Today is September 11, a day of perpetual mourning in America for all of the innocent lives we lost to senseless terrorist attacks 16 years ago. It is a day of remembrance, and ceremonies across America commemorated those civilians lost and those brave first responders who gave their lives trying to help.
Yet today also was a day of good news for us. We learned, first of all, that our nephew and his wife were safe, having lost just a few shingles from the roof of their house. We learned that our church members and pastor and his family also were safe. Apparently our aging church withstood the winds and the rains and came out intact. Some of that is due to the fact that the storm, at the last minute, drifted east, sparing our area from the worst of the rains and the winds. Some of that is due to the architecture of the church being low and having the buildings protect one another from the way they are configured. And part of that is because people prayed for deliverance, and they were granted that grace.
We learned that our sister-in-law's sister, who fled Naples and drove north, was safe. The fate of her home is still unknown, but we know that she was out of harm's way when the winds and the water invaded her city.
We learned, thankfully, that the time and money we spent putting in hurricane resistant windows, doors, garage doors, and roofing materials paid us back in full. We reportedly have no damage to our house, and even the vinyl fence (complete with its concreted-in posts) remains standing. We are so relieved to hear that our home and property are intact.
Sadly, we also learned that our neighbor who has been watching our home for us did not fair as well. She had a huge back porch with jalousy windows that worried her. Thankfully, she took shelter with a neighbor to the north, only to return today to find that her porch was totally gone. She said that she could not even find the pieces of it in the neighborhood. When the porch blew off, it also took part of her roof on the house, so she had to scramble today to try to get tarps on the roof and across the back to protect the interior of her house. We have not heard from her again, but I have thought of her often today and pray that she was about to secure her property. If we had been there, we gladly would have helped her tarp the house to keep it safe.
Yesterday, Florida took the worst weather beating of the last 96 years, and recovery in some parts of it will take months. Power is still out in over half the state; crews may need days if not weeks to get it all functional again. No power is all right with us as long as the house stays enclosed. With no one going in or out, the air conditioned, dry interior air will stay somewhat cool and dry, so we are not worried. When power is restored, the air conditioner should start again with no trouble.
Now the healing begins. Yes, we probably will get a $600 bill from our insurance company to help with the claims from people who have lost everything. Somehow, that seems a small price to pay. Our preparation was worth the time and expense to keep our property safe. We are fortunate that we do not have to travel down to Florida to take care of downed trees or missing roofs. We are grateful that we did not lose any family members or friends. We will stay here, out of the way for now, to let Rick's hand and our adopted state both begin the healing process.
Monday, September 11, 2017
Sunday, September 10, 2017
Big, Bad Irma
Seven years. That's how many years of loving labor we have invested in our Florida home to make it the comfortable, safe, bright retirement home of our dreams. When we first laid eyes on the house during an open house one fine March day, Rick did not want to even go inside to see it. So I went in alone, took a look around, and saw great potential. I finally persuaded Rick to take a look. All he saw was lots of work. We went back with Steve and Chris after the open house to peek in the windows. They, too, saw the potential buried under all of the dirt and neglect. All Rick saw was lots of work, but he was willing to give me what I wanted. We closed on that house on June 6, 2010.
On the day we closed, Rick wanted to sleep that night in a hotel. I wanted to save the money, so we moved in that same day. The house was built in 1960, and it had not been updated since that time. It was filthy. While Rick cleaned the disgusting toilet (he would not even use it standing up!), I set about sweeping dog hair and dirt from the Florida room. I scrubbed enough of the floor to set down an air mattress -- which would be our bed for the next two summers -- so we would have a place to sleep. Since we both were still teaching in Wisconsin, we had just a few precious weeks each summer to start the transformation process on the house.
Like many crazy people do with inanimate objects, we personified the house. Because of her location, we called her Gladys, and I immediately began to think of her as a sad, tired, achy, neglected old woman who was just crying out for some love and attention. She needed some new clothes, a little bit of patching up and boosting up, a ton of cosmetics, a new hairdo (roof) and a few flowers to make her beautiful again. We had our work cut out for us.
The kitchen was so disgusting that we tore everything out of it within the first week. For the next two years, we survived with a metal rack from Sam's Club to hold all of our dishes, pots and pans, and other kitchen necessities. We started with just a microwave which we had brought from Wisconsin and a refrigerator that took me four hours to clean out and to sanitize. Rick built a 2 x 4 frame to hold a Lowe's countertop and a sink. Part of the time, I was doing dishes in a dishpan in the bathtub.
Our living room consisted of folding lawn chairs, orange plastic storage tubs for tables, and old lamps on the floor. We didn't have a dining room table, so the plastic tubs also served as dining tables the first year.
