a new garage/home after Harvey

Hi, sorry it's been so long since I've been on the Garage Journal, but I have a story to share. My husband and I were hit hard like many from Harvey on August 27th. I won't go into detail, but it was pretty horrible, not so much during the hurricane, but the aftermath.

We've bought another place in Cypress, Tx about 2 months ago, about an acre of land, nice home, small swimming pool and a garage/shop which is finally taking shape after a great deal of work! A good thing is tomorrow we close on selling the flooded home and can put that to rest

The pic here is after being rescued by FEMA and a last glimpse back as we floated off. Behind the garage doors are two of my classic cars(71 Triumph TR6 and my 67 Mustang. The Mustang was totally submerged and the Triumph was about halfway. I can bring the TR6 back to life in about a couple years. The mustang will be a complete re-rebuild. The water level didn't stop here, it made it to about 6' in the garage and 52" in our home, the water stayed for 2 weeks soaking everything in muck. If the army corp of engineers would have posted a warning of the release of the dam waters, we could have saved a great deal of things.

Gary n I and puppy stayed in the 400sq.ft garage apartment for 4 long days until we realized the water was NOT going down any time soon. It was like a prison, can't get out, running out of propane for the small generator, food running low, irritating atmosphere, despair.


Finally after about 2 long weeks, not talking about where to live, we got back in as many. I'm trying desperately to clean things knowing there is a lot to do! The process started and insurance calls by Gary were never ending with pathetic help.


This pic I got earlier on praying that my classics wouldn't get it, but alas, you can just make out the line on the TR6 body where the water level got to.





The new home is nice, needed nothing but a good cleaning and a credit card to purchase new EVERYTHING. I live for my garage, the house is just icing on the cake!


This is a home that was being raised, it's not ours. Some just are in the process of renovatting their homes, other homes are just sitting waiting for workers, others are teardowns and new home have to be elevated at least 5' for new construction.




The new garage/s are about 48' deep, it's kind of complicated to explain, but there are basically two garages on the left side end to end. The middle garage has a lower ceiling and is becoming my tools n stuff, then the RV part is still under ideas, but I'm thinking a 4 post lift and one of my Maxjax lifts.


The place was an absolute mess! but I had visions of a nice workshop.





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Let me introduce my version of a Texaco station still in the works!






Got ahead of myself, but this was a couple weeks or so ago. My TR6 will be on that Kwik-lift for a long time, just have to get it here!


This is the RV section, just got my Gantry crane home yesterday by means of our new 14' trailer!




This is the short version and I apologize for its length. Funny thing is, I was searching for ideas for the large concrete driveway which I just pressure washed yesterday and today. IT's kind of porous and I feel it needs to be sealed, but I don't know what to seal it with and looking for ideas to preserve it for a while longer. We have spent a great deal of money putting our lives back together and always behind playing catch up. Ideas welcome and happy to be posting again despite the circumstances.
Dne'

ps: I know I didn't mention anything about the flooded home. Yes, it was a total, nothing was saved except for important documents. The water rose from in our back ditch 15' below our homes foundation in a matter of hours. We went to bed at 10:00pm, Gary woke up at 3:00 am to pee, the water was 6" from entering our home. By 5o am we were up in our garage apartment watching the water level raise higher and higher.

wow, what a crazy story!!! My best friends dad worked Harvey as an adjuster and said it was just chaos. He said quite a few insurance companies darn near went under (no pun intended) because of just how MUCH cash they had to dish out...

You have some REALLY nice projects/toys there!! You mentioned the house was a total loss, but were you able to save everything else? I've never dealt with a submerged car before, but it seems like it's repairable?

Going with the above mentioned lack of knowledge - did insurance simply write you a big fat check for everything destroyed, including the home?

Yes, the house and contents was a total loss, but FEMA takes over, they only pay 250k maximum and one has to itemize everything to get that; we didn't get near 250k, more like 190.. Even a home worth 1 million would only get 250k if meeting the criteria and if one didn't have flood insurance, that's BAD!
As far as my classic cars, it's just a matter of tearing them back down and starting all over again (re-restoration). As for our daily drivers, our insurance did pay enough to buy one new car. I bought the 2000 Dodge ram 1500 4x4 and love it!

wannabridin said:

wow, what a crazy story!!! My best friends dad worked Harvey as an adjuster and said it was just chaos. He said quite a few insurance companies darn near went under (no pun intended) because of just how MUCH cash they had to dish out...

