DieselDave
Super Moderator,
I\'m back and CPF is the reason
Let me start by thanking everyone here at CPF for all their tremendous support. It is due to your help I am back on CPF today. I bought this computer with the generous donation from the CPF collective. I told Sasha the thing I missed most, after power, water and food of course, was CPF. This large group of people is a genuine community that cares about one another. We have our differences but at the end of the day we usually come back for something kin to a group hug.
Overall we are doing great. We have replaced all the appliances, put down 12 pallets of sod and have the yard about 80% clean. We won't start the interior restoration until we hear back from the SBA about our loan. Once we have a big pile of money in place we will start tearing out the floors, sub floors and floor joist. We will have some type of foundation poured and then start putting it back together. We have a blue roof from the Corps of Engineers so that will be fine for a while. The kitchen is mostly cleaned out already. We saved a few cabinets for the time being so we can have a sink. Lezli keeps spraying them with bleach because mold is a real problem and it keeps coming back. We have all new beds, mostly donated and a little bit of new furniture, all donated. We don't need any more furniture because that will just be more to remove when we tear out the floors. Oh yea, I have AC now! I got a new AC about a week and a half ago. It's really helping with the drying out process. My electrical system is a mess and no one will touch it until the underside of my house gets dried out and that won't happen until the slab is poured. I am still using torches extensively every day as we don't have any power in three rooms and all the houses around my house are vacant so no ambient light other than street lights. We have a FEMA trailer in the back yard to live in. It's small but actually pretty nice and the price is right. J I am so lucky to have power and the chance to repair my house. The houses on either side of me are condemned. I think the reason my house is only a "uninhabitable-enter at your own risk" classification and not condemned is because with all the help I got we probably had 1000 man hours of work and clean-up completed before the building inspector came by and I had talked a crew into connecting my power so we looked pretty good. We've had so much help from so many people. The hole thing has been amazing and I feel so blessed.
Enough of "this old house"
Lessons learned about torches and 2+ weeks without power:
Everyone that comes over or stays over at night wants to use one of your "cool" lights. For me that meant handing out several 2x123 incans. I went through batteries like jelly beans. I was using batteries more than anyone and was in moon mode on my L4 with no spares to pull from other torches when 2-dozen Surefire batteries arrived from McGizmo, thanks. Bottom line, you don't need 60 lumens very often when the next closest light is 30 miles away. 10 lumens would have been fine for most task and 30 would have covered every task. Having "moon mode" on a torch is an absolute lifesaver. I used my L4 in moon mode for 2-3 nights. A high power car rechargeable light is awesome. I had 2 Tigerlights I would alternate every night. I would bring the light into the middle of the room, set it on the floor facing the ceiling and we could see to get around in most of the house for 50-60 minutes. I have white walls and ceilings so that helped. The single LED AA and AAA lights are great. The key chain coin cell lights didn't get used all that much. I would hang an ARC AAA from the ceiling in a small room and you could get around. I did the same with a Infinity Ultra. By the time power was restored both my ARC AAA and the Ultra were gone, where, I will never know. It is damn dark at night with no ambient light from other areas. I mean damn near cave dark sometimes when the moon is small and it's overcast. Make sure you have lights and a trunk full of batteries if you see the possibility of this type situation.
Generators; Bigger isn't always better
I started with an old 4,000 watt Coleman I've had for 6-7 years. It puts out enough power for 2 small window units, a severely ailing frig and 3-4 fans. It also burns ½ gallon of fuel an hour. That's 12 gallons a day, 24 every two days and so on. Gas was a severe problem for 3 weeks. There was no gas for 3 days then they were a few stations open for the next week and a half. The lines varied from 200-500 cars long and you could get 10-15 gallons of fuel. Sure, wait in line 3-4 hours for 1-day worth of generator fuel. I was having people pick up fuel as they drove in from Texas to help during the first 10 days. I caught a station opening up for the first time one evening and got 35-40 gallons in my cans and another 20 in my truck. When my folks arrived, about day 7, they brought (2) Honda 2000 watt gens. The Honda's burned one gallon every 6.5 hours. Running both of them together was still a fuel savings of nearly half. The other nice thing about the Honda's are they are so quiet you can stand next to it while it's running and speak in normal volumes. My big generator can be heard from 200-300 yards away. The down side of the Honda's is you can buy (2) 4000 watt Coleman's or others for less than the price of one 2000 watt Honda. Honda sells an adapter for the 2000-watt that allows you to connect two of the units together to make one 4,000-watt generator. The part cost $90 so when my Dad told me about it as he purchased the generators in Texas I said, "no I don't need that." Boy was I wrong. I don't want to try and explain it but trust me when I say it's much harder to run the same amount of items on (2) 2,000 watt generators than it is on (1) 4,000 generator, the 2,000 are easily overloaded. Bottom line, spend the extra money for the Honda's but buy the adapter. If someone had driven past the house and offered to sell me an adapter for $250 I would have bought it. A down side to the Honda's is they only run 6.5 hours on a tank of fuel which means they won't run all night. Having a little AC on a hot night after a hot day and high humidity makes all the difference in the world. OBTW: I used the 4,000-watt on most nights because it would run 11 hours and the exhaust would heat my 3 pots, totaling 7 gallons of water to about 120 degrees if left near the exhaust over night. 7 gallons is enough hot water for two people to bathe.
