Final Week of the NOMADS 2022 Laurel, MS Disaster Rebuild

Sunday, April 24, 2022

This was the last week in Laurel for NOMADS tornado recovery. But first, last weekend. Saturday afternoon our new team members Sadowna and Mark arrived. This was our first time to work with them and what a joy it was to have them join us. We had a great week! We all celebrated Easter at Laurel First UMC where the music and message were so good. We are so blessed to have a Savior who loved us enough to die for us even before we loved him. Hope you all had a blessed Easter – the best Sunday of the year!

Sunday evening, we all ended up in the nursery again for the fifth week in a row. How ironic that we had our last tornado warning on Easter. Some of the homes we have repaired were damaged by the Easter 2020 tornado. Fortunately this Easter, while there were trees and power lines down, and a few structures damaged, there were no injuries or severe damage.

We got our weekly tornado warning out of the way early this week.

Monday the four of us returned to the Todd house and installed the remaining siding on the back of the house, the garage doors and the front gable. That completed the work there.

Measuring for the last piece of siding on the back of the house

Mark and Sadowna cutting vinyl siding for the doors

Installing the last piece of siding on the doors

We had originally planned to patch some broken places in the vinyl siding on the front gable. When we found we had enough siding, we just replaced it all.

And we are glad we did. The new siding really makes the front of the house look so much better.

Tuesday thru Thursday we were back at the Henry house where we were not confident we could complete our list in the time we had left. However, by Thursday afternoon, we had installed and trimmed out the three remaining doors on our list, caulked and painted the doors, patched the drywall that had been cut out for plumbing in one of the bedrooms, taped, mudded, textured and painted the patch, installed and caulked all the remaining baseboards, replaced another broken window pane and touched up paint and caulk where ever needed, had the Bible presentation for the Henry’s and the homeowners of another home that was completed earlier. Everything was checked off our list!! As said above, it was another great week!

Mark had to do a lot of custom fitting on the doors we installed

Installing a piece of drywall to cover the hole left for the plumber…

… and then painting it. It really closely matched the original texture of the wall.

At times we may have been a little discouraged by the work at the Henry house. But by the end of the project we were amazed at how good the rooms looked.

Bible presentation for the Henry brothers

After work on Thursday we did a Bible presentation for a family in Sandersville. None of us had worked on the house but other NOMADS had. The family survived the tornado in this house.

Not so much for this classic car. The new house was built where this car was sitting during the tornado.

Friday we regrettably had to say “see you down the road” to our new friends Sadowna and Mark, and to our Laurel friends. Closing down a disaster rebuild project is always so bittersweet. We are so thankful God allowed us to help in the Laurel community and hopefully we can return another day.