Things May Never Be the Same Again : Survivors: They experience stress, money woes, a distrust of contractors--and in one case, a future that is brighter than ever.

For one group of Valley residents, the financial and emotional aftershocks of the Northridge earthquake continue a year after the temblor threw their lives into disarray.

Their experiences, as chronicled in The Times over the past year, range from newfound hope to utter frustration.

* An attorney whose house in Sherman Oaks slid partway down a hillside hasn’t been able to find a contractor he can trust. At times, he said, the stress has been unmanageable.

* A Northridge businessman has his once-battered liquor store up and running again, but a still-sour economy and rising interest rates on his government loans have left him worried.

* A homeowner in Pacoima does nothing to disguise her contempt for the government recovery effort. For her, the earthquake heaped indignation on top of misery: Her house is still damaged, she didn’t get enough money to make repairs, and she is not happy about it.

* A Panorama City man, once jobless and nearly homeless, now has a full-time job, an apartment and is even making car payments.

Here are their stories.

STEVE and BARBARA SADD

A year ago, Steve Sadd, 49, lived with his wife, Barbara, and their three pets in his dream home, a house on stilts in the hills above Sherman Oaks.

When the quake caused the foundation to slip, creating the possibility that the house could slide down the hillside, the couple escaped, but left most of their possessions behind.

For a while, it looked as if they would be able to get their lives back to normal without extraordinary difficulty despite the fact that their house was red-tagged. First, they hired a crew to pull the house back onto its foundation, and when a contractor told them they could move back in in a month or so, they rented a house in West Los Angeles.

But because their Sherman Oaks house hasn’t been secured to its foundation, the couple remain in their rental home.

In the meantime, their hillside house has been burglarized twice. Gone are an electric piano, a computer printer (the monitor broke in the quake), a saxophone and more. All told, thieves escaped with about $10,000 worth of loot.

Since the quake, even the simple things have been complicated.

Damage estimates on the couple’s home hover around $200,000--almost two-thirds what an undamaged house in their neighborhood would cost.

Although the engineering report was completed in April, Sadd has not found a contractor he trusts. Repair estimates have varied by as much as 50%.

“I’m convinced they base their prices on the cost of your car,” he said.

A year after the quake, he still does not know if his house is a total loss. And before he can get a Small Business Administration loan, he is required to have a signed contract for the rebuilding.

While he waits, he continues to pay the mortgage on his dream house as well as rent on the place where the couple is staying.

Life has been stressful.

“You spend (a lot of effort) trying to get back to where you were a year ago,” he said, his voice edged with frustration.

DANIEL WHANG

Upon first glance, Continental Liquors on Balboa Boulevard in Northridge shows no outward signs of damage from the quake that was centered just a few miles away. The store is neat and well stocked. A steady stream of customers and delivery people come and go.

Then, Daniel Whang, 42, starts pointing out the lingering signs of the quake: He has placed metal wire around bottles to keep them from toppling. The ceiling, which sank several inches during the quake, has been leaking during the recent heavy rains. The odor of spilled wine lingers in a storage room.

The store suffered about $76,000 in damage. Whang has received most of that back from the Small Business Administration, enabling him to replace the $50,000 in stock he lost when bottles tumbled off shelves. But he is still awaiting several thousand dollars more from the SBA so he can make some structural repairs.

“I thought it was going to happen quickly,” he said. “Now I know it’s going to take time.”

Though pleading with creditors, borrowing from relatives and dipping into his children’s college funds have allowed him to hold onto the store, business has been slower since the quake.

“People are spending money on their houses, on furniture, not on alcohol,” he said, standing behind the front counter.

Then Whang gets to the real problem: “I don’t feel any economic boom. The defense industry has moved out. There are laid-off workers. The majority of my customers are working-class.”

Compared to the lingering bad economy, he said, the quake didn’t register a blip.

And rising interest rates haven’t helped. SBA loans have gone from 8.5% to 11%.

“Hopefully, as the interest rates go up, business will increase too,” Whang said. “Then there will be no problem. If not, there will be a problem.”

LUCY PEREZ

Like thousands of others, Lucy Perez, 69, ran for her life the morning of the quake--out of her house and into her Pacoima street. And for three weeks, she and her family went inside only to retrieve the barest of essentials.

First, they camped in tents in the front yard. Later, they moved into the garage.

Despite a gaping hole in the living room ceiling and cracks that widened with each aftershock, the house on Pinney Street was declared habitable and was green-tagged by a city inspector.

A year later, Perez, her son and two teen-age grandsons have moved back inside, but Perez remains inconsolable. She got a $3,450 grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to cover the worst of the damage--but that’s only a drop in the bucket, she said, when compared to her own estimate that damage to the house, furniture and other belongings amount to about $44,000.

Perez is still so upset by the harm the quake caused to her home of 25 years that she’d rather not talk about it.

“Everything’s the same; nothing’s fixed,” she said.

In the past, the family has said that Lucy Perez’s Social Security benefits, combined with her son Eduardo’s wages from a part-time job, were too much to qualify for a grant, but not enough for a loan.

Lucy Perez summed up the family’s dilemma: “We are not too rich and not too poor, so we fall in the cracks.”

JOAQUIN MORENO

“Mucho trabajo, poquito dinero” (“A lot of work, little money”), said Joaquin Moreno, laughing as a way to politely dismiss a question about his wages.

Though he might not be rich, Moreno can afford to laugh. One year ago, he had neither a job, nor a car, nor a place of his own to live. His home--until early on the morning of Jan. 17, 1994--was a friend’s trailer in the Tahitian Mobile Home Park in Sylmar.

The quake rocked the mobile homes off their foundations, rupturing gas lines and igniting fires that damaged nearly one-quarter of the park’s mobile homes. Moreno was left homeless.

During the next several months, he moved from a Red Cross shelter in a gym to a seedy motel and then--with the help of a FEMA grant--to a one-bedroom apartment in Panorama City.

But his post-quake existence has been like a dream: He found a job he likes at Century Oldsmobile in Van Nuys, working in the service department; he has reconciled with his wife; he even has a car, a 1986 Grand Marquis, that allows him to avoid taking the bus.

“It was a good year for me,” he said, realizing the irony halfway through the sentence. “Thanks to the earthquake.”

In September, though, he will have to start coming up with an extra $200 a month or so when the FEMA grant for his rent ends. Currently, he pays $201 for the $425-a-month apartment while FEMA kicks in the rest.

But Moreno is on a hot streak and is confident things will work out.

“It will be pretty close,” he said, “but I will survive.”