Hi, I am so sorry for your loss. There are a few place to start to freely and cheaply start rebuilding your soil. If I am not mistaken you live in dairy country. What I did to improve our soil for next to nothing. Was go to different dairy farms and a horse farms and asked for manure. They were usually happy to give me all I wanted. This time of year leaves are plentiful and also a great soil builder. If you have the equipment to compost on a large scale you can usually get free coffee grounds and veggie scraps from local restaurants. It took a lot of moving truck loads a little at time for us but in a year we had beautiful soil where only hardpan existed. Horse sheep and goat farms are more likely to be willing to give ALL of their manure to you since they do not generally put it on the fields. Also in my town they mulch the leaves in the fall and the mulch is available to the townÂs people free of charge, maybe your county or town has a similar program. I know that the volume of topsoil you need is large but this could give you a good start on a nice large field to begin rebuilding. Keep good records of what you add in case you ever want to be certified organic. I would suggest you go to the composting forum you would be surprised at the lengths some of us will go to for good stuff to add to the compost pile. If you have farming equipment you could try to get all of your materials together and create a giant lasagna bed. Good luck to you I hope this helps a little. Believe me I have literally acquired tons of good soil builder for free they are out there. Peace, Sue

figured I would bring this post back to life since I am now in need of cleaning my faux wooden blinds lol! in response to the last persons post re: using Windex, do not use Windex wipes. not sure about the spray but i happen to have a pack of windex wipes next to me and it says not for use on any wood type surfaces. pledge makes good wipes for that but you would prob need a few packages if your blinds were reallyyy dirty. anyway i am going to try dawn soap with warm water since mine are filthy! i had a small fire me in my room last summer and the insurance company had someone come in to clean the walls, blinds Etc and only bc i had to take my bounds down to fix a broken tilt cord, i just now noticed how horribly they "cleaned" them. (see picture reference) so ill post the before pictures now and after pictures once im done. in the pics im attaching now show how bad the back side of the blinds were that dont face towards me vs the 3rdnpic which is what i usually have them set to..ugh! at least 8 only have 1 side to really scrub at vs dusting the other cleaner side lol!

Generally with flooding of the type you experienced there is more than just H2O in the water. Many times there is sewage mixed in. It really doesn't mater if the motors and wire appear to be dry now. They were never intended/designed to be under water. As mentioned above corrosion will, and already has, started happening. It might be a year or so before the appliance come to full failure though. You could get lucky and nothing will happen. If the insurance company is refusing replacement of the appliances ask them for a Whole House Warranty for 5 years that covers all the appliances against failure.

Zinsser is neither more nor less effective than the Killz. One coat MAY do it, but two DEFINITELY will. Even if I were using the Zinnser (whichever way that goes, two n's or two s's, LOL!) I would still use 2 coats. It's better to just bear down and do what you KNOW will work than to take a chance thinking one coat MIGHT do it. I have no brand loyalty. Either will work. I chose the Killz because it is easier to find and costs less in my area. Coming along and claiming that "TSP will cause paint failure" and providing absolutely no evidence to back that claim up isn't going to fly. For every "pro" who claims TSP is awful there are others (professionals) who have used it properly and successfully for literally decades. Dirtex, btw, provides absolutely no deglossing whatsoever. I don't think it provides much in the way of degreasing to speak of either. TSP does both. However TSP can damage tile and grout so we'll be using something else in the bathroom once the tub has been hauled out of there. If TSP has caused paint failure for you, it wasn't the TSP that caused it. It was your incorrect application and use of it. Proper use can be finicky and time-consuming from the point of view of a professional who just wants to get in there, slap the paint up, and get out. However it is very effective and well worth the effort when you are the one living with the paint job and you don't want it to peel, blister, or otherwise fail to adhere in a few years. When we get around to doing the exterior, I WILL be washing the entire house down with TSP. It is the best thing I've ever found for getting rid of that chalky residue. I can't use a power washer or any sort of wire brush, nor sanding, because the exterior is clad in 60 year old asbestos shingle. So me, a bucket of rags soaking in TSP, and a regular garden hose will be doing it all. I've seen other houses in the neighborhood that are peeling, blistering, and have the new paint flaking off because the professionals they hired to paint didn't bother to prep, or didn't prep properly. MY house won't look like that when I'm done. I have had well over 50 years of success with TSP when prepping old walls for paint, between me and my father. I'd say 100 years, but I don't actually know how long its been on the market, LOL! @dchall_san_antonio - you did your paint prep with stuff I wouldn't have used nor would I recommend using it, especially for mitigation of cigarette smoke residue, but if it worked for you, great. And OF COURSE you had to prime - even using the correct cleaning methods and substances, you will never get all that stuff off. Any encapsulating primer will do. The 2 with which I am familiar are the Killz ORIGINAL (not the other primers they make) or the Zinsser BIN. You used the latter. I'm not surprised it helped. And I'm not surprised nothing worked until you primed over it with an encapsulating primer. I am surprised you got away with cleaning just the 2 rooms. There is tar and nicotine in every single room in this house, even the one no one ever smoked in because there was a parrot in there. They kept the door to that room closed. There was LESS of it, but it was still there and still not something you want to try to paint over. In the room where the chain-smoker lived (all 3 adults in this household smoked but one was a chain-smoker), I thought the walls were yellow. The same shade of yellow. They weren't. 3 walls had been painted a peachy cream, and the 4th wall was (supposed to be) white. That was tar and nicotine coating the walls, floor, ceiling and baseboards, ever surface in the house has this guck on it. Trust me, you are VERY lucky you got away with doing as little as you did, LOL! Good on you for taking the job on and seeing it through. @jn3344 - I thought that might have been what you meant. Nope - still working my way through this project. My son was too tired to go out yesterday or the day before so we've had a 2 day break, but we're off to the races today. I get tired too, but he's not used to this type of physical labor and we've both got a thing about heights, which makes doing the 10' ceiling kind of nerve wracking even on the scaffolding, LOL! So I'm careful to be extra meticulous up there. The only time I've seen the kind of blotchiness you're talking about was my very first paint job on my own, when I let a sales guy talk me into their one-coat (allegedly) primer/paint combo to go up on brand new unprimed drywall. Sure enough, it soaked right into the drywall like it was a sponge and looked awful. It was pretty obvious it was NOT working right away so I didn't waste much time or material on it, just went out and got a good primer, double coated with that (its a habit of mine to double coat with primer on new or very old walls anyway but this REALLY needed the double coating). Years later the new owners contacted me through friends to find out what I had used because they were just now getting around to repainting it and wanted to know what I had used that held up for over a quarter century, LOL! Hopefully we will finish the washing and rinsing today or tomorrow. Then I'll go around with the orbital sander to get the worst of the paint runs and any other problem areas while my son comes behind me to clean up the dust. Then I'll be stripping trim. Then priming everything. Then we'll be in the homestretch. In some ways this is the hardest job I've ever done, between my general debility these days and having to clean tar and nicotine off (that's a first for me, I've never seen this before, lucky me, LOL!) In other ways, its the easiest. This is the first time I've ever been able to paint a completely empty house. It makes a lot of things lots easier.