How to Gut a House (in 7 Steps)

by

Step 1: Remove all furniture

Floods make no distinction between socioeconomic classes, so the goodwill sofa and the Ashley sectional will both be equally ruined and unceremoniously dumped on the front lawn. Same goes for plasma tvs, painstakingly “distressed” coffee tables, and dining room chairs that have been passed down 3 generations. All must go. Mattresses, fridge, stove, exercise bike, dresser – everything to the curb.

Step 2: Remove anything not nailed down

This is where contractor trash bags come in handy. Things have been sitting in several feet of water, so anything porous must be thrown out. Books turn into solid, heavy bricks, pages morphed together, still dripping. Wedding photos are damaged beyond repair, faces blurred and bodies stretched into colorful shapes that no longer resemble loved ones. All clothes are gone. All bedding, towels, blankets and pillows. Computer, laptop, cable modem – was it stored more than 5ft above the floor? If not, they’re gone, too.

Shoes, slippers, groceries stored in the pantry. Old documents, placed in the bottom drawer of a locked file cabinet for safekeeping. They’re gone. Social security cards, birth certificates, warranties and insurance papers; all soggy and illegible. Everything is scooped up into the trash bags, then tied and carried out to the growing pile on the front lawn.

Step 3: Rip up all flooring

Carpet that squishes when you walk on it, water seeping up from underneath. It has to be cut out, rolled up, removed. The pad underneath it, the collector of years of dust and dirt and life, now soaked through with sewage water. Because when the Amite River overflowed, that was what these houses were flooded with: raw sewage. Not some Little Mermaid ocean paradise where spoons and forks got the chance to dance and sing under the waves for a little while. This stuff is vile. This stuff makes your gag reflex kick in, even though you’re a grown adult, even though you’re wearing a mask, even though you know this is somebody’s house, somebody’s life, and you need to get yourself together because there is still so much more work that needs to be done.

You roll up the carpet. You roll up the pad underneath. You carry it out and you breathe through your mouth and the sewage water drips on your clothing and soaks through your shoes. And the pile outside grows.

Step 4: Remove drywall

It’s a process. You work as a team: someone removes the floor boards, someone the door frames, someone the doors themselves. One person notices marks on one of the frames –  heights of children and grandchildren marked in pen, starting low and growing taller and taller with the child’s age marked alongside each line. They remove this board carefully, set it aside for the home owner to decide if it can be salvaged.

For the drywall you need tools – primarily a crow bar and a hammer. And the knowledge of how to use them when nails and soggy leverage work against you. Then you need box cutters. And a person who has done this kind of work before. You cut the sheets out in large sections, pry them from the wall with your hands. Sometimes you get frustrated, can’t find the right angle, can’t find the box cutter, so you take a hammer and smash in, then begin to tear small pieces with your fingers. The wet drywall crumbles, coming off in 2 inch chunks that aren’t efficient or clean, but hey, it still feels like progress so you keep going, living for those rare moments when a 2-foot chunk comes off instead.

You carry the larger pieces out one or two at a time, your fingertip strength being tested to the max. If only you’d done those rock-wall climbing lessons way back when. The smaller pieces you collect in a wheel barrel, and take turns dumping it onto the pile out front. It’s so big now that you have to walk around it to find a place where more can be added to it; tossing sheets of drywall onto the top like a backwards game of jenga, hoping and praying that they don’t topple back down.

Step 5: Take out insulation

The insulation is in thick sheets; cotton-candy-pink fluff that has been formed into rectangles to fit between the boards of the house. It looks innocent, and almost cute, but you know under the cheerful pink color lies tiny pieces of fiberglass, just waiting to bury themselves under your unprotected skin.

You remove the sheets carefully, one by one, the bottom half dripping with water. Roaches scramble out from underneath. You scream, surprised, and then wonder if this is what’s crawling around inside your own house’s walls as well.

Step 6: Weep

The house has been gutted. All that remains is the wooden frame. You can walk from room to room, not by using doorways, but by simply going through the walls themselves, since they no longer exist. It’s hard to imagine, now, that this was once a bedroom, or that an office. That this was once a home, a refuge. A place that held stories and lives and love.

You step outside to look at the massive pile of debris you have created, and then notice that every house on this street has one that looks almost exactly the same. The piles repeat themselves down the street, one after the other after the other, like a row of dominoes. Though, instead of threatening to crash into one another, these domino piles expose what has already crashed: the absolute devastation pulled from houses piece by piece, drug out into the light.

And so, you weep. You weep for the owners of the house you have just gutted. You weep for the owners of the houses all around you, who may not have work teams to come and help them reclassify their treasures as trash. You weep because you are physically exhausted and emotionally drained, and you have only been at this for one day – one day, and yet there are thousands of people who have been doing this for weeks now, and who are still so far from done.

You weep because the destruction is so real, so great, so all-encompassing, and you have no other way to respond.

Step 7: Shower, sleep, repeat

You drag your weary body to the church that is hosting you, and gratefully climb into the shower. You use a towel provided by the Red Cross, wash yourself with liquid soap that is being shared by both volunteers and victims alike, and watch as the layers of dirt and grime wash off of you. You think of this water, how very different it is from the sewage water that had collected in the house. You think about being clean, about the smell of it being washed away…and you think of your baptism. Of renewal. Of new creation, of new life, of new hope.

You let those thoughts wash over you, and you remember that all is not lost. That, though the flood waters invaded and destroyed and left their mark in such tangible, horrible ways, they are not the only waters that have marked you. Rather, your baptism has transformed you and restored you, and it is through that act of grace that you know that your God is not a God who gives up. That your God is not a God who abandons, but instead is a God who saves. A god who redeems, a God who makes new.

And that God is still at work in the world today, creating life from the ashes, and bringing beauty out of the despair.

_____________________________

In our 90-Day Gospel Reading Challenge, we finish the book of Matthew this Sunday. And in those last few chapters, we experience similar emotions of grief, despair, and loss. Jesus is betrayed. Jesus is tried. Jesus is crucified. But then we shower. And we sleep. And we wake up again, and Jesus is resurrected. Jesus is healed. Jesus is alive.

There will always be devastation, and destruction, and pain. But there will also always be new life, and hope, and resurrection. This is the God we believe in. This is the water of new creation that has marked us and transformed us, and we will not be overcome.

The Rev. Jessica Lowe serves as Associate Pastor at Grace Community United Methodist Church in Shreveport, LA. She blogs at RevJessicaLowe.com, from which this post is republished with the author's permission. A version of this article also appeared on WashingtonPost.com.