Wades Beach: Out of the Ashes

What every home should have: a scow and a pod.

Today I’ll post an update of what has been happening the last ten days with the house and the effects of the fire. I’ll begin with today. We have an architect on the job. His name is Rob Brown and he is with the Greenport firm Fairweather Brown. Chrissie really likes his work, and met him at the house a couple weeks ago. I spoke to him today, and he’s working on sketches to show us in about 2 weeks. We talked about things I never knew existed, such as mudrooms. One thing I forgot to ask about was putting solar panels on the roof; Chrissie and I are trying to be “green” in some small way. The next step with the architects is that they will send a team to the house tomorrow to measure it.

I was out last Saturday for half a day when the demolition started. Chrissie stayed behind in the city. It is a good thing, because these guys were smashing down walls and cutting out the fire-damaged parts. The house is now 100 percent empty of all contents. A couple of scows were put on the lawn and then carted away, filled with debris, damaged furniture, and junk. We lost a lot of things, such as clothes, books, and fixtures. All that went out the door. What they are doing is preparing the house for construction, or I guess re-construction. We can save the exterior walls and some of the framing, but to do so they must remove all the drywall, insulation, and moldings. The reason is so that mold does not grow in the wet parts when the temperature heats up. Right now it is too cold for mold to grow, but that will happen if the house does not get aired out.

The demo crew took out every interior door, kitchen cabinets, fixture, window treatments (not even a year old). The house is now just a shell. They are to finish on Monday, and I am glad I will not be there. It will be pretty bare by then.

We also had a furniture expert come out and look at our furniture, stored in a pod on the front lawn. He is going to come and cart it all to Mattituck to his shop to clean and refinish it. Insurance will cover it. It is a good thing, because the wooden furniture has smoke damage, and can be cleaned. The majority of the furniture can be saved.

I was really busy in my day out there. I admit I was really pissed off that the crew threw out some things I wanted to salvage that were not damaged, like my Dress Blues that was hanging in a closet, Chrissie’s work clothes that were still in dry cleaning bags, and some books that were not in the place I said I’d put all things I wanted to save. Basically I had one spare bedroom to stage my rescue operation. This was important to me, because it was things like college yearbooks, photo albums, and special books (our two baby books were located; Chrissie’s partially char-broiled) and old clothes. While the demo went on, I shuttled out the good stuff to the shed or the car.

I also made some good saves, which was a relief. When the crew pulled the ceiling down, what was left of the attic came down to the living room floor. It was a mangled mess of what had been cardboard boxes. The funniest was when a couple hundred pennies rained down on a demo crew guy; that was my retirement fund! He looked like he was in shock as a rain of copper came down on him. The pennies were swept up and thrown in the bin. But I did manage to locate a set of teacups and plates my grandparents had picked up in Ireland in the early 1970s as tourists. I am sure they are worth very little, but these are pretty much the only items I inherited from them. It was a little bit of a relief, because one box that burned up in the attic was my grandfather’s World War II medals and ribbons from his U.S. Navy service. I always had wanted to mount and frame them, now that won’t ever happen.



But the biggest find was still yet to come. A big chunk of burned out boxes fell out of the old attic to the floor below. I saw mixed in with the pile of blackened charred debris was a box in a familiar blue color. It was hard to miss, as it was “Tiffany Blue.” I took my gloves off and dipped into the mess, and pulled out the long blue box. I knew right away what it was even before I opened it up: the silver cake cutter from our wedding. It was burned on the tip, right on the handle where “C + K” is engraved. I picked it up and was so happy. Then right after that, I heard a tinkling sound, like the sound you hear when you drop silverware onto a table. I found a burned and blackened knife, fork, and spoon. They were very very small, because these belonged to Chrissie’s mom as a baby. She died 10 years ago, so anything of hers we have is a real treasure. I was pretty thrilled to put them in my pocket and take them back to Harlem that night. They are soaking in the kitchen sink, and the blackness is coming off.

Labels: Aftermath