In Hurricane-Weary Town, 'I'm Just Tired of It'

"We won't be [living] back in here for months," Charlie Schuler said as he surveyed the new damage.

Schuler and a friend, Lonnie Rich, began collecting loose shingles and other debris from around the eight-foot hole in the roof. They planned to cover it with a tarpaulin.

Meanwhile, Schuler's wife and two daughters emptied spoiling food from the now-warm refrigerator and gathered clothes from bedrooms whose ceilings sagged with the weight of water that had seeped in. Savannah, 13, said that she could see sky through a hole in her bedroom closet.

"All my bluejeans have insulation on them," said Savannah, an eighth-grader at Gulf Breeze Middle School. "I'm going to itch forever."

Vicki Schuler said the most powerful tool for rebuilding a hurricane-damaged house is the telephone. On Monday, a day before she saw her house, Schuler started dialing the Federal Emergency Management Agency about financial assistance and insurance companies for the claims that her family would inevitably file.

A part of her would like to sell the house, which the family has owned since 1987, she said. In a strange paradox, recent hurricanes have driven up the price of beach real estate, as wealthy buyers compete to snap up land from storm-weary long-term residents and replace the old homes with newer, stronger structures that locals dub "hurricane mansions," Schuler said.

But Charlie Schuler said he won't sell. Standing on his roof Tuesday, he said he could not leave the house and community he loves.

"It's frustrating," he said. "It's just so unusual to have these storms in such a brief span of time. It is going to take a lot of work and a lot of patience, but I'm a third-generation Floridian, and we've been doing this for hundreds of years.

"I've been all over the world and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. It's beautiful here -- unless a hurricane blows through."