An ABC Extreme Makeover: Home Edition house that is! This past week, ABC's home remodeling show for charity featuring Ty Pennington has set up shop in East Bernard, Texas (home to most of Kristi's extended family) helping out a local family that really couldn't be more deserving. The Kubena family has twin daughters, both of whom battled leukemia when they were 3 years old, one of which is currently in remission, another has relapsed and receiving therapy at Houston's famed Texas Children's Hospital. With massive medical bills and debt, they were living in a small trailer home, but last week were surprised when the ABC production crew showed up at their doorstep and told everyone that they were getting a completely brand new house, made litterally from the ground up. They then had to load everyone up in the bus to go to the hospital to tell young Kara who cannot leave the hospital due to her weakened immune system. As you can imagine, building an "extreme" home from scratch is an impressive undertaking, especially since everything has to be completed in one week's time. So as should have been expected, the town has really opened their arms and helped with hundreds of volunteers to get the house raised. Royce Builders is providing the construction crews around the clock, and Gallery furniture is providing the interiors.
Since a lot of Kristi's family is from East Bernard, including both sets of grandparents, and numerous aunts, uncles, cousins and so on. Several of us, myself included, were granted spots on the volunteer roster to help out with this project. We were assigned to the 3am to 7am time slot on Saturday morning. It was in the middle of the night, so that meant that there were no cameras, production staff, or famous people around (for those of you wanting to see me on TV or something, I'm sorry!). A cold front had also just blown in so it was a little chilly, but that didn't keep everything from going on as scheduled and people being busy busy. Construction began Thursday morning, and as this was Saturday night, they had already gotten a very impressive amount done. The foundation was poured and set, all of the wooden frames including roofing was up and in place, the tarps on the roof were up and ready for the roofers to begin shingling. Inside, all of the piping, wiring, and duct systems were already installed. Fiberglass insulation was currently being placed as well as the drywall and sheetrock. Oh did I mention that this was going to be a 5000 square foot two story house? Since the actual construction is done by professional volunteer contractors, we mainly helped out around the site to make things go smoothly and more efficiently. We moved wood and supplies to where they were needed, transported the ever building piles of construction trash to the dumpsters and also cleaned and sweeped the inside inbetween different job crews to keep the workspaces clean. After our four hour shift, the house had litterally gone from mostly just wood frames on the inside to being covered with sheetrock. On the outside, half of the house had already had siding placed, while stone masory was halfway done on the front of the house. In just 4 short hours that we were there helping, an enormous amount of work had already taken place.
We were a little disappointed that we didn't get to see any of the television production take place, nor any of the stars or people behind the show, but it was still a very rewarding experience and it was fun to see how everything happens behind the scenes of the construction process. It's also a good project to give a deserving family a little help when they need it most. If you're interested in watching the show when it premiers, I believe the episode date is scheduled for Februrary 19th, or sometime around then.
For a news article on this, try
http://www.herald-coaster.com/articles/2006/01/17/news/news02.txtPS. Sorry there aren't any pictures on here. Security on site was pretty particular about there being no cameras or photographs being taken while helping volunteer.