You have some REALLY nice projects/toys there!! You mentioned the house was a total loss, but were you able to save everything else? I've never dealt with a submerged car before, but it seems like it's repairable?

Going with the above mentioned lack of knowledge - did insurance simply write you a big fat check for everything destroyed, including the home?

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Sorry to hear about this, that is terrible business. As far as recovery goes, the new place looks like its really coming together!

Thanks for sharing your story and good luck with the new shop(s).

-Clint

Denee007 said:

Yes, the house and contents was a total loss, but FEMA takes over, they only pay 250k maximum and one has to itemize everything to get that. Even a home worth 1 million would only get 250k if meeting the criteria and if one didn't have flood insurance, that's BAD!

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This has me curious as I've never had to go through a natural disaster of this magnitude. So if you paid your insurance dues on your million dollar home and had adequate coverage; FEMA would limit you to only getting 250k?

-Clint

Yes, it'd be better if your house burned down, then regular insurance would be in effect. I only know a handful a people which got the maximum of 250k. Some which had no flood insurance, I don't know what they did Our home was paid in full, some had young children and mortgages. I honestly don't know what happens in those cases~ walk aways?

Augus7us said:

This has me curious as I've never had to go through a natural disaster of this magnitude. So if you paid your insurance dues on your million dollar home and had adequate coverage; FEMA would limit you to only getting 250k?

-Clint

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Congrats on the new digs. It appears you have made lemonade and looking to improve on what you found.

Wow. Walk away and claim bankruptcy (for some people)
and destroying your credit rating and have no equity? That's a hard road to go down.

I had no idea it worked like that. I'm admittedly naive to what my insurance policy says exactly, but I would be pissed if I paid all that money for insurance over the years and got screwed the one time I had to use it. Surprised there's not a rash of house fires a day or two before hurricanes hit land.

I feel your pain. This evening I stopped by my mother's house that was flooded to check on progress. Drywall is up, but taping and floating won't finish this week.

She was either luck or unlucky. She bought the house 11 days before the flood and hadn't moved in yet, so she didn't lose all her stuff, only the structure. She had about 54" in the house.

marineman said:

I had no idea it worked like that. I'm admittedly naive to what my insurance policy says exactly, but I would be pissed if I paid all that money for insurance over the years and got screwed the one time I had to use it. Surprised there's not a rash of house fires a day or two before hurricanes hit land.

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I believe it used to be fairly common a few decades back that their would be house fires after the area was flooded. People come back in at night by row boat and set the roof lines on fire. Fire depts can't reach the fire and the roof burns down to the water line. Insurance claim is made for fire damage and not flood damage.

I don't understand insurance company's. They seem to cover "act's of god" things like a tree falling on your house because of wind, or a hail storm taking out your roof, but not a flood? Unless you live in a known 100 year flood plain then they should cover it.

A terrible situation for sure but looks like you are coming out of it pretty well. That Texaco station is fantastic. Is the new place on high enough ground you won't have another flood?

As a lot of people found after hurricanes, there is no substitute for flood insurance. Your regular house insurance does not cover flooding. Even if you are not in the 100 year floodplain, you can still be flooded by bigger events, or because the flood plain map is inaccurate. Lots of people involved in Harvey discovered that houses outside the floodplain were subject to flooding. In Harvey, about half the land that flooded was outside the flood plain.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/01/us/houston-damaged-buildings-in-fema-flood-zones.html

Or you can be in my situation a few years ago, in which my basement flooded with 2 inches of water due to the rise in the ground water table. A few months before, my hydrologist friend assured me that we could not flood there; technically true, but it still cost me thousands of dollars to replace carpet, etc.

Denee007 said:

Yes, it'd be better if your house burned down, then regular insurance would be in effect. I only know a handful a people which got the maximum of 250k. Some which had no flood insurance, I don't know what they did Our home was paid in full, some had young children and mortgages. I honestly don't know what happens in those cases~ walk aways?

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It sounds like a federal law to prevent insurance companies from going under in the event of a major disaster like this. Seems a bit unfair to the guy that paid his dues and expected what he paid for in an event like this. C'est la vie...

-Clint

Just a FYI with insurance, particularly flood insurance. Construction prices have gone way up the last few years. I have my flood insurance policy maxed out on my garage (1000sf) at 40k under nfip. Anything more requires a separate policy which doubles the cost. That said, rebuilding a 1000sf, stick framed garage in a rural area isn't going to happen for 40k.

kelpaso1 said:

I don't understand insurance company's. They seem to cover "act's of god" things like a tree falling on your house because of wind, or a hail storm taking out your roof, but not a flood? Unless you live in a known 100 year flood plain then they should cover it.

