I don’t know that I’ve ever written about how the storm affected the rest of Dexter. While our neighborhood suffered lots of damage, the main road north out of Dexter got hit pretty badly too.
Dexter-Pinckney Road is the road we take to get to our lake house. It was closed after the tornado and when we were finally able to drive out it 2+ weeks later, it was a huge shock to see the devastation out that way.
I don’t know if I’d just gotten used to seeing blue tarps and dumpsters and the signs of damage and rebuilding in our subdivision or what, but seeing the hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of trees down along that road was shocking. The road used to have canopies of trees along for 3+ miles and now all that is left are stumps and mulch (from the chipped/grounded up trees).
I drove that way again today and I got chills still, seeing how empty the roadsides were. And while our neighborhood can – and will – rebuild, you can’t just replace all of those trees that were growing for hundreds of years. And we’ve learned that even if you have insurance, they don’t cover removing downed trees, or replacing them, unless they actually hit/damage your house.
Our house is still waiting for most of the work to be done – they pulled down our siding last week and now we are waiting for the windows to arrive and get installed, and then the new siding and garage door will get installed. They will perform other minor work as they can. but it will be nice to have the outside all done. I keep wanting to buy some flowers but figured they’ll get mangled when they do the siding and windows, and Rick has a plan to re-do all the landscaping but again – it doesn’t seem to make sense to do that this year, at least until after the outside work is done.
So – this is what our house looks like today. It has Tyvek wrap on it, which is an improvement over what we had before (which was no Tyvek…apparently it wasn’t code when the houses were built). I think it will be better to have this stuff on than the damaged siding for the next two weeks – I think this will rattle less in the wind :-)