Then we started to do everything to the house, as money, time, and energy would allow. Each summer until we both retired, we would come down to intensely work on Gladys. We evicted the rats in the attic, and took out all of the old insulation. We added new, fresh insulation to guard the house against the intense Florida sun. We replaced the electrical service, the HVAC, and almost all of the plumbing inside. After we retired, we switched the hot Florida summers for the mild Florida winters. We spent thousands of dollars replacing every window and outside door with 130 mph hurricane-resistant materials. We replaced the garage door with a hurricane-resistant door also. We replaced every interior door in the house with solid core doors, adding new woodwork to match.
Through the years, we worked from room to room, renovating each in turn. We built an all new kitchen with new, clean cabinets, new appliances, and new lights. Fresh paint covered every inch of the interior, and new closet systems were installed throughout. We expanded the master bath, adding a new shower and sink. We had all of the terrazzo floors throughout the house ground down and re-polished until they shined line new.
And just this last year we took out a loan to refinish the last of the house. We gutted the last untouched room -- the 1960's pink-tiled bathroom -- and brought that room up to date with a new tub and tub surround, new walls and a fan, new lighting fixtures and electrical, and a new sink and vanity top. We spent thousands of dollars on a new roof and roof fan. We had a new cement front walkway poured, and we added pavers on the north side and back around the new patio slab to help with the drainage of torrential rains that sometimes visit Florida.
Seven years, thousands of dollars, and more cuts, bruises, injuries, aches, and pains than I care to count. And now we may lose it all.
Hurricane Irma has taken a turn, and instead of going up the center of Florida, it has now drifted to the west coast. The last time the west coast of Florida saw a hurricane was in 1921. Now Irma is on a course to make landfall in Naples and to travel up the coast. The eye of the hurricane, with its most destructive winds, is scheduled to pass directly over Dunedin and Tampa. We will get the worst the storm has to offer. The one saving grace is that it may be downgraded from a Category 4 to a Category 3 hurricane by the time it gets that far north. Storm surges probably will not reach Gladys, but sustained winds over 100 miles per hour still may cause complete devastation of the entire town.
Gladys has withstood countless storms throughout her 57 years, but Irma may bring her to her knees. The eye of the hurricane is supposed to hit her about 8:00 p.m. and will last until approximately 8:00 a.m. on Monday. Seven years, and it all may be gone in twelve hours.
Yet, as I have said earlier, if Gladys is seriously injured, she can be replaced. The people of Florida are the real concern. We are scared to death for them. The people we have met, enjoyed, cared for, and learned to love in the past seven years are irreplaceable. We have lost one dear friend from church already this year, and we do not want to lose any more. We worry about our family members who live just a few miles away. We worry about our neighbors, and we worry about our friends in our weaving group and in our church.
Sitting here watching the news and waiting is extremely difficult. We are scared. We feel helpless. All we can do is to watch, wait, and pray that we have something left in Florida when tomorrow dawns.
On the day we closed, Rick wanted to sleep that night in a hotel. I wanted to save the money, so we moved in that same day. The house was built in 1960, and it had not been updated since that time. It was filthy. While Rick cleaned the disgusting toilet (he would not even use it standing up!), I set about sweeping dog hair and dirt from the Florida room. I scrubbed enough of the floor to set down an air mattress -- which would be our bed for the next two summers -- so we would have a place to sleep. Since we both were still teaching in Wisconsin, we had just a few precious weeks each summer to start the transformation process on the house.
Like many crazy people do with inanimate objects, we personified the house. Because of her location, we called her Gladys, and I immediately began to think of her as a sad, tired, achy, neglected old woman who was just crying out for some love and attention. She needed some new clothes, a little bit of patching up and boosting up, a ton of cosmetics, a new hairdo (roof) and a few flowers to make her beautiful again. We had our work cut out for us.
The kitchen was so disgusting that we tore everything out of it within the first week. For the next two years, we survived with a metal rack from Sam's Club to hold all of our dishes, pots and pans, and other kitchen necessities. We started with just a microwave which we had brought from Wisconsin and a refrigerator that took me four hours to clean out and to sanitize. Rick built a 2 x 4 frame to hold a Lowe's countertop and a sink. Part of the time, I was doing dishes in a dishpan in the bathtub.
Our living room consisted of folding lawn chairs, orange plastic storage tubs for tables, and old lamps on the floor. We didn't have a dining room table, so the plastic tubs also served as dining tables the first year.
Then we started to do everything to the house, as money, time, and energy would allow. Each summer until we both retired, we would come down to intensely work on Gladys. We evicted the rats in the attic, and took out all of the old insulation. We added new, fresh insulation to guard the house against the intense Florida sun. We replaced the electrical service, the HVAC, and almost all of the plumbing inside. After we retired, we switched the hot Florida summers for the mild Florida winters. We spent thousands of dollars replacing every window and outside door with 130 mph hurricane-resistant materials. We replaced the garage door with a hurricane-resistant door also. We replaced every interior door in the house with solid core doors, adding new woodwork to match.
