I know - it's supposed to be "Hell hath no fury..." but that would ruin my little pun because I'm talking about hail. Last Sunday we had a nasty storm blow through and with it came hail. Now, I live in the Midwest - Kansas - and we are known for large hail, hail the size of golf balls and baseballs. But in the 16 years that I have lived here, the biggest hail I have ever personally seen in our community is about the size of a grape - still rather impressive for a girl from Southern California.
What I saw hitting my house and bouncing off of my glass french doors, deck, barbeque grill,and everything else, was golf ball size and larger - about the size of a nectarine. I've talked to people who have lived here their whole lives and most of them say they've never had hail that large around here in their lifetime. The picture of the hail with the penny is one I grabbed from the front porch - in a hurry! I didn't want to get beaned and earn myself a possible concussion, so I just grabbed what was available with the door open just a couple of inches. It's not one of the largest ones by any means, but I wasn't going to risk stitches in my head, know what I mean? The other picture is from my front yard. It's hard to see it, but it looks like a bunch of white toadstools just popped up. Some of these were hitting so hard that they exploded on impact.
That Sunday evening my husband was working (he started back with the city Police Dept. in January), I had an assignment due, and a bunch of laundry to finish before school and work the next day, so I and my youngest stayed home from church, otherwise my truck would have been outside during the storm and not safely under our carport in the back. Tucker, as the only member of the family at church that evening, said that several of the stained glass windows got broken and almost all of the storm glass covering the stained glass got damage, and all of the cars in the parking lot have dents all over them. My husband drove his patrol car under the carport and thereby saved it from a lot of damage. All of the other cars except for his and one other had broken lights, glass, and dents all over the place.
The next day driving to work showed a town that looked like it had been through a shootout and lost. We have a few dozen instances of holes in our siding, just one broken storm window, a couple of damaged screens - not nearly as bad a lot of people. Some of these houses with siding look like they were peppered with automatic gunfire. Houses with wooden siding look like they have been sandblasted - most of the paint is gone on the west and north sides of the houses. There are broken windows everywhere, which are being boarded up, and overall there is a lot of roof damage, with blue tarps seen on numerous roofs.
By Friday, our town was inundated with contractors - cars and trucks with ladders attached to them and so much advertising on the vehicles, you'd run the risk of having an accident trying to read it all. We got no less than 8 forms of advertising on our door, and several more in the mail just on Friday alone. There are warnings all over the local news channels and in the papers advising people to thoroughly vet contractors to avoid being scammed.
We have State Farm and our adjuster came out this morning and met with the contractor we selected and together they went all over the house and the roof. Apparently our roof is totaled, as is the roof on the carport. I found pieces of roofing material in the yard last week so Bobby went up on the roof and did find damage, but he wasn't sure to what extent. I guess it's bad, lol. The adjuster has determined that our roof will be replaced, along with our metal garage door, my french doors on the deck, all of the screens on the west and north sides of the house, the broken storm window, and the siding on the west and north sides of the house. However, if a match cannot be found for the existing siding, then all of the siding will be replaced. The contractor told us that siding manufacturers change the colors and styles every few years, and ours is old enough that most likely we'll be looking at all four sides of the house being done. My problem is that I didn't want to go with vinyl siding again, but insurance will only cover materials that are comparable to what is currently existing on the house. I guess if we get another damaging storm go through that ruins vinyl siding that was just replaced, they might have to rethink that policy. Homes with that concrete-type siding didn't get any damage at all to it. It's definitely worth thinking about.
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