On August 29th 2005 I watched the aftermath of hurricane Katrina on a CNN newscast from a gym in Iraq. It was the last 3 weeks of my deployment and here I was with 8 other people watching the news of our flooded city, surrounded by dusty weights and noisy clattering metal. When I was able to get in touch with my family they had arrived at my aunt\'s house outside of Miami. The home I lived in with my grandparents, in Chalmette, was under 9 feet of water and I was on the other side of the planet. The house we lived in was built in the late 70\'s and was the house my mother and uncle had grown up in. I moved in with my grandparents when I started attending college, and everything I owned was there while I was fulfilling my military obligation. \r\n Our house was a little outdated and hadn\'t been significantly updated since it was built. The house had blonde bricks and 10 year old blue carpet. My room used to be a carport and was closed in to make a fourth bedroom, leaving two brick walls. The cabinets were the original ones from the 70\'s, and weren\'t updated because my grandparents couldn\'t afford to. Much of the house was decorated the way many would expect a grandparents house to be decorated. We had three arched windows in the front of the house and when I was finally able to make it there they were all busted out. The cabinets were swollen and the countertops laying on the floor. The old blue carpet was buried under a thick layer of thick black mud, and my feet were getting stuck with every step I took. Six months later I began to gut out the house and I took me roughly two weeks to get it emptied of everything we owned.\r\n Today I am married and live in the house with my wife and two sons. In October 2005 my grandfather passed away from a heart attack. Sometimes I think the stress and despair took its toll on him, but he was a proud man and would never say it. My grandmother moved in with my mother and gave the house to me. I began rebuilding it and did most of the work myself. My wife designed it and I built it, we took a wall out between two bedrooms to enlarge the master bedroom and added a huge master bath and walk in closet. We fully updated everything and brought the house up to date. My old bedroom is now my 3 year old son\'s room, without the two brick walls. We now have beautiful custom made mahogany wood cabinets and granite countertops. The linoleum floors are now porcelain tile and I although we have lived here now for a year, I just finished our tile backsplash this week. We are still not done completely and hopefully will be one day. I also put the last of the door handles on this week and finished painting the trim. I guess I am about 92% complete and guess I\'ll finish sometime within the next year.\r\n