Part I
We moved to Florida in March of 2020, as the world was shutting down. We had our struggles as we looked for work and housing, finally settling into our home on October 2, 2020.
Just shy of 2 years later, our home was destroyed by a Ian, a Category 5 hurricane. Our part of the state sat under the eyewall of that storm for 10-12 hours with winds of 180 to 200 mph, sustained.
Recovering from Ian is really what led me to start this blog. Every day people ask me “How are you doing it”? when they see how calm and collected I am navigating this nightmare. My answer is: “I don’t know, I just am”.
Let me give you the rundown/timeline of what’s happening/not happening for us in a nice neat list.
- Insurance compay sends an adjuster and a remediation company out to our address the week after the storm.
- Insurance adjuster sees the home and formulates his estimate before it’s gutted and it’s not clear whehter or not he even got on the roof.
- Remediation compay comes early, preventing us from salvaging the remainder of our personal belongings. (We salvaged some things) and guts our house to the studs resulting in a mountain of debris on the curb.
- Insurance company juggles us through multiple desk adjusters with little to no communication finally sending us about 30% of what we would need to rebuild.
- We contract with a temporary RV company on November 1st and take delivery of a 40′ travel trailer, paid for by the addditional living expenses portion of our insurance policy.
- Insurace company goes radio silent, so I hired a public adjuster, who let us know that our insurance company was in the final stages of bankruptcy.
- We receive our first claim check, endorse it and send it directly to our mortgage holder who is also listed on the check. They send us 50% of the funds and hold the rest until they see proof of work being done.
- We spend the first part of our contents money on $5,000 of mold treatment.
- FIGA (Florida Insurance Guaranty Association) takes over our insurance claim and begins communicating with our public adjuster. (public aduster will cost us 10% of whatever funds they win for us, and this process can take 6 to 9 months.)
- I chose to finance a replacement roof so as to keep as much of the remaining insurance funds for interior work as possible.
- Travel trailer rolls away on April 1st as the money had run out, and we move back into our unfinished house.
- We continue to wait for our permit to be approved, at which time hopefully we can get started on some insulation and drywall so as the weather continues to heat up, we can use our AC system.
- We find out that the state funded insurance company won’t write us a policy because we don’t have walls.
Needless to say, all of this has been frustrating. I don’t mean to say that I’ve not had any weak moments where I wanted to throw up my hands and walk away, or cried my eyes out, but for whatever reason, I just continue to soldier forward, going to work every day for a local roofing company and trying to live as normal a life as possible (ironic right?)
I try to keep things as light as possible for my husband who is also working very hard at his job. He does not have the patience I was born with and he trends towards tense, irritable and angry when things aren’t moving very fast for us.
As part of recovery from this natural disaster, my PCP pretty much demanded that I begin some talk therapy. I’m not a stranger to talk therapy, I’ve leaned on it many times in life, and I started right away. It was in my first meeting with the counselor that I realize my resilience is a force. It’s not common, and while it can be coached and learned for anyone….for me it’s inherent and I honestly think it is what has kept me earthside because the last 10+ years of my life have been very difficult at times.
I mean, sometimes I check in with myself and say “Am I OK?” when the answer is yes, my next question to myself is ‘How the hell can you be ok?”. I am ok. We are ok, it will all be ok. It will be uncomfortable in many ways, it will be difficult an slow and frustrating, but it will all be ok.
Until next time…