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.
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.
THE WALLS ARE UP!!! I went to the house today to meet with the painter (who did NOT show up!) and the dry wall upstairs has all been installed! They were waiting on a drywall nail inspection. (??) But they said that painting should begin soon!!!
Slowly but surely, normal is returning to our lives. Or at least the feeling of normality… I don’t know that we ever were very “normal” – whatever that is!
The house is in progress. We met with the head construction guy last week and went through the house and had the chance to point out things we wanted changed and ask questions about how and why they were doing things. He said they wouldn’t be finished by March 31st as they had originally planned, but hoped to be done by mid-April. (YIPPEEE!!!! HOORAY!!! I had never even hoped it would be that soon! I am sure it may be moved back again, but STILL!!!) We have gone and picked out the new carpet and tile for upstairs, and are working on picking out paint colors as well.
The kids have settled into school and are enjoying themselves. The rental house is still just a rental, but is feeling a little more comfortable and soothing to us all. We all still have days where we are off kilter, and even some bad days where we fall apart a little bit, but they are coming less often and with less intensity when they do come.
We still don’t know what is and isn’t going to need to be replaced from our house. We are waiting on Paisley to complete her list of possessions from her room.
We had a family picture taken the other evening!
We are fairly settled into a rental house, only slightly smaller than our house, and very closeby. I put Posy and Ben into our parish’s Catholic school. They know most of the people there and I am just too stressed out lately to even attemt to homeschool in even a relaxed manner. I hope it will just be for the rest of the school year, but am trying to be open to God’s prompting in that area too. The adjustment was pretty hard for them, but they are doing beautifully now. It’s weird to just have the two littles during the day again. It has been a long time since I have not had an extra set of hands and some older child company around. Tessa misses them too.
They have finally begun demolition on our house. The upstairs is down the the studs. We will get all new walls and everything. We got to go and pick out bathroom fixtures this past Monday. It was surreal. It is hard to buy stuff to replace things. I thought it would be fun to go out and buy all new things – unrestricted shopping. But everytime I go I look at things and just pine for what I already had. A good friend finally dragged me to the store so that I would buy the same pair of shoes that I had before. 🙂
I will do okay for several days and then just kind of fall apart. Sleep is the hardest part right now. When I am okay I sleep fine, but the first clue that I am going to lose it again is waking up at 3AM and not being able to go back to sleep. Sometimes my brain will go into overdrive trying to remember every item we had in the house, and sometimes I will relive the Run From The House over and over. Then I spend a day in tears and then I seem to be okay again. It is just strange. Since everyone was fine, I didn’t expect for the emotional effect to be like this.
Jay is doing about the same as me, fine for a few days and then it hits him again.
Paisley and James are doing okay, although the stress is evident.
The blessings that have come out of this are amazing. We have gotten so much help from our parish, our friends, and even people we don’t even know. We have been inundated with love and prayers and lots of gifts and donations. I have even been reunited with two dear friends from high school through this! God shows me plenty of little graces every day.
I got the computer back yesterday, so I will be able to check email more often, and even get around here very few days.
Thanks to everyone so much for your love and prayers in this time!!!
We got moved to a nicer hotel yesterday, we actually have a sitting room and kitchen now. We will stay there until Tuesday or Wednesday when we get our rental house.
Tessa is really freaked out. We spend 45 minutes consoling her last night and telling her that we were safe now and that the smoke alarm would not go off where we were. There would be no smoke, etc. We just had to tell her over and over, she kept asking the same questions.
So this morning, I got up after not sleeping for a while, it was finally morning and got into the shower. While I was in there I heard a loud noise. I thought to myself, “No, it just could NOT be… it would not be the smoke alarm.” Sure enough Jay poked his head in the door and told me the smoke alarm was going off.
I got out, and since there was no visible smoke yet, I threw some clothes on and a towel around my head, grabbed some stuff and we ran out to the van with the kids. (It was about 6:15am at this time, they were all still sleeping. And Yes, Ben was again in his underwear!!!)
After a few minutes, Jay went in to see if he could find anything out and the alarms were off and the hotel staff let everyone know it was just a kitchen fire and was out now and we could all come back in.
Ack. Did I not have enough adrenaline?????