Thank You To My Friends

Two years ago today I woke up homeless. April 28, 2014 was the day my house burned to the ground. There was pretty much nothing left and what was left was mostly damaged by smoke, water or the fire. It’s an eerie feeling to wake up and know you don’t get a choice in what to wear because you only have the clothes on your back. But I’ve learned that it’s okay.

Two years ago today, I woke up on a cot in my sister’s den. At least I was still alive. At least Keith was still with me. I still had my dog, and my horses, and the chickens. We owned the land, so in the truest sense we weren’t truly homeless. We just didn’t have the building to live in. I may not have had a lot of possessions, but I did have something better: friends and family.

While Keith and I were still dealing with the fire inspector and the sheriff’s report, my sister Chanda rushed out to Wal-Mart and bought us some replacement items. I could at least put on a clean set of clothes because of her. And we invaded her life for a month while we crashed in her den until we could find another place to live.

The fire took out our electric pole and the power company shut off the electric until we could get it fixed. My friends Robert and Tia let me bring the horses to their house and fed and took care of them until we could get the pole replaced and the power to operate our well back. 

My friend Linda offered us her little cabin by the lake as a place to stay so that Keith would have a shorter drive to work. We stayed there for another month until my mom and her partner Bill, were finally able to bring up a smaller camper trailer for us to live in. 

We now have a new home and new possessions, but I’ve learned something along the way. You can live without stuff/possessions, but don’t throw away your friends. If you have good friends, you have one of the most valuable possessions in the world. 

Today I want to thank all my friends and family again for all their help over the years. Everyone, including the anonymous donations to our fund and anyone who offered a place to stay (even if we didn’t take you up on it). One kind gesture is sometimes all it takes to make someone’s day. Thanks for being there. 

I've got nothin'

It has been almost a year and the other day a writing prompt came up that motivated me to write this poem. 

“I’ve got nothin’,” I said

as I looked out over the pile that

was my clothes, my house, my bed.

It broke my heart

to think of great-grandma’s

antique teacart.

“I’ve got nothin’,” I cried

when I found the body

of my cat who had died.

I see nothing but ash

as we throw the remains of

all my stuff in the trash.

The place still smelled of smoke

but as we cleaned

I realized I was not broke.

I had nothing that day

but over the course of a year

life has found a way.

I was at the end of my rope

until the new house

filled me with hope. 

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.