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From what I've read the Houston area is/was a flood plain area but the city planners didn't plan for it. And, insurance companies are in business to make money, not give it out.

To the OP, hope your new place works out good for you.

So sorry to hear about your experience. Good luck in the new home and great looking garage.

If you haven't, check out the Texaco sign that ShakeyPuddin55 has in his post.

There is no 250k limit on flood policies. The portion above 250k is called excess flood coverage but its quite available. MANY in the Houston area have had claims on homes much higher than that. Several friends and coworkers of mine have been this since Harvey. All have settled except one that cannot afford to elevate AND rebuild. FEMA does not cover the cost to elevate as that is an improvement, not a loss. As with most insurance, its YOUR POLICY that sets the limits. FEMA is much harder to file claims with and get paid than your regular insurance company.

Flood plain maps set the likelihood of flood which sets your rates for flood insurance. It does not define if you SHOULD have insurance. If you are in the flood plain, your rates are much higher. Many folks in Houston did not have flood insurance and no homeowners policy covers flood. Outside the flood plain, the rates are actually not all that bad. Ours is $650 or so a year. We were fortunate not to flood during Harvey but some nearby neighbors did. That was a lot of water.

I'm not flood insurance expert and I don't live in a flood plain, but for some reason this has peaked my curiosity. After the last comment I was compelled to try and look this up and found this from an article, link below. And my apologies to the OP not trying to hijack the thread but I think this explains what she was saying.

More than 90% of all flood insurance policies in the country are issued by NFIP. And homeowners whose property is located in designated flood zones are required to buy a policy, a requirement enforced by mortgage-issuing banks.

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Complicating the issue is that NFIP caps payouts for residential homes at $250,000 and $500,000 for commercial properties. Many homeowners with a NFIP policy don't carry surplus insurance even if they own more expensive houses. And repair bills exceeding the cap could be financially burdensome for some homeowners.

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/mone...victims-under-covered-houston-area/613239001/

And with that, I bow out of the insurance discussion and await more photos of the shop

-Clint

That *****, but it looks like you definitely made lemonade from those lemons! If the new house didn't flood during Harvey, it's highly unlikely that it ever will. Parts of Cypress were devastated. I was up there right after the storm, taking supplies to some friends that had over 4 feet of water flowing through their home.

Much envy about that new shop. Wow! It would be awesome to have that much space.

For those interested, here are pics I took within a mile or so of our house during and after Harvey. This is in the Katy area, just west of Houston.

During:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gsn512mdr2zhrho/AADuPXYBLQRamAj1eIpNfutpa?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/p5wb2uh20pn63io/AACtitKVRAMrwH46WO1Ee8yZa?dl=0

After:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pr3wweoqffzwvt5/AABT2-S_KWfiQSEC-adM0wMna?dl=0

NONE of these homes were listed as being located in, or even near, a flood zone of any kind. Thus most people did not have flood insurance. However, after the storm ended and the investigations began, it was found that the Army Corp. knew this could happen, but kept the area from being called a flood zone via a technicality in the law. These homes were built just outside of a 6x13 mile reservoir area (Barker Reservoir, which is normally mostly dry land) that was built in the early 40's, to protect downtown Houston from flooding. The Corp. knew that in an extreme rain event that the reservoir would grow FAR outside of its marked boundaries (I.e., the land that the gov't had actually purchased way back when). The only thing that they did to mark this threat was that a footnote was added to some land plats stored away in a county office. The word "FLOOD" is NEVER MENTIONED on those plats, anywhere. The wordsmith language used instead said something to the effect of "Subject to extended inundation". Meaning that the water could indeed rise into that land and stay there for weeks or months, but a technicality prevented it from ever being called a "flood zone". Meanwhile, years later, developers were allowed to build all these new subdivisions on that property. Did the developers know? Most believe that they did, but greed won out. No one thought that it would ever be possible to have 50+ inches of rain in 3 or 4 days. Everyone believes it now. One small town south of us, Needville, recorded 64 inches! (As a side note, the forecast was that Harvey was going to go back out over the Gulf Of Mexico, gather strength again and come back over Houston! It did go back out, but then came ashore 75 miles or so to the east, where it flooded Beaumont and the surround area. Things may have reached biblical proportions in the Houston area if all of that extra rain had fallen here instead of moving east.)

