Hugo part 7 and the last of my story It’s not over until the fat lady sings is a sign that appears later on King Street. Indeed, it truly is not over for some time to come. It takes a while for the electricity to come back on. I know it is at least 2 weeks but I am too tired to write and the days seem sort of endless. I did ride out to Baptist College where I was teaching Art Appreciation in night school for my check but it was not available. They told me to come back in a few days. The school district also misses it’s check deadline. It’s just how it is. We all do eventually get paid but not on time. Meanwhile as the weeks progress people are pouring into town from all over to find work but you can’t hire anyone. They are already hired. And prices are skyrocketing. I hear from relatives that no one can get building materials anywhere because it is all being shipped to Charleston. I ponder about my insurance and the damage to my house. I decide that I have to get a separate estimate from a lot of craftsmen and somehow tie them all together. My walls are plaster. That’s almost a lost art but I do know that some old craftsmen are still around. Someone I teach with knows of someone who is still in the business and I can get an estimate. The roof is tin. I get an estimate from a roofer but not until I have searched for a while and the rust has set in so that the damage is apparent. I stay away from people who want to be paid for estimates. A lot do and I understand that people everywhere need a good estimate but may not hire the person to do the work. The people doing the estimates are already being hired and they don’t want to leave their paying jobs to come and do an estimate for free. I have to work at this but I am proud that I do not pay for one estimate for what anything would cost. I realize that I needed to take my time with it because demand is at an all time high here. I refused to talk to another adjuster (and 3 or 4 different ones call) until I get my ducks in a row about what things would really cost. When I answer the phone and it’s another adjuster calling, I give them an earful about the last estimate and say I haven’t gotten all of my estimates on my damage yet. It will be November before I will even even agree to talk to an adjuster and by then I will have collected all of my estimates and given them to someone who is licensed to put them together for me. (I think it is important to note that since all property was damaged, adjusters were being sent here from all over the country. They didn’t have a clue about what anything would cost here at this point in time in this city any more than I did. It would be March before I could even get anyone to finish work on my house and that was after I waited for him to finish another job and the guy was from Connecticut and he did the roof and the chimney.) I got my estimate approved by the insurance adjuster who climbed up on the roof with me to see the actual damage. I received a partial check. I learn that because I have the house mortgaged the bank will hold the money and dole it out to me in thirds. I start by hiring the guy who put my estimates together for me. He starts replacing my porch ceiling which received considerable damage. He doesn’t know enough to stagger the board lengths. Even I can see that they were staggered before the hurricane came. That is the end of his tenure. I am afraid he might mess up the roof. In bits and pieces, I find people to do this or that. I find some guys to come in and sheetrock Frances’ bedroom and ceiling. Actually they find me. I am going to save some money here by going back with sheetrock instead of plaster. I figure it will be a loss of value but I don’t have all year here. The guys who do this are guys who just came up and asked if I had any sheet rocking to do. They came from out of town on a Friday, jumped in and fixed the walls and ceiling and were out of here by late Sunday. This was the point at which I learned about blown ceilings that had a pebbly finish but didn’t have to be sanded. They left on Sunday and went back to whatever small town they came from. Later, I find an electrician and replaced Frances’ light with a nice one that hangs down so that she can change the light bulbs easily. I also had asked the adjuster for some money for Frances because she wasn’t able to use her bedroom for the past month or so. The adjuster includes that and I pass it on to Frances. She is not complaining at all about the state of the house. All in all, by spring it seems like things are going OK. The mantels had sunk back into place and Frances had the use of her bedroom. The tin roof is another story. In January I find someone from Connecticut who says he can fix my roof and chimney. He is recommended by someone who knows the owner of the house he is working on just around the corner. I go by to speak to him. The owner is standing around watching him work. I mean it’s pretty obvious to me that the owner is paying by the hour and wants this guy to be working the entire time. I ask him to come by my house later and talk to me. He has a scrapbook of pictures and newspaper articles about his restoration work back in Hartford. His name is mentioned in the articles and there is a