Kimberly Gatlin lives 10 minutes away from her half-ruined dream home. She stays at a Holiday Inn Express now, along Interstate 45. The recovery workers come down for breakfast in their work clothes around 6 a.m. Ms. Gatlin’s room is tidy, just like the dream home used to be. She has arranged a little bar, with big bottles of vodka and Hennessy cognac and Grand Marnier. She has a grocery bag stuffed with cans of tuna fish and pineapple.

Ms. Gatlin’s neighborhood is called Westador, 20 minutes north of downtown. She bought her house in 2010, and she fell in love with all of it. The house has five bedrooms and fancy ironwork on the balcony, like something out of an old movie. Ms. Gatlin, 52, is black, and the neighborhood has grown increasingly multicultural in recent years, but neighborliness, she said, trumps race: once a month, everyone on her block goes out for a friendly dinner.

Today, her section of the neighborhood still manages to exude a kind of refined charm, even though everyone’s stuff is now chucked out and growing mold by the curb in big piles. It’s as though a formation of handsome men, all in smart suits, drank too much cognac and emptied the contents of their stomachs all at once. It smells that way, too.

Ms. Gatlin is a train dispatcher for the railroad, and her company is paying for her hotel stay. They need her at work. “If a train dispatcher is not in the chair, no trains move,” she said.

She has started back at the job now, but before that she was out at the dream home every day, coordinating the volunteers who ripped out her drywall and the guy who towed away her dead cars.

“I’m physically, mentally and emotionally tired – I’m exhausted,” she said. “But you’ve got to keep going.”

She has no idea when she will be back home in Westador. On Friday morning, she said she was thinking about buying a rug for the hotel bathroom, and maybe a spread to personalize the bed.