HOUSTON — She couldn’t sleep. Not now.

Kris Ford-Amofa lay next to her husband in a spare bedroom at her sister’s house, thinking once more about the brown water that had slithered under the front door of the first home she had ever owned.

The water that swirled around her three children as the family fled, wading up City Green Trail to seek refuge at a neighbor’s house. The water that had buckled their living room floor, rotted the drywall, and made them homeless. The floodwater that was not covered by their insurance.

Where did she even start? On Thursday, she got up early, set two phones on the kitchen table — one for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and one to call Enterprise about a rental car — and started dialing, launching into her third day on the job as a disaster-recovery coordinator for her upended family.

With no preparation and few road maps to guide them, tens of thousands of hurricane survivors like the Amofas are stumbling through their first bewildering days after Harvey.

The rains might have passed, but now they are consumed with worry about their children’s futures, precarious family finances, and what remains of the homes they fled.

They need to find their way out of shelters and relatives’ extra bedrooms. Find new schools for their children. Find hotel rooms when everything is booked, find rental cars when everything is taken, and find the time to gut their homes, call contractors, and hack through layers of bureaucracy, all while bills pile up and bosses call them back to work.

An hour and a half into her morning, Kris, 43, was ­nowhere. Growing up in rural Louisiana, she knew floods and tropical storms. She had fled Hurricane Rita in 2005. Still, she was not equipped for this.

She had filed a claim with FEMA but was told she needed to send a declaration and release form. She didn’t have her laptop, and she couldn’t find the right paperwork with her phone.

Harvey had made landfall on the Central Texas coast late Friday. Now it was Monday, and the waters were still rising across Houston.

On the Amofas’ street, the water was topping car windows and reaching the height of small children. And it was flowing inside the beige-brick home on the northeast side of town where Kris and her husband, Yaw Amofa, 47, had lived for less than a year.

The family thought they would be safe. Kris had a second floor. The federal government said the area was at “minimal hazard’’ for flooding. So they bought milk, eggs, loaves of bread, and hunkered down for the weekend, joined by Kris’s younger sister, Miesha Jolly, 36, and Miesha’s three children.

It had taken Kris and Yaw six years of work to buy the house. Six years of saving up, fixing their credit, attending personal-finance classes, and debating whether they should invest so much money and risk into a single $180,000 purchase.

Yaw, an immigrant from Ghana, said it was their American dream. The family moved from southwest Houston to this new subdivision on the edge of the woods, a slice of suburbia so newly built that the family’s address did not yet show up on some online maps.

When they moved in, they hung a sign on the living-room wall: “Home — where life begins.’’

After the storm, Yaw and his brother-in-law tried unsuccessfully to find contractors and drywall experts to inspect the damage. They had received conflicting information about whether they should start tearing up the walls, or wait for a professional to inspect the house.

Time, heat, and water were Yaw’s enemies now, conspiring beneath the carpets to rot and putrefy. A family down the block was already ripping out their soaked floorboards. His next-door neighbor’s leather couch was already bearded with white mold. When Yaw returned to clean up and inspect the house, he decided he couldn’t wait.

So, without masks, he and a neighbor marked a line on the walls and started sawing away with wood-handled kitchen knives. Drywall crumbled like soggy meringue. They yanked out insulation, which dripped like wet wool, and threw it onto the front yard, Bob Marley’s “Natural Mystic’’ playing in the background.

“Things are not the way they used to be,’’ Yaw sang.