The good and the bad

Life has been a big rollercoaster for us lately.  Got the good sprinkled in with (quite a lot of) the bad, but hey, that's life sometimes, right?

The Bad

Tropical Storm Ida did a major number on the Tidewater/Hampton Roads area of Virginia.  Including our house.  We're close to the Elizabeth River, but are not in a high risk flood area, but flood it did.  Right into my mom's level of the house (the basement, which is only two feet underground).  Thursday morning we woke up to 3 inches of water across the whole level.  We spent much of the next four days battling the rising water as the storm just stopped and hung out for four solid days of straight rain.  =(  We had to pay to have professionals come out and clear up the water that we couldn't with our little pump and wet-vacs.  They just came today to take all of the industrial strength fans and dehumidifiers.  After five days of a constant LOUD fan noise, it almost seems eerily quiet around here!

In any case, the water is gone and we're pretty much all dried out, so now comes the rebuilding.  We'll definitely have to replace all of the baseboards and will probably have to replace a good bit of the drywall.  We're going to look into bricking up one of the doors down there and making it a wall.  My mom wants to not replace the carpet and instead paint the cement, which I think will look really neat!  She's thinking of painting it black, which should add a lot of drama to the room, which is I think what's she's going for.  The colors for the living room are black, red and cream, so I think it will look really nice.

We had to spend a chunk of the adoption loan on having the water removed, but I'm hoping we won't have to pay for a ton more.  I'm thinking of trying to put together a work party with friends from church and seeing how much we can do ourselves.  The baseboards shouldn't be a problem and I think we have friends that know drywall pretty well.  I'm hoping we can do a good bit of it ourselves and then hire out what we can't to a friend or two that are contractors.  So at least most of the money we will have to spend will stay among friends!

The worst part of all of this is that we can't have our home visit from our social worker until the work is done.  So that might push everything back a few weeks.  =(  I was SO excited about powering through everything and getting the home study finished lickity split.  Oh well, could be much, much, much worse.

The Good

1. Today is Eliza's birthday!  It's hard to believe that it's been five years since the first time that I ever held her.  It's just as hard to believe that I could even HAVE a five year old!  She's in kindergarten for goodness sakes!  I'm SO not old enough to have a kindergartner.  Nevermind that I'm 30 and so very MUCH old enough.  I don't FEEL 30!

2. Everything with the house isn't nearly as bad as it could have been.  We should be able to get it back into a livable condition pretty quickly, all things considered.  No one was hurt and the house didn't suffer any major structural damage or anything.  Apparently a family at Eliza's school had their oil tank (or something) break/leak and absolutely EVERYTHING is covered in oil.  Their house isn't even habitable.  So although this is all a huge hassle and money drain, at least we have a roof over our heads and a safe place to live still.

3. I'm about to head out to mail off our I-600A,home study application/fee/forms we've done and submit my passport application!  A grand total of $1935, but totally worth it.  =)

4. Crossed off several more things on our checklist.  We're getting there!