Marisa and Claudio Finco stood in what was once the living room of their two-bedroom house on Kissam Avenue on Staten Island, taking stock of progress since Hurricane Sandy ravaged their neighborhood.
They had thrown out their sodden furniture and belongings, cleared the property of debris, scrubbed the wood floors and begun tearing out the drywall. And just that morning, six weeks after the storm, Mr. Finco had installed a new mailbox out front. The metal box was bolted to a frame he had fashioned from two-by-fours and sunk in a planter full of soil.
“Hey!” Mr. Finco, an Italian immigrant, said with theatrical exuberance, pointing to his handiwork. “The first sign of recovery!” He chuckled and shook his head in a gesture of recognition that a lot of hard work still lay ahead.
The residents of Kissam Avenue are taking their victories, however small, and holding them tight.
Nobody has moved back home yet; so much remains to be done before that can happen. And in the weeks since the storm, shock and grief have given way, ever so slightly, to resignation and, for many, a muscular determination to restore their lives and move on.
But even as residents press forward, they have had to be vigilant against resurgent sadness. They have learned how easily the sense of loss can surge back, like floodwaters, and overwhelm renascent hope.
“I gotta go,” said Franca Costa, whose bungalow at 14 Kissam Avenue was badly flooded, explaining her motivation. “I gotta go home.”
Ms. Costa has been a model of determination on the street. In the first weeks after the storm, her one-story house was constantly filled with volunteers, who helped gut it and prepare it for renovation. She then hired electrical and plumbing crews to get the systems working again.
It has not all been smooth sailing: her first electrician did inadequate work that had to be redone by a second electrician, and her first plumber disappeared without explanation.
But these setbacks have been outweighed by all the help she has received, much of it from strangers, including another Staten Island resident who has taken it upon herself to refurnish Ms. Costa’s house free.
Building inspectors posted a green tag on Ms. Costa’s door last week — permission to reoccupy the house, one of the first to appear on the block — and she hopes to move back in within a couple of weeks.
“My little handyman special is coming back to life,” she said.
Down the street at No. 27, Arun Vejsel recently learned that he would not receive any insurance money because the adjusters determined that flooding was to blame for all of the damage to his one-bedroom house, and he did not have a flood policy. He expects that repairs will cost him about $50,000, on top of the tens of thousands he spent on renovations after he bought the place in 2006.
This infuriates Mr. Vejsel, a Macedonian immigrant, but it has not slowed him down. He and his son, both contractors, rewired the entire house and put in new walls, and they are about to lay new floors and install a bathroom and kitchen. They hope to be done by the end of the month.
Mr. Vejsel has applied for a loan to help pay for the repairs. “If we get it, good,” he said. “If not, what are you going to do?”
Pedro Correa’s house, which was blown off its foundations, still sits in the middle of an adjoining marsh, and the future of his property, 103 Kissam Avenue, remains unclear. He does not think he will rebuild and is helping to marshal support among neighbors for a campaign to have the government buy the properties on Kissam Avenue, and in other hard-hit areas of Staten Island’s Oakwood neighborhood, and integrate them into a wetlands restoration project.
Amid all of this uncertainty, Mr. Correa has found solace in reminding himself that after a harrowing night during the storm, he is still alive, and his children still have a father.
A few days ago, he took his 7-year-old son, also named Pedro, to visit the property for the first time since the storm. In the boy’s imagination, the house had become “the bogeyman,” Mr. Correa said. “He’d drive near the block and bust out in tears.
“I finally said to my wife, ‘I’m going to take him down and see it, let him see the house is gone.’ ”
Father and son walked around the site, still coated with splinters of the house and some of the family’s belongings. The boy found two of his Matchbox cars, embedded in the debris, and took them with him.
“I said, ‘Do you want to look around a little more?’ ” Mr. Correa recalled. “And he said: ‘No. I just want to go home.’ ” Since then, the boy has stopped asking questions about what happened and what is left.
“He could see everything’s gone, and now he knows everything’s gone,” Mr. Correa said. “I think it’s closure for him.”
