Diary of a Brisbane flood family

This article is the fifth in a series by AAP reporter Lisa Martin covering one Brisbane family's recovery from the floods.

BY Lisa Martin

The thank you is almost as disastrous as the disaster itself.

But under the circumstances, a kitchen meltdown is completely forgivable.

After all, how is one supposed to focus on cooking when your to-do list rivals the prime minister's?

And to add to the mind-racing stress; every five minutes a mobile phone blasts something resembling a warning siren that the end of the world is nigh.

Lunch's main course, artichoke chicken, is usually a knock-out dish for Jen Robusto. But not when the chicken is accidentally crumbed in raw sugar.

The Brisbane flood victim keeps her bread crumbs and sugar in identical containers in the kitchen pantry of her temporary rental home in St Lucia.

The Robustos' Kenmore home was among 14,700 homes left partially underwater when the Brisbane River peaked at 4.46 metres on January 13.

Across the Queensland capital, almost 12,000 homes were completely flooded.

Nearly three months into the flood recovery, Jen attempts to squeeze in a low-key thank you lunch for two special friends.

(She plans a much bigger celebration with flood mud helpers when the family move back to their Kenmore home early next year.)

"They came, day after day, after day," she says.

"One of them sat at the sink for three days and washed and washed kitchen things.

"Then they came to the new house and helped me unpack there too."

For weeks she has nervously waited for news from her insurer Westpac about the claim.

"I tried to be patient all the way but when we hit April, that's when I started to say `come on'," she says.

"It's three months but it felt like years ... I started to get frustrated."

The mother-of-two is a superwoman, spearheading her family's flood recovery solo.

Her husband Ed works away in New York, eldest son Jed at university in Canberra and youngest son Carl is studying year 12 and busy with exam preparation.

Jen admits she's not eating very well lately and has lost motivation to cook.

"Thankfully there's a restaurant strip right around the corner, with lots of cheap uni student eats," she says.

Her kitchen is half the size of her old one with significantly less storage space, which is rather depressing for a house proud "home-body".

"I've gotten a bit slack," she says. "I don't have my favourite pasta pot.... All the ugly cutlery, it's so mixed matched.

"At my other house, the kitchen had an island, with four drawers for each different kind of cutlery - everyday, next to everyday, good and really good.

"Now emptying the dish washer is like domp domp domp domp domp, dealing cards, I just put it all in one place."

Jen says in the scale of kitchen nightmares, the sugar-coated chicken ranks alongside a roast chicken so inedible it had to be used as shark bait.

"I couldn't believe it, I used the whole container of sugar, which is about a year's amount for me," she says.

"I just kept thinking why isn't it sticking... I must have been brain dead.

"As I was frying it ... I was going 'what's going on here?' It was going all black. The whole meal was horrible but they ate it, the polite things.

"I wanted to run up the road to get something else."

And just when it looks like things couldn't get any worse for Jen, the rental home had a sewage flood because of a loose bathroom pipe.

"Me and water, obviously not doing so good," she says.

"You'll probably read in the paper I drowned in a pool one day, me of all people who can swim like a bloody fish."

But with the plumbing issue and ruined lunch behind her and the delayed engineering report for the insurers finally sorted, Jen finally feels hopeful.

"We got the engineer report on Friday and there were ifs and bifs about what to do, what not to do," she says.

"Then the guy rang late Friday and said they were going to cover it ... they're not going to nickle and dime me. I wanted to jump for joy."

The house will require "pinning", an expensive process that fixes the foundations' stability.

She expects quoting to begin in the next few weeks and construction work to start sometime in May or June.

Her husband Ed, won't return from New York until July.

He saw the "mud house" for the first time in early April.

"It was just nice for him to see what life was like here," she says.

"It's really hard to tell someone."

They spent the two weeks together mostly sorting through boxes of salvaged possessions but enjoying some much needed family time at a special swimming dinner and competition.

"He got to see Carl swim at the GPS (Great Public Schools competition)," she says.

"Terrace (St Joseph's College) has now got a record for the same team winning the relay five years in a row.

"It was really big deal ... he did his (personal best) ... he did the fastest leg.

"I'm so proud of him."

Jen says now that the insurance claim is finalised and they're closer to construction work starting, she can de-stress slightly and hopefully cook up an Easter feast for her sons.

But she might give chicken a miss.