the mirrors, the CLOCKS. I just couldn’t bring myself to buy any of it. (Except the bandaids for Paisley.) I just wanted to go home to my OWN home.

Soon, soon…

The rest of the list will be in our hands by Friday – Or so they say. Then we will finally know the real extent of the damage. Just a couple more days.

Things to do in the next week and a half:
1. Find and unpack all linens, assess damage, wash, prepare for putting on beds
2. Buy new linens if old ones are too damaged
3. Pack up rental house while still living in it
4. Clean rental house
5. Receive list of non-salvageable items, buy things needed to move into house
6. Go over construction and paint problems with contractor
7. Maintain house and feed family
8. find hotel for interim time
9. Move family into hotel.
10. catalog all receipts during all this
11. Get kids to school every day, hold baby, keep three year old from melting down on hourly basis.
12. Pull out all hair and run off into the sunset.

As if I needed a reason to NOT work on packing.

I was just out in the garage sorting some boxes. “Finished” and fully packed on the right, “To Work on” on the left. I picked up a box of toys and moved it over to the DONE pile, walked back to approach the box underneath it, only to find…

A SCORPION

It was sitting right on top, right where I have just had my hand the grab the other box.

Blech. Ewww.

No, I won’t go back. Let’s just pretend there is no garage. No boxes, no garage. There, that was easy. Now I am all done with all that stuff.

(I wish.)

The word is in: Official Construction Date of Completion and Move In, that is… April 30th. Go ahead, glance at your calendar. This is the 12th. The 30th is REALLY DARN CLOSE. And somehow, we have to extricate our belongings from what is “rental” in this house.

I need organizational skills here. I need sanity. There is so much to do I can’t even begin a list at this point. I keep sitting down and trying only to find myself in tears wandering off to try to finish Paisley’s room list, which is first priority. And speaking of lists, we still don’t know if we will have to buy any furniture or other must-have-to live kinds of things because we STILL DON’T have our list!!!!

And then what will happen when we move in? Will they just dump our stuff off and leave me to re-set up my whole house? Or will they try to do it FOR me? I don’t know which is worse!

Deep end – here I come.