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A LONG 87 days later

It all started September 10th. Hurricane Florence was tracking straight for us at a category 3 or 4. My husband an active duty marine was not given word to evacuate yet. With only one car we didn’t want to be put into a bad situation and had my mother drive 3 hours south to come get myself, our almost 10 week old son(4th of July baby 😎), and our English bulldog. We packed up my moms truck that night and left around 4 am on September 11th, sadly enough the twin towers were not on my mind that day. I remember looking out the window as the sun was starting to rise and see in these long thing curved bands of clouds. That’s when I knew this was going to be a BAD hurricane. Our town and surrounding towns were given a mandatory evacuation by the 12, my husbands command didn’t release anyone till mid day on the 13th, the day before the hurricane was to make landfall.

Boy did it make landfall....

We were away from home for two weeks, that was stressful to say the least, with very little reports of how our area was we weren’t to sure what we would be coming home to. Other cities were underwater and completely cut off from civilization so we could only expect the worse. My best friend was due to get married September 20th in more head city. Her flourist shop was destroyed, her bakers home and shop were destroyed but the caterer had little to no damage. Her florist was able to drop ship her order from out of state the night before the wedding. However her Baker was unable to fulfill her cake order, so two nights before the wedding I busted out 12 dozen home made vanilla butter cream cupcakes. After 4 dozen I wanted to just go buy cake mix SOOOOO bad. But I pushed through. On September 19th we got the go ahead to head home, since my husband HAD to be back to work that following Monday. A typical 3 hr drive took us 10 hours, three detours(one of which took us in a complete circle and 3 hours out of our way), and two full tanks of gas.

What are normally cute little quaint coastal towns, looked like a bomb went off and destroyed everything. Every personal, well loved belonging, a person could have were in piles on the side of the road mixed with soaked drywall and installation. These piles were massive, some taller than the homes it came out of. 100+ year old trees were complete uprooted and Laing just mere INCHES from people’s homes, so many more people could have been killed if those trees hadn’t missed by as little as they did. Windows were blown out, sides of homes and building were complete gone, metal roofs were collapsed in. THESE were the towns no one reported on, the towns that are still struggling to this day.

After a brutally long car ride we were finally homey 7pm ... our home is an apartment, with us being on the bottom floor. At first glance we could see siding, drains, roofing stripped from the building. The buildings were still standing and the metal security fencing hadn’t budged 🙏🏼 as we got out of the car that’s when we really saw what we were about to walk into. Trees once again were uprooted, dirt streams all over the pavement, piles of the missing building materials laid next to the side walk. We opened our door and we knew... we knew instantly we had damage before turning on the lights. The smell of mildew, mold, and rotting hit like a ton of bricks.

The first room we looked at was our sons nursery, streams of mold coming from the ceilings was what I saw first. I took off my shoes and I was met with wet carpet, two weeks later mine you, his wooden crib was cracked, hipped, and bowed. His wood dresser the same with mold starting to form.i turned around and went to our living room, the couches we had for barely a year were soaked.our bedroom we were met with no power and the same streams of mold coming down our walls. Our desks, bookcase, bed were covered in mold, our mattress was wet. It was a complete shit show to say the least.

We couldn’t stay there so we drove another 2 hours to morehead city, where the wedding would be, and stayed with the bridal party. At this point nothing in morehead city had power, our generator was a large farm tractor that powered the home which everyone was so grateful for.the wedding was sadly rushed due to the high temps, no ac, or power.

We were luckily given our apartments walk through tour apartment to stay In Till ours was fixed, we went from a two bedroom to a one bedroom for 74 days. It was cramped we were practically living on top of each other, and that’s when the arguing started. Our marriage struggled BIG time during those 74 days. We fought constantly, and about the dumbest things too! We were no longer intimate in any way with each other, we constantly were trying to tear each other down, at about the three week mark we decided to go to counseling.

During all of this I was fighting our insurance company who had denied our claim three times. Our insurance handler I was working with had stated false information multiple times, had blatantly lied to us stating what our contract said we were covered for, we weren’t covered for. This went on for about a month. Finally I was at my last straw, I had to go through so many people just to talk to my handler I got ahold of his supervisor, who I also had problems with. I remember it was mid day on a Tuesday, I was at my wits end and just told the supervisor that if they keep playing this game and my claim doesn’t start looking better by Friday I was filing a lawsuit come Monday morning. Coincidentally my claim got approved 5 minutes later 🙃🙃 we were approved for 20k 🙏🏼 which paid off all of our debt, paid for our home to be refurnished and put about 5-6k into savings. Things financially were looking up for us.

We through out all of unsalvageable belongings and order new ones, during this time they started work on our apartment.... ya know when things are going great and all of a sudden you get sucker punched in the face? That sucker punch was our construction crew. The demo guys did a GREAT job, the repair guys...when they were done EVERY INCH of our home was covered in drywall dust. Our laundry room which is no where near any of the construction was covered in a film of dust. All of our new furniture was covered. After the painters came through we realized the repair guys did even worse, there were 2-3 feet long cracks going up our walls, CHUNKS of drywall were missing, the walls were not smooth and you am see a very distinct line where they put in the new dry wall, hell our curtain rod holders were missing!

Come to find out the repair guys got fired cause we weren’t the only apartment unit they did horrible work on. We got the best repair guys out and for the most part they did a good job, got brand new carpets too! December 3rd roles by and I get a phone call about mid day that we can move in on the 4th. The 4th was spent deep DEEEP cleaning our apartment, to the point when you walked in it smelt like a brand new home. The 5th everything was moved and set up. Which let me tell you our bedroom furniture I put together and that stuff is HEAAAAVYY. I about died just trying to move the headboard into our room. Everything was going well till I went to set up the new crib we bought 🤦🏼‍♀️ one of the panels was completely busted through almost as if someone had kicked it in. After dealing with customer service for an hour it was resolved and then our couch was delivered( the small chair is back ordered for another month🤦🏼‍♀️)!!!! We set up our budget friendly Christmas tree and are now as of December 6th FINALLY living back into our home.

We are still working on our selves and our marriage and are slowly getting better. Hurricane Florence not only destroyed our everyday life and home but it drove a wedge between our marriage. Now I just gotta work on my husband getting up with our son at night 😂

Here pictures of the pretty