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Ouch. The bathroom could probably take it better than any other room in the house.
That's pretty bad. If there hadn't been a storm, the solution would be reasonably straightforward, as there are companies that specialize in quick drying a house, but I can only imagine that they have more work than they can possibly handle, at the moment.
Do you have any functional electricity? I suppose you might be able to get every fan you can find. Dehumidifiers (and air conditioners) would also be good, if you can find them.
We have a generator that we plan on bringing Saturday.
if you don't have anymore water in the main bathroom, it can be also pretty bad :rolleyes:.
A sorry try to make you smile in this time of difficulties :o
Too little...unless you happened to live in a desert. Out here, it's kind of like: Water? That'll be gone in a few hours anyways.
They had some crazy flooding in the NY City area. Saw some incredible video on the news last night. Some of the subways were swamped. Looked like white water rapids coming down the stairs.
Did the alligators get loose from the sewers?
Jeez, DD! I only opened up this thread today but glad to hear you and your family are OK and sorry to hear about the property. Do you have insurance to cover the damage? (I seem to remember you were selling insurance weren't you?)
Whatever, though, just remember that stuff's just stuff. You and your family are what matters.
Yeah, I was thinking that there's probably nobody on this forum who is better qualified to understand the insurance situation than DDay. I was also thinking that there's a reason I don't want to live in hurricane or tornado prone areas. We just have wildfires and earthquakes. The former are predictable and manageable (not that we always manage effectively, but they ARE manageable), while the latter are rare.
Unfortunately, when I paid off my home I rolled the dice and self insured. Homeowners insurance would have cost around $2,500 a year with a 5% wind and hail deductible which would have come out to $7,500 out of pocket. I figured that if I saved enough money that it would be worth self insuring, never expecting the second largest hurricane to take a direct hit on my house.
Yeah, Ca. central valley is hot in the summer but, no hurricanes, tornados. All earthquakes are far enough away that they are mild when they reach us, fires are far enough a way that we only have to deal with some smoke. But I wouldn't call them predictable and manageable. You can predict there will be fires, that's about it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
But if this drought continues for several more years, I think Ca. agriculture will start to collapse. This whole area will turn back to desert.
Your homeowners would have been $2500?!?!? WHY??? Is that with flood insurance, or is there something else? I'm not even sure what I pay. It's small enough that I don't pay it much attention, but I'm pretty doggone sure it's only around a fifth of that.Quote:
Originally Posted by dday9
No, that would be for just the homeowners. The reason it is so high is because of the location. If I were to purchase flood insurance, it actually wouldn't be bad because I'm in a flood zone B so it was something like $500 for the year.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
The way homeowners insurance works here is that your wind and hail deductible is a percentage of your dwelling coverage. So in my case, coverage is $150,000 on the home and 5% of that is $7,500.
Geeze, all WE have to worry about is burning down....
If we paid 5%, I'd be going broke fast. My house has tripled in value in the last few years. In fact, if I take the low point it hit around 2008, it's probably about a five fold increase. It got down around $60K, and is now up around $300K, but it's been rising so fast I don't know if that $300K is high or low. If it's high...give it a couple more months.
Yeah, that's why I tried justifying not carrying the insurance. I knew that even if I did have the insurance that I'd need to take out a loan just to meet my deductible.
By the way, that $2,500 was with a 5% deductible. My first quote was for a 2% deductible and the premium was over $5k. I can't remember the exact price, but I remember almost falling out of my seat.
That certainly sounds like some pretty high insurance rates. I suppose, hurricanes and tornados do tend to drive it up. We have hail, and we have windstorms, but nothing like what you get.
By "Self Insure" do you mean saving money yourself to use against a possible crisis? I do that for smaller things but I'd be terrified to do it with household insurance. Mind you, if the premium was £2500 I might think twice:eek:
For comparison I looked up the cost of my last house insurance renewal. It was £197 and that's on a house worth just shy of £400K. I guess we live in very different worlds. Mind you, in the UK the biggest risk from the weather is that the house might become depressed and start questioning it's life choices.
Have you had a chance to assess what the cost of the damage could be yet?
We went out on Wednesday and did a preliminary assessment. I mean, the biggest issue is going to be the water damage. Thankfully there’s no structural damage to my roof, so it’ll be anywhere between $6k -$8k to replace. The biggest unknown is how much water got in the walls/ceilings/floor.
By the way, this is my neighbor’s roof with structural damage:
https://www.vbforums.com/images/ieimages/2021/09/1.jpg
We think a shed got lifted up and slammed against her house.
Had to go look up my home insurance. I pay $574/year, though I'm not sure whether I have quite enough insurance. House prices have been soaring so fast, that insurance covers the last valuation, but the house is probably worth twice as much, so...I could likely replace it, but not buy a new house.
In Florida, when a hurricane is forecast, people are out knocking the coconuts out of the trees, if they haven't done so already. They can become cannonballs in a hurricane.
Smooth and magnificent.
Warming back up, here.
Would having slab roof provide a better resistance against hurricanes?
I genuinely don't know. You don't really see those in Louisiana.
@dday I see you are having heavy rain again today. Do you have power yet?