Cash on hand: After a bad disaster cash is king and $1,000 isn't nearly enough.
There were no banks open for the first 10-14 days. You might think why do you need cash when there's nowhere to spend it. You need cash to pay the people that flood your town the next day for the cleanup. Tree cutters, debris removal, food, supplies and water takes cash. I made some great deals on tree removal and clean up the first week because my sister brought cash with her when she came from Texas. When the jobbers found out I had cash their price would drop considerably so they could get the job, they needed cash and everyone was paying with a check. My sister made an emergency call to all my family and friends in Texas the first afternoon and had a wad collected by the next AM. She left that afternoon and I had money by noon the next day. 2 days after that I was broke again but had more money inbound with my folks.
FEMA and the Red Cross
I love them and can't say enough good things about them. A Red Cross hot meal out of the back of their van and a 12 pack of water in donated white Budweiser cans is manna from heaven after a storm. Their magnesium food heaters are cool. All the FEMA folks we dealt with genuinely seemed to give a damn.
Ins. Companies
They try to blame everything on flood water whether you have flood ins. or not, which I didn't. Example: I had a lot of things blow off a tall hutch and similar when the wind blew out windows. The ins. Company says, since the item landed in water it is flood damage not wind damage so it's not a wind loss, therefore it's not covered by your homeowners policy.
Neighbors, friends, family and CPF
The greatest, they saved my ***.
You can see some Before and after shots here.
I couldn't bring myself to shoot interior shots but with 4' of seawater in the house at the high point you can guess how it looked.
Let me start by thanking everyone here at CPF for all their tremendous support. It is due to your help I am back on CPF today. I bought this computer with the generous donation from the CPF collective. I told Sasha the thing I missed most, after power, water and food of course, was CPF. This large group of people is a genuine community that cares about one another. We have our differences but at the end of the day we usually come back for something kin to a group hug.
Overall we are doing great. We have replaced all the appliances, put down 12 pallets of sod and have the yard about 80% clean. We won't start the interior restoration until we hear back from the SBA about our loan. Once we have a big pile of money in place we will start tearing out the floors, sub floors and floor joist. We will have some type of foundation poured and then start putting it back together. We have a blue roof from the Corps of Engineers so that will be fine for a while. The kitchen is mostly cleaned out already. We saved a few cabinets for the time being so we can have a sink. Lezli keeps spraying them with bleach because mold is a real problem and it keeps coming back. We have all new beds, mostly donated and a little bit of new furniture, all donated. We don't need any more furniture because that will just be more to remove when we tear out the floors. Oh yea, I have AC now! I got a new AC about a week and a half ago. It's really helping with the drying out process. My electrical system is a mess and no one will touch it until the underside of my house gets dried out and that won't happen until the slab is poured. I am still using torches extensively every day as we don't have any power in three rooms and all the houses around my house are vacant so no ambient light other than street lights. We have a FEMA trailer in the back yard to live in. It's small but actually pretty nice and the price is right. J I am so lucky to have power and the chance to repair my house. The houses on either side of me are condemned. I think the reason my house is only a "uninhabitable-enter at your own risk" classification and not condemned is because with all the help I got we probably had 1000 man hours of work and clean-up completed before the building inspector came by and I had talked a crew into connecting my power so we looked pretty good. We've had so much help from so many people. The hole thing has been amazing and I feel so blessed.
