KNOTT COUNTY, Ky. — It will be a long time before many families that lost everything in July’s Eastern Kentucky flooding have a permanent home to call their own again.

In the meantime, they’ve been making the best of their temporary travel trailer homes.

Inside Carr Creek State Park in Knott County, there are rows and rows of travel trailers where people like Tressie Everage and her dog Sheena have settled in.

“I’ve got a microwave. I’ve got a stove. I’ve got a refrigerator,” Everage said as she showed off her state-owned camper, explaining how happy she is to have those simple kitchen necessities again after losing everything in the flooding.

That same night of the flooding, Everage suffered a stroke that almost killed her.

As she now waits to find out what type of help she may get from FEMA, she’s happy to be in her travel trailer. The state takes care of the propane and other expenses that make it a comfortable place to live.

Just down the way from Everage’s lot, however, it’s a different story for Kayla Morton. She, her husband and their two small boys are all living inside a camper they bought themselves after Morton said a FEMA inspector wrongly documented what happened to their home.

“She put our home as minimal damage when our home just had to be completely demolished,” Morton said. “It was the most damage you could possibly get. We couldn’t save anything. Our home was destroyed.”

That judgement prevented them from being approved for a state camper. Because they’re not in a government travel trailer, they’re not getting any help with the costly propane it takes to keep warm and cook. Morton said that’s getting far too expensive to afford.

Morton’s family is desperately looking for a place to rent, but with thousands of homes in the area being destroyed, supply is low.

“We can’t find anywhere,” Morton said. “We have put in applications; we search multiple times a day on Facebook or websites, and we cannot find anything.”

Morton worries about the emotional impact it’s having on her children, who’ve already been through so much.

“My boys they said they wanted Santa to bring them a home for Christmas, and I would just really like for them to have a home before the holidays so that they can have a Christmas tree, just so they can feel at home and feel, like, a sense of normalcy and stability and permanence, instead of being in a camper,” she said.

On the other side of the park, another mom is doing what she can to make her state travel trailer feel as home-like as possible for her seven-year-old son, Tony Jr.

“I mean, a home is what you… not exactly a house, but the people that’s in it makes a home,” she said. “I mean, you can make a home out of anything.”

As she and Tony Jr. worked to put together a dart board and basketball hoop for the yard, she explained living with a feeling of uneasiness. Every 30 days, the campers are inspected. Families must meet a set of qualifications to keep their campers on a month by month basis.

“I hope we’re here come next month, but I don’t know,” the mom said. “As long as we’re doing something, I guess, to try to move on… not necessarily move out, but move on, then we get to stay another 30 days.”

For now, however, she’s just remembering that after losing so much, there’s still a lot to be thankful for.

“There’s some that are still living on their porches and in tents. So I thank God every day that they came through, that we got a place to stay and we are warm,” she said.