No, I got a text message yesterday saying the estimated restoration date is Sept. 29th.
Possibly, depending on how it is constructed...and whether or not I'm thinking of the same thing that you are.Quote:
Originally Posted by dee-u
Slab roofs that I'm aware of tend to be flat. That can be a problem unless they are well made, but they are viable in the south. They don't work so well in areas with lots of snow, as they have to be VERY strong.
Still, the key to surviving a hurricane is: Good construction. However, you have to build not just well enough to withstand the hurricane forces themselves, but the impact of the debris being tossed about from all the less well constructed houses. DDay's house looks like it was pretty well built, but the windows took a hit, and the roof may have been impacted as much by flying debris as the wind itself. Very hard to build against that.
There's a restaurant on top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. It has big picture windows (perhaps 10-15' high, though I forget exactly) looking out over the mountain. It has been there for years.
I mention this because Mt. Washington had the worlds highest recorded land windspeed for a very long time (231 mph). It gets hurricane force winds on average of once a week, and 100 mph winds on average once every 10 days, yet that restaurant is doing fine, even with those big windows.
Of course, those windows appear to be double panes, possibly of plexiglass, and each pane appears to be about two inches thick. You can't build a house like that, but if you did, it would shrug off a hurricane.
This is another example of things being built much better in the past. The town of Bedrock would have minimal damage, Fred and Barny would have been at work at the quarry the next day. Now that's a quality slab roof.
Yeah, and the windows couldn't blow out, either.
And a dog called TotoQuote:
Still, the key to surviving a hurricane is: Good construction.
I am thinking of a "slab roof" as the ceiling, and a regular roof on top of it. Perhaps some grills or shutters on the windows may provide protection from flying debris. We are regularly battered by strong typhoons the past years, we are lucky that we haven't experienced something that knocked our roof, the most common problem we are experiencing is the flooding.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
I’ve been wanting functional storm shutters since I moved in. Right now (what’s left) there are decorative ones that serve no use.
My old manager showed me how she built hers, and I’ll probably do the same.
When I was in Florida, our office didn't have real storm shutters. What it had was a set of sheets of plywood with holes drilled so that they fit over studs sticking out from the four corners of the window. A pain to put up and take down relative to storm shutters, but functional...and we had the manpower to install them, when needed.
We then backed boats up against the doors and filled them with water. That acted as a multi-ton door stop. Unfortunately, one of the boats had an internal gas tank that had a leak or vent. Water got into the tank.
When rebuilding, might want to consider adding storm shutters to the windows to deflect debris and keep out water.
My GoFundMe account temporarily stopped accepting donations for my campaign. They want to know how I know the people donating. I don't think it'll be an issue because I followed the process to get it back taking donations, but that's something I never even considered.
That was a tornado.Quote:
Originally Posted by FunkyDexter
Huh? I've heard of GoFundMe suspending or deleting accounts because they don't like the person's politics, but I never heard that one before.Quote:
Originally Posted by dday9
That seems kind of opposite to the whole point. I've heard lots of stories of somebody putting up some Go Fund Me and getting money from all over. If you have to know everybody who contributes...aren't you then just asking your friends and family?
Yeah, I had to write a whole statement about where the donations were coming in from. I was like, I’m big in the programming community, the Boy Scout community, and oh yeah I’m the chief technology officer for voluntaryism in action. Soooo those donations come from a bunch of different places.
Now I wanna play the song Rock You Like a Hurricane on my guitar...the metal version :bigyello:
https://www.songsterr.com/a/wsa/scor...ane-tab-s337t1Quote:
Originally Posted by Jacob Roman
Today has been particularly rough. My wife's having a bad day thinking about the house.
it is not too hard for the kids ?
They think we're on vacation!
We just got some moisture reading levels. The lowest (least damaged) room is at 17% and the highest (most damaged) is at 19.5%
Ooooooo. Now i can play alongQuote:
Originally Posted by homer13j
I think we have humidity that high.Quote:
Originally Posted by dday9
In our air, not our drywall and wood work...Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
I was able to throw or pack everything up this weekend. The contractors are going in on Tuesday to rip out ceilings/walls/floors.
You were able to throw everything up this weekend? Sounds like you got some bad gumbo.
I was out wandering up streams for the last week. There was a pretty good fire going a ridge or two away. It blew up to 80,000+ acres due to some strong winds. There were pyro-cumulous clouds billowing over the ridge, at times. Fortunately, the wind generally kept the smoke away from us most days, so we didn't breathe in too much of it.
Funny enough, I did have some gumbo this weekend. It was pretty good for a "roux in a jar".
@dday - I see more heavy tropical rain headed your way - are you in a good spot at your home to weather this next round?
My house is south of New Orleans, so it won’t be affected by this tropical storm. However, we’ve temporarily moved to the Lake Charles area and they’re expecting some flooding and some light winds.
The only thing I’m really concerned about is my camper because it isn’t covered. Then again it’s just a tropical storm so I’m not going to stress over it too much.
If I pretend it doesn’t exist then all my problems go away, right?
Yeah, that works.
Or...Power to accept the things you cannot change!