3 posts tagged “home”

Well Peter was right. The damage due to the storm was very Katrina like in my area.  I got off lucky compared to a lot of my neighbors. I was without power from Friday till Sunday night around 10:50PM. ( HATE HATE HATE not having lights at night! Thank God the temperature was cool after the blow.)  Personal losses were 5 shingles off the roof, my chimney needs some decorative wood replaced, and I had one crossbeam support broken on my fence.

I replaced the shingles myself quickly, but I'll need someone who knows what they are doing to replace the boards on the chimney. Plus, I don't wanna go up on the roof again, sucker is way steeper than I remember.

The neighbors around me range from shingle damage to multiple trees in their houses. One house lost its chimney, lots of cut up trees for the county service to pick up in yards all over. Some are so think with newly cut tree limbs that it's hard to drive down the street.  It is AMAZING how many trees were just blown over, plus almost as many were snapped in half.  Fences are strewn all over the place. I'll never see my garbage can again. I think its a miracle that no body was killed in the storm.

Next door neighbor said he had just paid off a roof replacement on some investment house and two hours later he has a tree right through it.  He was there when the storm hit and said it was crazy. Katrina did a whole lot of damage to our area and it took 4-5 hours do to it. This storm did equivalent (if localized) damage and he said it passed in under 5 minutes.

Well the county building inspector's office sent someone to check out my 'holes' and he reported to me that the front yard holes are caused, most likely by crawdads or some other burrowing animal reaching all the way through the ground to the drainage pipes under my yard that drain into the stream behind my yard. This hole then becomes a place where all the rain drains and just starts pulling all the area around it into the stream. His suggestion, fill in the holes with a lot of dirt and it should eventually stabilize.

Back yard problem is different. He believes that the construction company that built my home and the rest of the neighborhood used fill dirt to raise the level of the houses and that they buried some unburned refuse behind the house. Stuff like tree stumps and trees that didn't burn.  This stuff has completely decayed in the 7-9 years it's been there and now there is a pocket where that stuff used to be. Rainwater drains in and causes the ground to weaken as it leaks into the space left by the decaying material and I end up with a large pocket waiting to collapse. His suggestion, fill in the area with a lot of dirt and do it again for the next couple of years as it settles until it stabilizes.

I'm a bit worried about this advice, and his conclusions but he could very well be right. The area's that are sunken in the back yard do look very symmetric. Almost like a 10x15x3 foot box collapsed back there. However, just putting dirt on the affected area and hoping for the best seems a bit,...optimistic.  I'll probably try his suggestion and if the problem resurfaces ask for advice from a different source.

Addendum: Weather is REALLY harsh today. I think 3 tornadoes were spotted in the area. This new building makes it easy to watch the wind and rain come whistling in.  The powers that be had everyone move to the interior of the building for around 20 minutes, and now I hear one of those tornadoes might have been close to my house.  I really hope no damage was done because I won't be getting home till late today.  The tornado siren going off sent many people home to check on things and one of my friends that lives around 1.5 miles from me, has called me to tell me that nearly all the roads home had trees down on them and power is out everywhere.  His description makes me want to got home to check on things pretty badly right now. He said and I quote, "I haven't seen anything like this since Katrina."  Folks we didn't get messed up like the coast did but that description for this area means things are badly messed up. Probably take a week at least to clean up and fix up everything. 

Sigh, I bet my holes have gotten bigger again.

Haven't updated in a long time now, sorry to both of my readers. I've been lazy.  What's been happening to me since the last update? Well let's see.

I've got a girlfriend, my work has moved from one of the worst part of town to downtown (whoot!) and my back yard has decided to leave me.

Nikki and I are having fun when we can get together, but long distance relationships suck. We basically only get to hang out together on the weekends.

My work moving was a blessing and a curse. The old building sucked much ass and the new one is sweet but honestly we got moved around a month too early. There is still work going on outside the building. Some of the windows weren't even installed when we started putting people in here.  We've been here a month now and things are starting to get back to normal.  Now I gotta pretend to know how to do my work again.

The back yard is just strange.  Around a 10'x15' section of ground is now a foot lower than the rest of the yard.  While getting ready to cut my grass for the first time, I stepped in what can only be called a sink hole.  The ground was hollow in a roughly 3'x4'x3'deep hole. I dug it out, and filled it with a huge amount of topsoil I bought from Lowe's, but on reflection this was stupid. The problem isn't going to go away from just filling in the dirt. I need to find the real problem and fix it, so I've called the county building inspector to send someone around to give me an idea where to start to fix this problem. I'll update after I've had a talk with the inspector.