Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Today-Part One


 These pictures are a bit haphazard as far as their order, but oh well. I'm too lazy to try to fix it. 
This morning we had weeds that were like THIS all over the yard, as well as  lots of trash and debris laying around the yard. 

 And this little guy was smidging around in our basement the other day. We didn't see him today.

 Amanda took care of those monster weeds and trash. Yay! It's been bugging me having all that in our yard, even though every yard looks that way. Thanks, Amanda! She found some interesting things, such as a whole crayfish carcass, among other things.

 How do you feel about cleaning, boys? That good, eh? Just kidding. They did Grrrrrrrreat! Thanks, Rick and Chris!

 It was a busy day at our house. Along with cleaning, there were people picking up debris on the boulevards. There is a video of this below. I thought it was pretty interesting at least.

 The siding is now clean!

 And so is the deck!

The sinkhole that is right here in front of our house was also being worked on today. The street was blocked off, but luckily Forest Road is a handy detour, as well as a place for me to park and easily reach the house.  I have a video of them digging around in the pit as well, but it's not very interesting to watch. It was interesting to watch in person, though, which is why I took a video in the first place.

I watched for a little while and one of the guys came over asking me if I was waiting for them to get out of my way so I could leave the driveway or something. Nope. I parked out of the way. I learned that the folks doing this were all from Virginia. There was a father and two sons, and then another person who was also from Virginia on their crew. In case you were curious.

Along with all of this that is going on, we were expecting our flood insurance check to be delivered today. It was coming by way of UPS. We weren't too sure that UPS would even try to deliver it with the road being blocked off and tons of vehicles directly in front of our house. So I went to the UPS office (did you know their hours are from 4:30 pm to 5:00 pm? crazy!) and had them tell their driver to not even try and deliver it, (it needed a signature, of course)  but to bring it back to UPS and we would pick it up after he got done with his deliveries. 

Which we DID DO!

We have our $15,000 advance check in hand (that we never did anything with in case the claim didn't go through), the check for the remainder of the balance, a check for $1000 for taking our belongings out of the house, and a check for nearly $500 for putting up sandbags (even though they didn't do a lick of good in the end.) To the bank we go tomorrow! Next step: we are probably going to try to sell the house as it is, which should still give us a good start on a whole new house, in a different location outside of the flood zone. We have already had someone interested in buying it, but we couldn't work with his payment preferences. Rats. Oh well. Wish us luck! A few prayers on the matter wouldn't hurt either. ;)

5 comments:

Michelle M. said...

Wow, I'm surprised that someone has already shown interest in the house as it is. We'll pray for you that you can find a buyer quickly. Have you started looking at other non-flood-zone houses yet?

Sara said...

Good luck to you!

Bogen said...

Nice to see a sibling care enough to come help out.

Allen said...

I'm not too surprised, since it's easy to see this as a great time to get a fixer-upper at a discount since all the homes in the area are now fixer-uppers and in a flood zone that lowers their values. The chance of another flood could be acceptable to some people, and even better if the water control people and the city learn from this and make changes. In 30 years the next generation of home buyer might not think so much about the flood zone and it could sell for more. (Perhaps just in time for the next flood.)

Alternatively, the guy just needs housing and thinks it unlikely to flood again that bad in the next few years, planning to be out of there by the next flood in 30 years.

Of course, it could flood again next year. Never know. Good thing you had flood insurance, but I totally don't blame you for wanting to move to higher ground.

Rick, Erin, and girls said...

For the benefit of people looking at posts way back here, we figured out what those ginormous weeds are. They are actually sunflowers! I'm still happy they were removed from the yard, even if they weren't really weeds.