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hard to describe the mess


12string

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Yep, hard to describe the carnage left in the wake of tornado.  Houses literally explode.  Houses scrubbed off the foundation.  Trees shattered and splintered.  Around the edges of the damage is where it gets surreal with all the debris stuck in the trees.  After a tornado in Edmond I recall finding the entire roof off a shed or small house that seemed to be intact, just ripped off and left laying in a field.

Also found an entire six pack of Coors beer still in the plastic rings sitting in the same field.  I was 12 or so.  Tasted like crap.....

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Tornadoes, more than a very minor one once a decade, are a new, 21st Century thing for us in Maryland.  Our's are still relatively minor, but we've had the roof of a football field concession stand ripped off and now stuff high in trees 70 yards away, another home where the inside is fairly intact but no one knows where the roof ended up, etc.

I can most identify with the people who have to rebuild at a time when materials, appliances, building inspectors, etc. are still hard to find.  I'm STILL waiting for my back porch's landing to be rebuilt.

I've been getting by with the minimum in furnishings because most of the things I like in the furniture stores are still marked "out of stock" and won't be available for months.  For a week, I my living room furniture was a lawn chair borrowed from my brother: I had been frantically searching furniture stores and nothing worth buying for me was available - almost all were too short to support the head on my 6'3" frame. My excellent recliner was finally ordered from Costco Online - luckily on sale for $200 off but still a high $799, hoping I was going to be able to rest my head on the adjustable headrest after measuring the dimensions on pictures and calculating proportions from the few given actual size measurement. It's fine.

My excellent bed was available with a free base the electrically raises/lowers the head-end and a great mattress and pillows and was only bought at a good price because my June 30th return to my house coincided with furniture 4th of July sale at Mattress Firm plus a $50 online coupon.  But I didn't go for the highly overpriced or in-stock because it's not-so-pretty bedroom furnishings available, so my nightstand is a tray table and my dressers are storage shelves.

I spent hours and hours from April through late June researching and searching in a dozens of Baltimore-Washington-Annapolis area stores for the right kitchen appliances and washer/dryer - knowing I'd be cursing myself if I'd be spending years using inferior ones - and managed to do fine there, but only by going hundreds over the contractor's budget for each item.

I wanted Oxford Blue siding on the house (gray with a hint of blue) but I couldn't get it or a lot of other non-white siding in the vertical (straight) siding I wanted.  My contractor eventually found Oxford Blue in Dutch-lap (a bend in each piece of siding) and I settled for that.

Then there were the delays in rebuilding because of a lack of inspectors due to the pandemic - which is currently hitting Louisiana harder than it ever hit Maryland.

And what happens during rebuilding when the often-occurring termite damage is found and things are not up to code like the electrical service/wiring, etc?  Insurance almost never covers that!

That just scratches the surface of all the problems I encountered.

That frustration is going to be fate of a lot of people in Louisiana, etc. and, with so many rebuilding they're going to find it tough to get their first choices in appliances, siding, roof shingles, etc, etc, etc,

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