Texas 2 update 5                                                                                                                                      9/19/19

Hello again!  It is another “forced vacation” from volunteer work so I’m going about doing another upate.  It’s only Thursday but tropical storm Imelda is doing its thing.  It’s been raining for the last 2 days and is predicted to continue through Monday.  Today, the schools are closed and many roads are covered with high flash flooding water so I was advised to stay in my cozy 23000 square foot building.  I see pictures of high water covering cars almost to their roof on Highway 105 which is one I travel and is the address of a house I have been working on for the last week.  I will include a photo of the house but my camera is in my van and I don’t want to go out in the hard rain to get it now.

The house had about 2 feet of water in it from Harvey.  I’ve explained before that the houses we work on vary a lot from big expensive brick homes to ones like this that look from the outside like no more than shacks.  The owners said this one was a miner’s shack before it was moved to its location long ago.  At least it has a wood floor rather than concrete slab but the floors and walls are very uneven.  It’s actually quite nice inside after all of the work we’ve done to it.  It was stripped and new drywall installed, new flooring installed (which I helped do) in all rooms.  It has 3 bedrooms, kitchen, and living room and a single bath.  I installed most all of the window and door trim and baseboard.  Someone else from Iconnect is doing the painting and some of the caulking that I didn’t get done.

A couple of things of note are that almost all of the owners where I have worked have had health or handicap issues.  The husband on this one has a very deformed face from an off-road motorcycle accident up to ten years ago.  Even though he has obviously had many skin grafts, he still has a kind of hole in his face, has a difficult time talking even using an assistive device, and feeds himself through a tube into his stomach 2 or 3 times a day.

This house is across the street from a large high school.  I don’t know how much water was in that school after Harvey.  It is in the community of Orangefield .  The cities here are more like counties in Wisconsin.  Each seems to border the other and there are no “towns” like there are in Wisconsin.  Orangefield is within the city of Orange and there are other communities that are within cities that seem like cities themselves to me.

The man that was staying here last week has moved to a motel in Beaumont to be closer to the contract work they have for him there.  I will try to get a picture of the house where he did some drywall and “mudding” and where I am expected to work next.  He left a mess we have to clean up.

This house where Steve and I did a little work before is in a depressing little community where people have moved out and about 20 or 30 percent of the houses are boarded up or left to have the places grow up in weeds after Harvey.  It is also depressing to me since Iconnect’s policy is to not repair outside appearance or damage not done by Harvey.  The soffits are all hanging loose and about to fall off and the back of the fireplace has big holes in the wall.  I tried to get them to change their “policy” on this one with no success.  I have to apply trim and hang doors etc.

Right now, I’m in the midst of finishing up for a couple of days on trim etc. for a house that Iconnect’s contractor left early and undone.  The couple has 3 small racially mixed children and has been going through a divorce.  I guess they’re back to living together now.

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