Visiting our things, and continuing to wait...

Today we got to see our stuff.  Our contractor is based in Knightstown.  It is about a 45 minute drive from our place.  He has bought an old elementary school to use as storage and a place to train others to restore fire and flood damaged goods.  Our things fill two classrooms.  Room one was full of things that have been determined to be damaged and not able to be salvaged.  Here is a panorama view picture of that room:

It was a little dark in the room but the amount of things that were damaged was overwhelming.  Wow.  Every piece of furniture you see here is either broken, cracked, water damaged (either from the basement flood or the fire hoses or weather or the two toilets that leaked all night), or deeply scratched.  All of the 'soft' furniture (beds, couches, etc.) was either covered in insulation or glass and therefore ruined.  Some of it we could try to fix up, maybe.  Most of it was trashed.  I did not take a picture of the room that had the wet books and pictures from the basement.  That was tough to see.  Lori and I were able to go through the Christmas decorations and happily, many were just wet and not ruined. 

The next room was things that had not been cataloged or had been cataloged and not moved to another room yet.  This room was big and FULL of things.  Here is another panorama:

The boxes in the back were full of things not yet opened and cataloged.  There were about 30-40 of them.  All of the junk in the garage was in here, some furniture, shelving from the basement, the ironing board and the beer fridge from the garage.  The beer had been removed and the men who were with us said they had no clue where it could have gone.  They seemed to be serious about not knowing, but I hope they have it in their beer fridge.  They have earned it with the careful and respectful way they have treated us and all of our junk.  I could not be happier with the way these men and the whole restoration company has worked with and for us.  If you look carefully, you can see Kevin and Kenny in the picture above.

What about the clothes?  About three-fourths has been laundered and is in the main shop.  The rest remains in bags laying in the second room:

 

We had hoped to get some clothes to take home, but it was really not convenient to go through the clean pile.  We were looking to get some coats and other shoes at least.  Since this was not possible as of yet, the claims adjuster told us to go buy new coats and shoes and keep the receipts.  So we did just that tonight. Since I have been wearing the same two pairs of shoes for about a month, I was glad to get a new pair.  About two weeks ago, I bought some black pants for school.  I forgot that the only pair of shoes I had were brown. I am certainly no fashion expert, but I don't think my brown shoes would look very good with black pants.  I can now wear the black pants and give the khaki ones a rest for a while. As I type this, I thought that I need to iron those pants.  Do we have an iron in the rental package?  I think I saw one.

One thing we did bring back to Indy:

 

The giant TV we bought about ten months ago.  The room it's in is so small it looks like the Patriots played the Texans in our living room tonight!

We should meet with the claims adjustor this week about the settlement for the house and the things we lost.  We have a mortgage payment due soon on a house that no longer exists. Hopefully we can get this claim settled soon.  That's one more thing we are waiting on...