I should be writing to update you all about the status of my world famous, hail brutalized house. If you’re keeping track of things, the storm blew through on May 8, which means it’s been nearly three full months, and I should be filled with the giddy joy of new siding and windows and a whole house face lift.
And yet.
So, there’s good news and bad news. I’ll start with the good news, which is short and has the advantage of stretching out the suspense of the impending bad news. Plus, you can decide if you want to stay happy and just stop reading here.
The good news is that they will be giving me a new roof this week. It should be all done on Thursday. That is definitely progress and it’s good and awesome, and I’m very excited to have new gutters and new downspouts and yes I am trying to stretch this out so that I can postpone addressing the bad news as long as is possible.
Right. That’s the good news. I told you it was short.
The bad news is less short.
To start with, the damage to the house has focused on the front side of the house, as you can see by the ever famous photo. The insurance is only paying for siding on two sides. Which, of course, most likely means that there I should likely expect to either a) find some funds to do the whole house or b) make good on my threats to make the house look less than its best, and only do half the siding.
That isn’t the bad news.
The bad news comes when the siding guy, realizing the age of your house, looks past the once crunchy coating on the outside, and goes to the even crunchier inside layer and it tests positive for lead.
That’s right gentle readers, the original paint on the original outside of my house was lead-based paint. Which now has to be abated. And that raises the price considerably. And this mostly means a bunch more wrangling with the insurance company who, as you might guess, is not excited to be shelling out more money for my shelled-out cottage. I don’t blame them. I am not excited to be shelling out even more money to not make the house look less unfortunate.
You might recall that I seem to have somewhat challenging experiences with insurance personnel and so I should not expect that I would have a stress-free adventure with getting the House of the Holey turned back into the House of the Whole. Call me the irrational optimist, and add another check mark in the category of “evidence to the contrary.”
Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that after a few outright denials of assistance with this issue, the insurance has agreed to send another adjuster out to survey the carnage with an eye, or a testing kit, toward the lead. I suspect there will be many more discussions and battles on this before I have an actual idea on the impact to my pocketbook, however I have had a number of generous contributions towards getting this all back together, and while it may take way longer than I ever dreamed, my optimism, whether rational or not, is telling me it will be ok. One day. Not today. Not tomorrow. But one day.