Hole in our House

We had some excitement on Friday afternoon. Our elderly neighbor lost control of her car and ran into the corner of our apartment. Kate, Andy and I were all in the living room at the other end of the apartment when we heard the impact. I ran back into Kate's room and saw this:



I looked out the window and saw the car--I did not, at first, recognize it as our neighbor's, and the only thing I could think was, "!!!!! Somebody hit our house! There's a big crack in our house!"

I could hear someone hollering outside, and Kate was calling, "What was that?" I said, "Stay there!" and then she kept asking, "Why do I have to stay here, Mom? Why do I have to stay here?" The mailman was outside and saw it happen, so he ran to get the manager.



Here's what the outside of the building looked like. She wasn't going very fast when she hit (good thing!). She was parking, and couldn't get her foot up on the brake.

The license plate frame came off the car, and one of the rubber bumper things on the front. Other than that there was no damage to the car. It's one of those big old Fords with an all-metal body. (The license plate was facing inward, of course--someone turned it around before I took this picture. So I blanked out the number.)



After I got everything pulled away from the corner in Kate's room, I took another picture. I think they had already started taking things off from the other side, so the area around the electrical outlet was looking worse at this point (you can see daylight coming through).



The maintenance guys got started on it right away. They pulled out the whole section of wall. We were really fortunate that the window didn't break. That would have been a huge mess.



You can see how much this stud cracked. Yikes.



They got the whole section re-framed and buttoned back up pretty quickly. The accident happened around 1:30, and by 5:00-ish the wall was back up, with the wiring and insulation in place. We have bare wallboard on the inside and a sheet of plywood on the outside for now.

We're fine, and our neighbor's fine--the only casualty was the rhododendron bush that the car took out. (You may be able to spot the stump in that last photo.) I'm really glad that Kate wasn't in her room when it happened. That would have been severely traumatizing. The past couple of weeks she's been disturbed by noises at night. She'll be lying in bed trying to go to sleep, and then call, "Mo-om! I heard a weird noise outside!" Can you imagine what it would be like if she'd been sitting in her room when a car cracked the wall? Not good.