Continued...

As promised, here are more pictures...

First, we have the den. The den was on the back side of the house, and now it is more like a nice covered patio. On the left side of the first picture is what used to be a wall of basically a big window, and now the whole wall is gone. The second picture is the view of the back yard from the newly-made patio. The backyard is huge, and there was a wood fence all the way around it, but no more. By the way, all that stuff that you see sitting around is stuff that has been found and brought back into the house. The storm surge pretty much cleaned everything out of the house for the most part.


The pic on the left is our still functioning bathroom. Part of the wall behind the toilet was till there (from the waist down), and we slid pieces of wall paneling in on each side (also from the waist down) to give some privacy. The only drawback was that you had to get someone to guard you while you went because it was wide open facing the back of the house. The pic on the right is of my parents' bathroom. The stuff that the surge decided to leave in the house ended up like this... nasty. And the water in the bathtub is water left from after the floodwater receded, so that is the same water that flooded the house.... so you can just imagine how nasty everything is from that water. YUCK.


This is the view of the front porch. All of those bricks that are laying on the ground used to be the wall of the house. The pic on the right is the dining room, looking into the kitchen. Like I said earlier, there was nothing left... no furniture, no cabinets, no refigerators, no oven or dishwater, etc.


Here on the left is the guest bedroom that was on the front of the house. The king-size mattress was still there with some sheetrock and other debris. On the right is a picture of basically the far right side of the house (if you were facing the house). From front to back, there was my mom's study, Ben's bedroom, and then my parent's bedroom. I'm standing in my mom's study taking the picture, and the whole wall, including studs, is gone between that room and Ben's bedroom. All of that debris got hung up in Ben's room (wall paneling, doors, studs, and the daybed that was in Mama's study).


This is my parents' bedroom. The first pic on the left is looking back into Ben's bedroom. There was still a mattress from their bed left in their room, but no other furniture. A lot of clothes and magazines and etc. got washed into the corner of the part of the wall that was still left as you see in the next picture. Those are Ben's drums and I'm not sure if we found them in that bedroom or where they were. The other picture is looking down one hallway. The A/C unit at the end of the hall had come out of its closet, and all kinds of other junk, clothes, etc. ended up in the hallway all bunched up with the carpet. It was pretty gross.


Here is our pop-up camper that got caught up in a fence with other debris a block back from the house. And then there is my mother's piano that we found a couple of blocks back in somebody's back yard. It was her high school graduation gift from her parents. It survived the Flood of '79 in Jackson, and then I grew up playing this piano. So it was very special to her and to me. After I got there, though, we went to say good-bye to it. Even though it is all in one piece still, there is probably no saving it. However, on Monday, a church group from Daphne, Alabama had come over to help work at the church and to help do what they could, and they were able to get it for us and bring it back to the house. That was very special. But we're still not sure it will be able to be saved because the inside was just filled with muck and debris, and saltwater does horrible things to stuff.



So anyway, that's all I have to show. Even though it has been hard, my parents are doing okay (okay as they can be, I guess). We just try think about how it could be worse. But next time I post, I'll try to talk about something a little more cheerful. :)