Moving Along
Well, I can’t exactly say that things are going back to normal around here, but I can say we are slowly moving forward. Some days are rougher than others and I’m sure that many of the days are far rougher for mom. She is at Jessica’s and we expect that she will be for at least a few months. Many different options are being considered for what to do once the house is fixed up.
And speaking of mom’s house. We are slowly working through that as well. I’ve been meeting with contractors and the insurance company to get estimates for repairs etc. It would be nice if they could magically just hand you a bid, but those bids actually take a fair amount of work. Then, once I receive a bid, I have to review it for gaps. As an example, the first bids we received were missing the furnace for the shop, most of the electrical work, the glass doors that dad had in his shop, the drop ceiling, and on and on. This isn’t a huge deal because all of it would have to be addressed once construction started but I’d rather have as much as possible covered in the original bids.
There are some items that we probably won’t have rebuilt. For example, the glass doors in the shop, while kind of neat, aren’t really all that practical and that money could be better spent on an upgrade in the house. (commercial electric glass doors aren’t cheap to replace) The insurance company pays the amount of money that is required to put the house back to it’s original shape. They don’t care how you use the money. We could take the check for repairs and just keep it and sell the house in it’s current condition. If we were to do that, the insurance company would actually be at less risk because they wouldn’t have to worry about additional damage that is discovered during demolition. Obviously we aren’t going to do that. We plan on awarding the job to a contractor in the next week or so and then we should start to see progress.