picture of him in one of the articles. I figure he knows what he is doing so I get next in line after he finishes his current project. In March he is free to work on my house. He builds a form and rebuilds the chimney in the old configuration. I am impressed. He rents a folding machine and brings lots of tin over and begins on the roof. A lot of days he has his teen-age kid with him. I wonder why the kid isn’t in school but I don’t say anything. The kid is bored and takes a piece of metal and scratches his initials plus someone else’s initials in a heart in the long glass pane on the door to my porch. Because that is where the carpenter has his stuff set up to fold tin I am not using that door. I don’t notice the scratches until later after they are paid and gone. I am mad because it was old glass. Wavy glass that had probably been in the door since the house was built. I don’t find out until much later that the roof is put on wrong. The roofer only folds the tin over once at the seam. Properly, it should be folded over again to lock the pieces together. I don’t know this and I don’t learn about it until I have a problem a few years later and need a repair. As it turns out the house I live in now was repaired after the hurricane in the same manner. An appraiser told me that this occurred all over Charleston after Hugo. The roofers either were saving money or just shoddy workers. Now if I ever have to have a tin roof replaced I know how it should be done. Experience is the best teacher. When school finally opens the walls along the halls are loaded, I mean loaded, with people’s old clothes. They smell pretty rank. A teacher spots a pair of nice wading boots. My size, she declares and grabs them. The clothes stay in the halls for days. Finally, they are cleaned out and sent somewhere. I don’t know where. People want to help and they sent old clothing here by the ton, it seems. The clothing is not distributed to anyone to my knowledge. A crew comes in a few weeks later and bags it up in black bags and it is hauled away. The school was used as a shelter and I am told people slept in the library. I have to clean the bookshelves after them. The most prevalent thing is the amount of chicken bones. Evidently fried chicken was served because people left the bones on the shelves near the books along with other things. My aide and I are wiping down the shelves and disposing of dried up bones. We are moving books over to wipe and check for bones people might have chucked behind the books. I move a bunch of books in the 300 section and there lying unwrapped and unrolled is a bright lime green prophylactic. Rubber, if you will. I shriek and my aide comes running over. It doesn’t look used. It looks more like someone got it out as a joke and had to ditch it fast. No matter. Neither of us want to touch it. I call the day porter in and he disposes of it. Two aunts come to visit. I think it is early spring. I drive them out to Sullivan’s Island and Isle of Palms. They are astounded at the apartment buildings that have been just sheared in half. Rooms you can look into as if you were a voyeur peeking into someone’s living room. It’s all new construction and it doesn’t look like any of it was good enough to stand the storm. In reality, I think Hugo is what brought Charleston into it’s future as a world class city. The hurricane was large enough and fierce enough to damage everything. Newer construction took a massive hit. The older houses stood but sustained damage. Some very old families had to sell their homes that they had owned from time on end. They didn’t have the property insured and didn’t have the money to repair it. I remember coming across Jamie Westendorff standing by his family’s old plumbing business on Wentworth or Beaufain. He was shaking his head. No insurance he told me. Jamie held on to the property anyway. No one was living there. I believe as I write this the old place is being renovated now. Others were able to spruce up time worn houses and as all boats rise with the tide, property values rose also. After repairs on my little duplex, I was able to buy 20 Limehouse Street down by the Battery because my property values went up and my house was worth twice what I paid for it. After a while I sold the Limehouse property and bought the house I had always wanted but didn’t believe I would ever own. The stump of the great deodor cedar is still in the middle of the yard with it’s roots exposed just as when it went over. I have let too much grow around it. I need to cut it back so that I can get to the trunk and sit on it and reflect on the evening it went down and all that has happened since then. In retrospect, I probably would not leave for a hurricane because of where I live. I now have gas water heaters and stoves. I stayed through Floyd while everyone was bottlenecked on the interstate in panic trying to flee that storm. My current home has stood well over 200 years. 210 years, in fact. It will still stand. However, it might be prudent of me to buy a few rolls of tar paper ahead of time to keep under my house, just in case. That and some flat head nails.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 22:23:38 +0000
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