New House

In less than a year, we have gone from this.

to this:

Well as you can tell we finally have a new house. Here they are moving it on to our foundation.

Then just as soon at they had it all put together and at least water tight, it came a gully washer.

 

We finally got it all ready for living in.

Then we started filling it up with all the new stuff. We knew that we wanted to put in a new wood stove because we always have a power outage during the year and need some type of back up heat. So Keith started building the hearth for the wood stove. He even built a cardboard replica of the size of the wood stove to use as a guide.

Right now we are stuck at partly finished, because we didn't order enough stone. I think the guys at the stone company didn't compute my request right. I told them we were going all the way up the wall, but they only calculated for the lower portion as that is the only amount required for protection. So we had to order another box and we are waiting for it to come in.

While we were waiting on that, I found this wonderful tile on sale at Amazon and just had to buy it.

 So Keith went to work on it and now I have a really awesome backsplash behind my stove. The smaller edge tiles we found at Home Depot. I think they accent the main tiles really well.

Now we are finally in and enjoying our new home. It doesn't feel as strange as it used to and it's way better then living in the camper trailer. I still miss things daily. I go to look for something and then realize, that was the other life in the other house. But it's getting better and I have new stuff now. 
I'm thankful that we've been fortunate enough to get everything taken care of as easily as we had. I can't imagine the horrors of having to go through something like this with out homeowners insurance.  While we were living in the camper trailer provided by my mom, I watched the news several times about others who also lost about as much as we did. We didn't really get much in the way of community support. Not like others. Almost every thing we did was on our own or family support. But we had insurance and that covered most things. 
Things I've learned from this experience:
1. Don't let your homeowners insurance lapse when you pay off your mortgage. We had made the final mortgage payment in March and Keith was waiting for the release of lien documents to take to the insurance. I don't know if was intending to drop the insurance, but since we were still waiting on documents, we were still covered and paid up. The insurance covered the full coverage on the house.
2. Contents- Make sure to update your contents insurance regularly if you pick up anything like family heirloom antiques or extra guns, or if you have a lot of jewelry. We only had a contents insurance for $39,000 but in the end turned over a list that contained nearly $75,000 in items. Many antiques from my dad's side of the family, all of my silver jewelry (I was completely shocked to learn that I had accumulated over $10,000 in jewelry alone) and all of our guns. As we were set up to do mounted shooting competitions, we had accumulated around $27,000 in guns and ammo for competitions. However since we hadn't updated our contents insurance, we are still fighting with the insurance company as they have "depreciated" our items down to only $29,000 and apparently aren't interested in paying out the full value of the contents insurance.
3. Jewelry- If you have any type of plastic container for your Jewelry, Get them out of it NOW! I had a large plastic box that I kept much of my jewelry in because it was easily portable and easy to use for travel.  Well it melts ALL over your jewelry and entraps your items in a horrible blob.  The jewelry that survived the best was in regular jewelry boxes from the fine jewelry stores and in surprisingly also some of my wooden jewelry boxes.  I did go out and purchase a pottery jewelry box after the fire that I'll be keeping some thing in now.
4. If you have guns and ammo, get fire proof safes AND metal ammunition cans. We had one set of plastic ammunition cans that we had gotten at a Friends of the NRA dinner once. The rest of the ammunition was all in US military grade metal cans. None of the ammunition actually survived the fire, but almost all of the ammo in the military cans stayed in the cans. The rounds in the plastic cans when everywhere.  
Well that's about it for this round. See ya later.