Home For Christmas

You are Rebuilding Homes and Restoring Lives in Paradise, California.

This Christmas, we’re celebrating how lives are being restored through this important work. Thank you to every volunteer who has painted or swung a hammer or helped raise a wall this year. Your willingness to give your time and talents means the world to our homeowners

Today we’re celebrating the homeowners who are moving in for Christmas! Homeowner Bob lives in Magalia and was up early the day of the Camp Fire. There was smoke, but more alarmingly, there were embers falling down on his property. He had purchased his home just a few years earlier and began watering down the property, trying to put out small fires as they flared up.

“I never walked back into my house to save anything, I was so focused on trying to save my house.” After hours of fighting the small fires, he said the houses across the street were catching on fire one after the other. “My house was a trailer and it didn’t catch fire, but it just started to crumple from the intense heat and I got out of there.”

Bob took his RV and got out safely. It’s this RV that he used as temporary housing, since the fire in 2018. When he got back to his property, his tools had melted into the driveway. Nothing made it through the fire.

When he’s back in his home, he’s never camping again. “I’ve had enough of that.” And Bob helps out on his home to get it ready to live in. Working alongside the volunteers has been a great experience for him. “These volunteers that have been here, they are some of the finest people you would ever meet. I’m pretty sure they are the finest people that have ever been on my property. They come from all over, Florida, Illinois, I just can’t say enough about them.They wrote notes on the wall studs and I wrote notes back to them. They are all covered up now, but that was really cool.”

Bob’s home passed inspection just in time for Christmas and he already has his Christmas lights up!

2023 has seen so many home rebuilding projects completed and others just begun. For each of our homeowners, the waiting is the hardest part. Volunteers, like you, make that waiting worth it.