| Happy Thanksgiving. I look around me and feel thankful too. There are so many people worse off. And that will only grow unfortunately. Most problems seem pretty minor when you look at the ones others face. But of course, a problem is a problem, so even if it's minor it might be annoying. I try to be relaxed about things. Doesn't always work, but it definitely means less stress when it works. As for how things are going around Most of the debris inside houses that was at the street was picked up most everywhere that I've seen, if it was out at the street at the time they came by. There are still piles of landscaping debris in spots in my area. I only had landscaping debris and they picked that up a long time ago, on October 25th. (a contractor hired by county went around with a truck and they had a piece of construction equipment they used to pick stuff up) I had thought about mentioning something previously, and will go ahead and do it here. I never knew a lot about FEMA's 50% rule, but it's something some in the neighborhood next to me might have to deal with. (and maybe a house or two in my neighborhood) I still can't exactly summarize that rule in the exact way I think it applies, but it's something like if it costs 50% or more of the market value of your house to fix it, you have to bring it into compliance with current regulations. The rule applies to people in Special Flood Hazard Areas. It doesn't apply to the market value of the land. For my county, Hillsborough, you can lookup an address in the county to see what that value would be: https://www.hcpafl.org/Home/FEMA-50-Rule Not sure if it's accurate. I was curious to see what the tool said for me, but I don't know how they come up with the amount they came up with. That tool had my market value higher than what I thought it would be. I took the market value overall from the property appraiser website and subtracted the land market value out and it was quite a bit less than what that tool gave me. (For the value I calculated, I got the same value adding up the value of the house plus the extra features that are separated out on their site.) I get emails from the neighborhood next to me and they had a meeting this month I think for people that had questions on various things like that. (I think most of their houses got several feet of water inside.) I was thinking of mentioning that 50% rule in case others in a Special Flood Hazard Area didn't know about it. Basically, if it costs more than 50% of whatever that market value of your home itself is, and it was not built as high as what existing codes require, you have to either raise it or tear it down and rebuild it. That's one reason we never have improved anything at my house in twenty plus years, since the 2004 hurricane season. We never had damage, but we realized then the threat that hurricanes posed. (were naive prior to that) We're so low that it doesn't pay, for us at least, to fix anything really, unless it has to be. Because eventually, you might have to rebuild. Thankfully for us personally we made out quite well this season, not needing to fix anything. I have a neighbor across the street that didn't see flooding inside their house from Helene, they were just high enough, but they ended up with more things they need to fix than most everyone else in my neighborhood, other than the ones that got flooded. But maybe nearly compares. There was some pool equipment outside that was damaged, combined with some damage to their screen enclosure. (Maybe just panels, not sure.) But the roof will have to be replaced due to some tile damage in Milton. Then they were going to make a small miniscule change to something inside, and then were going to remodel just a tiny bit, but then they found they needed to fix something else. That resulted in they have gutted much of the house, where in some rooms the walls, floors, cabinets and everything else has been torn out. They are also taking the opportunity to fill in a sunken room that was lower, which is a good idea. In some places if you have a sunken room, even by just inches, it may actually be considered a basement. I saw a story on the local news about an instance where they either wouldn't cover any of the damage, or would cover less, due to a room being several inches lower than the rest of the house. It might have also had something to do if it was lower than the outside elevation, I forget. Although I think in that case the elevation of the room might have been higher than the outside level was nearby, but maybe some other level elsewhere was lower. You don't think a lot about all the crazy ways you're not covered until you find out you're not covered. We don't have any sunken rooms, but several neighbors do or did. One person had previously filled theirs in and another that had not had those rooms flood a bit in Helene. |