Should it be raining in here?

There's been CRAZY activity over at TOH this week - and my dang camera ran out of juice so I don't have pictures. I'll get over there tomorrow to get some new ones.

Boudreaux's crew has finished the interior demolition on the kitchen, so we can now get a sense of the space with the walls opened up. We discovered some dead space behind the wall in front of the chimney with a LIVE outlet in it - someone along the line built out the wall so they'd have a straight run of counter, but didn't disconnect the power to the old outlet. The kitchen was SO small it's hard to imagine anyone closing off space on purpose. We've also seen more fun lime greet paint and some of the old linoleum.

Tropical Storm Cindy - which the local news has said was a hurricane after all - blew the patch off the roof where Lafitte's crew took out the old chimney. That left us with a very large hole in the middle of the roof, while Hurricane Dennis moved in this direction. Fortunately Dennis hit Pensacola instead, but it was still kind of troubling that once the ceiling was taken out in the kitchen, we could see right up and out, as well as down into the basement.

I was over there a few days ago to meet with a floor refinisher and checked out our big hole. It was drizzling at the time, and raindrops were clearly falling through the kitchen into the basement. Strangely, I just found it kind of interesting rather than alarming. I mean, it's all a mess right now anyway, right? But I did discover a new problem that's going to cost us: the wood beam exposed by the hole in the roof clearly has termite damage. In New Orleans, termite damage isn't exactly a shock, but depending on its extent, it can create a nightmare of carpentry. Since it only has to hold up the roof, I'm counting on Boudreaux to be able to fix this spot without ripping off the entire roof and replacing all the framing.