Recovering...

This week has been crazy and I'm not sure where the time went. It was a smaller week of campers and so I had 4 staff on "special projects". They did a ton of projects like chopping wood, painting around camp and washing (and putting in!) docks.

Getting the docks in was great because I feel like we are getting close to being back to normal. The archery range is still on the field because the real archery field is still muddy and disgusting, but we are almost back to normal.

After all the work that I put into the trailer house project, this was the week that it was supposed to be delivered. Supposed to be. Except that it wasn't.

The flood relief center found us a team of volunteers that are professionals at cleaning mold. They came out and walked around stone house and were super confident in their ability to clean it. They said it wasn't as bad as other houses they'd been to and it would be no problem.

I was so excited because we didn't need the trailer if we could fix the stone house. Also, I was getting cold feet about the trailer. I was nervous that it would end up being expensive and require more fixing then I could see. So I called the seller and backed out. It was a good exercise and learning experience and if I ever need to buy a trailer again, I will know much more!

The volunteers came back the next day with about 10 volunteers. The volunteers were local people who'd signed up to help. They were wearing tee shirts and paper masks. I was a little skeptical, but they seemed to know what they were doing. They gutted almost the whole basement and got the big wet couch and other furniture out of the basement. But at the end of the day, some of the sheetrock was still up and there were still some piles of stuff left in the basement. They told me they were done and that all I needed to do was take the rest of that stuff out and then powerwash the walls and hit them with some bleach.

Um...

I thanked them for their hard work, but I was so disappointed. When they'd described what they planned to do the day before, it was much different than what they actually did. And I had NO intention of putting any of my staff in there to "finish up".

My next step was to call an actual mold removal company. The woman who came out was VERY thorough and I wasn't surprised when she said, "this is BAD!" because I know that it is really bad. She told me NO one should be in that building without a haz-mat suit and an oxygen mask and that my description of the volunteers was pretty concerning. She also told me that power washing and bleaching was a terrible idea.

$5000 to finish gutting and soda blast the basement. .

Yikes.

The board approved but didn't really like me spending $5000 on the trailer. And to fix the stone house plumbing, electrical isn't even factored into that price.

I called our insurance company to see if it would be covered under "mechanical failure" since it was the sump pump failing that caused the mold. Unfortunately, mold is not covered under any aspect of any of our policies. So we're out of luck.

So now I'm back to square one. I don't have a solution to the housing problem yet.

I am frustrated and my whole week has been spent on this stuff. I feel detached from the campers and staff and I am ready to go back to normal camp and not "flood clean up".