Patience, 67, is a lifelong resident of Biloxi, Mississippi. She, a mother of 3 grown children (Arnold, Donna, and Robert), has been living in her former home since 1967. Her modest home there was heavily damaged in the surge of Katrina. The small amount of money she had for repairs, she gave to a contractor who promised her a new home, but her money was mismanaged.
The many volunteers have been great to her and have done all that they can to repair her damaged home. They have gutted, set a few new windows, put in a new sub-floor, and through their work, demonstrated a degree of optimism about the property's future. But her home barely withstood the knocking and the beating of these minor repairs and must ultimately be demolished.
The challenges in designing this house were to: provide an outdoor extension of the living and kitchen spaces for entertaining, provide daylighting for every room, meet the International Building Code and the Standard for Hurricane Resistant Residential Construction and to make the home easy to build with volunteer labor and accessible.
