Irmagrsh

I wanted to blog about Hurricane Irma for quite some time now but we had guests every night for a week (Friday night was our first night with the house to ourselves) so I didn't have time to talk about our hurricane adventure. First off, I want to thank everyone who messaged or texted us to find out how we were doing and send prayers. It was so thoughtful and we felt so loved. Also, the power of prayer really works - the storm changed course countless times but through it all, the Lord protected us and kept us calm.

Saturday, we saw the beginning of the storm start to come through so our friend came and stayed with us since he was in an evacuation zone (long story but his wife was out of state and his flight to join her got cancelled the day before) and we hunkered down. Thankfully, we had quite some time to prepare so Stephen was able to help board up 3 houses, including ours, so we didn't feel as rushed as we did with Matthew. Saturday was low key, lots of wind and rain but nothing too crazy so we watched movies, ran around outside while we still could, I baked and the boys played video games.

Sunday was go time. The wind started picking up so we stayed indoors and played board games and video games. The worst of it was that evening/night. It sounded so awful - definitely worse than Matthew. Throughout the night, we kept hearing branches hit the roof and thinking it was our oak tree out back falling on the roof. We started to see some small leaks in the roof but thankfully, it was from the vents and not the roof coming apart. It was an intense night but thankfully the Lord got us through and once the eye was beyond us around 2 am, it wasn't as crazy outside so we were able to get some sleep. I seriously can't believe that our power didn't go out until 12:30 am Monday morning and then it came back on at 5 am - our street is seriously on the best grid!

After sleeping for a few hours, we decided to go outside Monday morning so assess the damage. We literally couldn't believe that we didn't see any big roof damage (we still need to get it inspected to verify) and there were no trees on the house! There was definitely a lot more debris down than Matthew but no body's house was damaged!! The Lord truly protected us. There were breaks in the main water line for our county so we didn't have water for a few hours. We decided to stay inside for a few more hours since it was still windy. After lunch, we walked a few streets to see the damage then started the clean up the yard. Thankfully, we only lost water for a few hours so we could shower but we couldn't drink it for a few days. The next few days, we cleaned up the outside and checked out friends' houses and helped them clean up as well.

This was the biggest area of debris. Thankfully, the magnolia didn't fall so now we're trying to pull it back into place

Since we were already doing a lot of cutting, I decided it was time to finally give our front bushes a good trim lol Everything looked so clean after all of the yard work!!

This plant got the worst of the wind and so I had to basically cut the whole thing down

We both went back to work on Wednesday which was difficult to do but we were thankful we were able to clean up the yard before going back. A few of our friends lost power for a few days after the hurricane so we were more than happy to have them stay with us until their power came back on. I'm so glad we had power and was able to help them out :) 

For now, we are enjoying getting things back to normal for only the past few days ;) Today, I left for a week long business trip to Charlotte and it seems that there's 2 more tropical storms in the Atlantic that could hit us so we'll see... Probably shouldn't have taken down all the plywood just yet ;)

Linking up with Biana