El Nino Ate My Fence

I have a lot of house blogging to catch up on and I had hoped my first post of the year would be to tell you about all the projects i've worked on the past few months. Instead I guess I'll tell you what my next, unplanned, project will be: a new fence!

The beginning of a week-long El Nino storm rolled in to Southern California yesterday afternoon. By 3pm my entire street looked like the Grand Rapids; it was flooded from sidewalk to sidewalk (I mean up over across the sidewalk, up to everyone's lawns). The rain slowed and by 6pm, the street was just creek gutters. Then it was calm all night and in the morning.

While i was at work, the rain and wind turned on again, with wind up to 21 miles an hour. When I pulled into my driveway at 3:45, all I could do was laugh when I saw this:


Some of the posts that were in the ground, were snapped in half and some had pulled out iwth the cement they had been sunk into. Luckily, the fence was just short enough to miss taking out my neighbor's 3 cars. In fact, I went over there and they hadn't even heard it fall down earlier! They were nice and helped me knock down the last section that was about to come down (it's still up in the above picture which I took before they helped me).

For reference, here's what my fence used to look like:

I called my agent at Liberty Mutual to see if my homeowner's insurance covers this. It does, but I have to pay a $600 deductible. For some reason that's not stressing me out. Probably because I'm excited that I'll get to get a new, slick gate across the driveway. Although it is a little ironic that after 5 months of debating on this area rug, I finally bit the bullet and ordered it last night because it was on sale. Doh. Picture for those too lazy to click on the link (you can also see it in the living room of the current season of Biggest Loser - I think it's season 9):

The bursts are made out of raised ribbon.

However, who knows how long until the new fence is actually up? I'll probably have my friend Krista's carpenter come do it since he's reasonable and he built her an awesome barn door style gate. But the adjuster might not come out until Thursday and the rains are continuing through Friday. I guess for those of you who know where I live, you now have open access to play Super Mario Brothers on the hot tub Nintendo in the back yard =)