We thought that we are progressing well with water related fixes and cleaning. But that was only a part of the story. The house was secured as advised by the police. Water is running in and out. But the house was not yet livable.
There was an inch thick dust all over the house and all over the things that were thrown around the house. We had to be really surgical in our approach to cleaning and tidying up as we were not able to locate the house papers yet. We just could not afford to lose them come what may. Police have told us that by looking at the nature of burglary, only small time thieves would have done this and would not have the capacity or knowledge to distinguish how the house papers would look like compared to million other pieces of paper scattered all over the floor.
Wading through the paperwork by dusting them off became a very tiring job. We decided to dump all the papers no matter what they looked like in one place. We dumped all the photographs (mixed up as you might have guessed it) in one place. Threw out all the broken items in the rubbish. Threw out all the organic waste (like cottons, cardboards, etc) into the well that we had planned to close. We went with this operation, room by room.
We used the broken steel cupboards as temporary storage place. We piled up as much recyclable waste as possible outside the house. We were finally happy to see that our two weeks of struggle has finally paid off. The house was ready for repairs.
We thought the next thing to do was to get things organized to cook. Starting from repairing the stove to getting the gas connection operational. We thought this should be fairly easy compared to five plus weeks of the struggle that we had to go through to get the house ready for repairs.
Wait till I blog about that. You will be surprised to see how ill-prepared India is to deal with such issues and also how effective you can be on your own.