Through the years, we worked from room to room, renovating each in turn. We built an all new kitchen with new, clean cabinets, new appliances, and new lights. Fresh paint covered every inch of the interior, and new closet systems were installed throughout. We expanded the master bath, adding a new shower and sink. We had all of the terrazzo floors throughout the house ground down and re-polished until they shined line new.
And just this last year we took out a loan to refinish the last of the house. We gutted the last untouched room -- the 1960's pink-tiled bathroom -- and brought that room up to date with a new tub and tub surround, new walls and a fan, new lighting fixtures and electrical, and a new sink and vanity top. We spent thousands of dollars on a new roof and roof fan. We had a new cement front walkway poured, and we added pavers on the north side and back around the new patio slab to help with the drainage of torrential rains that sometimes visit Florida.
Seven years, thousands of dollars, and more cuts, bruises, injuries, aches, and pains than I care to count. And now we may lose it all.
Hurricane Irma has taken a turn, and instead of going up the center of Florida, it has now drifted to the west coast. The last time the west coast of Florida saw a hurricane was in 1921. Now Irma is on a course to make landfall in Naples and to travel up the coast. The eye of the hurricane, with its most destructive winds, is scheduled to pass directly over Dunedin and Tampa. We will get the worst the storm has to offer. The one saving grace is that it may be downgraded from a Category 4 to a Category 3 hurricane by the time it gets that far north. Storm surges probably will not reach Gladys, but sustained winds over 100 miles per hour still may cause complete devastation of the entire town.
Gladys has withstood countless storms throughout her 57 years, but Irma may bring her to her knees. The eye of the hurricane is supposed to hit her about 8:00 p.m. and will last until approximately 8:00 a.m. on Monday. Seven years, and it all may be gone in twelve hours.
Yet, as I have said earlier, if Gladys is seriously injured, she can be replaced. The people of Florida are the real concern. We are scared to death for them. The people we have met, enjoyed, cared for, and learned to love in the past seven years are irreplaceable. We have lost one dear friend from church already this year, and we do not want to lose any more. We worry about our family members who live just a few miles away. We worry about our neighbors, and we worry about our friends in our weaving group and in our church.
Sitting here watching the news and waiting is extremely difficult. We are scared. We feel helpless. All we can do is to watch, wait, and pray that we have something left in Florida when tomorrow dawns.
Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Nasty Weather
With sick hearts, we have witnessed the devastation that Hurricane Harvey has caused to cities in Texas, Louisiana, and other places in the Gulf region. Thousands of people have lost everything, and the recovery for those losses will cost the nation trillions of dollars. More devastating, however, is the loss of life caused by this horrific storm, and the nation is not finished with this type of weather yet.
Here in Wisconsin we have watched the weather patterns do some unusual things also. The spring was mild and warm, the summer was unusually wet (we had no "brown out" of lawns this July), and now September dawns wet and cold. "Early winter" and "harsh winter" are predictions starting to populate conversations.
The wet weather, along with Rick's hand surgery and subsequent recovery time, both have hampered our progress in getting the rest of the porch painted. If the weather is not too cold or too wet to paint, then our calendar is filled or we just do not want to face the task. For all of those reasons, I seriously doubt that we will finish painting the porch this year. And that's OK. It has a prime coat on the parts that we scraped off, and it can wait until next year if need be.
Of greater concern, however, is the weather that now is heading toward Florida. Rick said just yesterday, "Aren't you glad that we finished all of the remodeling of Gladys this past year? Now when we return, we will have just a little gardening to do. Maybe we can actually relax and enjoy Florida and all it has to offer." He voiced this opinion partially because when we return to Florida, he still will not be able to lift more than 5 or 10 pounds with his left hand. He will not be able to physically do a lot of manual labor until the hand continues to heal. Sightseeing and relaxing on the beach sounded like reasonable, ideal pastimes.
Yet we know that Hurricane Irma is heading straight toward Florida, and this time Dunedin might not be able to dodge the bullet. Dunedin has not had a direct hit from a hurricane since 1921. Irma is predicted, in one model, to skim the northern part of Cuba and then to slam into Florida. More than one model have it traveling straight up the center of Florida like a zipper, thus affecting nearly every county in the state. If those models hold true, even Dunedin could see both destructive winds and torrential rains with possible flooding.