Enough of "this old house"
Lessons learned about torches and 2+ weeks without power:
Everyone that comes over or stays over at night wants to use one of your "cool" lights. For me that meant handing out several 2x123 incans. I went through batteries like jelly beans. I was using batteries more than anyone and was in moon mode on my L4 with no spares to pull from other torches when 2-dozen Surefire batteries arrived from McGizmo, thanks. Bottom line, you don't need 60 lumens very often when the next closest light is 30 miles away. 10 lumens would have been fine for most task and 30 would have covered every task. Having "moon mode" on a torch is an absolute lifesaver. I used my L4 in moon mode for 2-3 nights. A high power car rechargeable light is awesome. I had 2 Tigerlights I would alternate every night. I would bring the light into the middle of the room, set it on the floor facing the ceiling and we could see to get around in most of the house for 50-60 minutes. I have white walls and ceilings so that helped. The single LED AA and AAA lights are great. The key chain coin cell lights didn't get used all that much. I would hang an ARC AAA from the ceiling in a small room and you could get around. I did the same with a Infinity Ultra. By the time power was restored both my ARC AAA and the Ultra were gone, where, I will never know. It is damn dark at night with no ambient light from other areas. I mean damn near cave dark sometimes when the moon is small and it's overcast. Make sure you have lights and a trunk full of batteries if you see the possibility of this type situation.
Generators; Bigger isn't always better
I started with an old 4,000 watt Coleman I've had for 6-7 years. It puts out enough power for 2 small window units, a severely ailing frig and 3-4 fans. It also burns ½ gallon of fuel an hour. That's 12 gallons a day, 24 every two days and so on. Gas was a severe problem for 3 weeks. There was no gas for 3 days then they were a few stations open for the next week and a half. The lines varied from 200-500 cars long and you could get 10-15 gallons of fuel. Sure, wait in line 3-4 hours for 1-day worth of generator fuel. I was having people pick up fuel as they drove in from Texas to help during the first 10 days. I caught a station opening up for the first time one evening and got 35-40 gallons in my cans and another 20 in my truck. When my folks arrived, about day 7, they brought (2) Honda 2000 watt gens. The Honda's burned one gallon every 6.5 hours. Running both of them together was still a fuel savings of nearly half. The other nice thing about the Honda's are they are so quiet you can stand next to it while it's running and speak in normal volumes. My big generator can be heard from 200-300 yards away. The down side of the Honda's is you can buy (2) 4000 watt Coleman's or others for less than the price of one 2000 watt Honda. Honda sells an adapter for the 2000-watt that allows you to connect two of the units together to make one 4,000-watt generator. The part cost $90 so when my Dad told me about it as he purchased the generators in Texas I said, "no I don't need that." Boy was I wrong. I don't want to try and explain it but trust me when I say it's much harder to run the same amount of items on (2) 2,000 watt generators than it is on (1) 4,000 generator, the 2,000 are easily overloaded. Bottom line, spend the extra money for the Honda's but buy the adapter. If someone had driven past the house and offered to sell me an adapter for $250 I would have bought it. A down side to the Honda's is they only run 6.5 hours on a tank of fuel which means they won't run all night. Having a little AC on a hot night after a hot day and high humidity makes all the difference in the world. OBTW: I used the 4,000-watt on most nights because it would run 11 hours and the exhaust would heat my 3 pots, totaling 7 gallons of water to about 120 degrees if left near the exhaust over night. 7 gallons is enough hot water for two people to bathe.
Cash on hand: After a bad disaster cash is king and $1,000 isn't nearly enough.
There were no banks open for the first 10-14 days. You might think why do you need cash when there's nowhere to spend it. You need cash to pay the people that flood your town the next day for the cleanup. Tree cutters, debris removal, food, supplies and water takes cash. I made some great deals on tree removal and clean up the first week because my sister brought cash with her when she came from Texas. When the jobbers found out I had cash their price would drop considerably so they could get the job, they needed cash and everyone was paying with a check. My sister made an emergency call to all my family and friends in Texas the first afternoon and had a wad collected by the next AM. She left that afternoon and I had money by noon the next day. 2 days after that I was broke again but had more money inbound with my folks.
FEMA and the Red Cross
I love them and can't say enough good things about them. A Red Cross hot meal out of the back of their van and a 12 pack of water in donated white Budweiser cans is manna from heaven after a storm. Their magnesium food heaters are cool. All the FEMA folks we dealt with genuinely seemed to give a damn.
Ins. Companies
They try to blame everything on flood water whether you have flood ins. or not, which I didn't. Example: I had a lot of things blow off a tall hutch and similar when the wind blew out windows. The ins. Company says, since the item landed in water it is flood damage not wind damage so it's not a wind loss, therefore it's not covered by your homeowners policy.
Neighbors, friends, family and CPF
The greatest, they saved my ***.
You can see some Before and after shots here.
I couldn't bring myself to shoot interior shots but with 4' of seawater in the house at the high point you can guess how it looked.
