House Update #3

We drove back down to Colorado Springs to meet with the contractor who will be repairing our home. It was my first time seeing the house since the fires and I was blown away by the magnitude of the damage done to our neighborhood. It was surreal to drive up to our house and see complete streets wiped out. There are no homes left on the path I used to walk everyday with Jack.

When we got to our house, we found this posted on our front door:

And as we walked inside this is what we saw:

The entire floor is unstable as the fire burnt up all the beams underneath. It will be a very labor intensive process as they remove the floor while still bracing the walls. 

Here is a picture of how we left our house back in 2010:

The tenants were able to remove all their property from our house, except they forgot to clean out the fridge. And there has been no power to our home ever since the fires (over 2 months now) so the fridge is in bad shape. The contractor warned us not even to open it as there are sure to be disgusting things crawling everywhere. You can see that things are leaking onto the floor. This poor fridge is beyond repair. They are going to wrap it up and throw it out.

All of the our backyard neighbors homes were destroyed by the fire. You can see below that one house is already being rebuilt:

Here is the same backyard view back in 2010 before the fire destroyed these two homes

Our next door neighbors home is gone as well. It was so odd to see all the open land surrounding our house. 

After meeting with the contractor we took a driving tour of our neighborhood. Most of the rubble has been removed and now the place is bustling with construction crews and vehicles

The Flying W Ranch was completely burnt to the ground and had to close its doors. 

 
Charred trees everywhere


It was touching to see all the flags and signs thanking the fireman in the midst of all the destruction.

 

We feel especially grateful to the firefighters since we know they were in our home fighting the fire back from our property. Our house surely would have burnt to the ground if it weren't for them.