Governor Scott has declared an emergency for every county in Florida for the storm that is not supposed to hit until three or four days from now, and storm provisions already are sold out in most southern Florida locations. Evacuation of the Florida Keys has started. At last report, Irma was a Category 5 storm with winds of 185 miles per hour. We know that Gladys has a brand new roof, 130 mph impact windows and doors, and a 130 mph wind resistant garage door. What worries us is that although the windows in the double front doors are hurricane resistant, we are not so sure the frame and the pegs that secure the doors closed will hold in hurricane-level winds. And if those winds reach 185 miles per hour, nothing is safe in its path.
We also worry that the three plastic sheds in the back and side yards (and their contents) could end up in another county, as could our garbage cans, our park bench on the front porch, and our flower pot of flowers that our neighbor has so lovingly been watering for us.
Of course, the two large trees in the back yard also could cause considerable damage to our fence -- if the fence even surrounds the yard when we return -- and to our house.
If Irma really rips up Florida, our homeowner's insurance will be useless because Citizen's insurance will not have enough funds to cover the cost of the damage statewide. Forecasters show that Phase 2 -- a tropical storm called Jose -- is lining up right behind Irma, and that it has the potential of turning into a hurricane and following the same path also. And those are just material concerns.
Of far greater concern is our nephew and his wife who live just a few miles south of us, our friends at church, and our neighbors on our street. They are all dear to us, and they all are in harm's way. We pray that the storm takes a less destructive path and goes out to sea east of Florida, and that our family, friends, and neighbors all remain safe.
If Gladys takes a direct hit, we may be driving down to Florida much sooner than we thought to see what we can salvage from the storm. At this point, all we can do is watch, wait, and pray.
Here in Wisconsin we have watched the weather patterns do some unusual things also. The spring was mild and warm, the summer was unusually wet (we had no "brown out" of lawns this July), and now September dawns wet and cold. "Early winter" and "harsh winter" are predictions starting to populate conversations.
The wet weather, along with Rick's hand surgery and subsequent recovery time, both have hampered our progress in getting the rest of the porch painted. If the weather is not too cold or too wet to paint, then our calendar is filled or we just do not want to face the task. For all of those reasons, I seriously doubt that we will finish painting the porch this year. And that's OK. It has a prime coat on the parts that we scraped off, and it can wait until next year if need be.
Of greater concern, however, is the weather that now is heading toward Florida. Rick said just yesterday, "Aren't you glad that we finished all of the remodeling of Gladys this past year? Now when we return, we will have just a little gardening to do. Maybe we can actually relax and enjoy Florida and all it has to offer." He voiced this opinion partially because when we return to Florida, he still will not be able to lift more than 5 or 10 pounds with his left hand. He will not be able to physically do a lot of manual labor until the hand continues to heal. Sightseeing and relaxing on the beach sounded like reasonable, ideal pastimes.
Yet we know that Hurricane Irma is heading straight toward Florida, and this time Dunedin might not be able to dodge the bullet. Dunedin has not had a direct hit from a hurricane since 1921. Irma is predicted, in one model, to skim the northern part of Cuba and then to slam into Florida. More than one model have it traveling straight up the center of Florida like a zipper, thus affecting nearly every county in the state. If those models hold true, even Dunedin could see both destructive winds and torrential rains with possible flooding.
Governor Scott has declared an emergency for every county in Florida for the storm that is not supposed to hit until three or four days from now, and storm provisions already are sold out in most southern Florida locations. Evacuation of the Florida Keys has started. At last report, Irma was a Category 5 storm with winds of 185 miles per hour. We know that Gladys has a brand new roof, 130 mph impact windows and doors, and a 130 mph wind resistant garage door. What worries us is that although the windows in the double front doors are hurricane resistant, we are not so sure the frame and the pegs that secure the doors closed will hold in hurricane-level winds. And if those winds reach 185 miles per hour, nothing is safe in its path.
We also worry that the three plastic sheds in the back and side yards (and their contents) could end up in another county, as could our garbage cans, our park bench on the front porch, and our flower pot of flowers that our neighbor has so lovingly been watering for us.
Of course, the two large trees in the back yard also could cause considerable damage to our fence -- if the fence even surrounds the yard when we return -- and to our house.
If Irma really rips up Florida, our homeowner's insurance will be useless because Citizen's insurance will not have enough funds to cover the cost of the damage statewide. Forecasters show that Phase 2 -- a tropical storm called Jose -- is lining up right behind Irma, and that it has the potential of turning into a hurricane and following the same path also. And those are just material concerns.
Of far greater concern is our nephew and his wife who live just a few miles south of us, our friends at church, and our neighbors on our street. They are all dear to us, and they all are in harm's way. We pray that the storm takes a less destructive path and goes out to sea east of Florida, and that our family, friends, and neighbors all remain safe.
If Gladys takes a direct hit, we may be driving down to Florida much sooner than we thought to see what we can salvage from the storm. At this point, all we can do is watch, wait, and pray.
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