The water could have spread ever farther into the subdivisions, but the Corp. was worried that the reservoir's 80-year-old earthen dam might breach if the water got too high, which would have basically created a tidal wave flowing into Houston. The top of the dam is at 104 feet, but they took action when it got to 101.5 feet. They decided to open the floodgates fully to relieve the pressure on the dam. Just across I-10, another similar reservoir, known as Addicks Reservoir, also had its floodgates open, because water was already going around one end of its earthen dam. Well, BOTH reservoirs drain into the same bayou, which flows directly towards downtown Houston. So after the storm was gone, people whose homes had been high and dry, got flooded out for days. Lots of 1-10 million dollar homes got also severely flooded during this part of the event.

I became very concerned when streets 1/3 of a mile from our house were starting to flood. Maps available online showed our house was 100-110 feet above sea level, yet none agreed on the exact level. (A neighbor that is a land surveyor later brought home his $10,000+ equipment and verified that our slab sits at 107 feet.)

WTF, you ask? Many people here are asking the same thing. The lawsuits are piling up already. You can bet that those guilty of this are either already dead from old age or will never be punished for their actions.

I agree Clint, let's talk about my new shop! The new home of my blog (www.Classiccarsandtools.com) and stuff that I do! I think I'll start a new thread and let's put this behind us! We go to meet with our realtor to close as someone bought the flooded home for a decent price which will help fund things we need~! (like a 4 post lift) Where we are, I don't think it will flood, but that's Mother Nature~ she can be quite a pain! lol
dne'



https://www.usatoday.com/story/mone...victims-under-covered-houston-area/613239001/

And with that, I bow out of the insurance discussion and await more photos of the shop

-Clint[/QUOTE]

While this is a tragic event and life changer, sometimes that's not necessarily a BAD thing.

I think all of us are holding on to a lot of stuff and junk that we should let go, but do not for sentimental reasons, or just in case we need it, or just don't want to bother. Think of the last time you moved and wondered why you have all of this stuff you don't touch for months/years at a time, or only when you move.

Sometimes a flood/fire/disaster gives you a chance to reset and clear away all of the detritus of the past and start over new. No, not fun in any way, but a reset can help put that part of your life behind you.

In this situation, you had a nice home, and a decent garage, but you had very little parking there, and no way could you bring in another car or such for parts or projects. Now you have a huge garage setup, a big RV space for that 4 post lift, lots of space outside for projects, work space, etc. And no close neighbors to bother you about any of it.

In this case, I think you came out better for it.

Well said Dan! Not terribly long ago, I was trying to convince Gary for us to move where I'd have what I want, and same for him. Guess he just wanted to stay in the previous home. That's when we built on to the existing garage, but I quickly outgrew it. Now I have pretty much more room and can expand and work on many things at a time; like a flooded 67 Mustang and TR6, much of my equipment/tools which are still tainted with muck water, lots of cleanup to do. And you're absolutely correct about not having neighbors right next door! I can grind on metal to my hearts content!
dne'

Vegaman_Dan said:

While this is a tragic event and life changer, sometimes that's not necessarily a BAD thing.

I think all of us are holding on to a lot of stuff and junk that we should let go, but do not for sentimental reasons, or just in case we need it, or just don't want to bother. Think of the last time you moved and wondered why you have all of this stuff you don't touch for months/years at a time, or only when you move.

Sometimes a flood/fire/disaster gives you a chance to reset and clear away all of the detritus of the past and start over new. No, not fun in any way, but a reset can help put that part of your life behind you.

In this situation, you had a nice home, and a decent garage, but you had very little parking there, and no way could you bring in another car or such for parts or projects. Now you have a huge garage setup, a big RV space for that 4 post lift, lots of space outside for projects, work space, etc. And no close neighbors to bother you about any of it.

In this case, I think you came out better for it.

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Really sorry about your misfortune. But the new place is looking great!

Flood insurance pays out more in claims every year than it charges in premiums. Flood insurance is a federal program because it is so costly.

Private insurance companies don’t cover flooding directly because the premiums would be sky high to make a profit. The policies they sell are backed by the federal government.

I've started a new thread to focus more on the new shop; join me there

https://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?p=7075261#post7075261

That really ***** what happened but your new garage, WOW. Its going to be awesome. Heading to the new thread............