Monique's Family Needs Help Completing Their Home

Hi, I’m Monique. Several years ago (2018), my family (my husband and 3 kids) was looking to purchase our forever home. We live in Arizona, where the housing market is often booming. We looked around and decided that we wanted to restore a 100-year-old house on the farm where I grew up. It was a real labor of love.

We called a few general contractors, and each one walked the property and suggested we tear it down and start from scratch. They all said it wasn’t impossible, just not worth it. Historic homes are few and far between in Arizona, and having grown up nearby, it was worth it to me.

We finally found someone who shared our vision. He wasn’t a contractor but was a builder and was willing to help us make this happen within our budget.

Well, we had a lot of red tape to get through, and before we knew it, we were in the middle of a pandemic and all of the building price surges that came along with it. Our helper kept asking for more and more money, even though we were doing a lot of the work and purchasing on our own.

He had family and health issues that continued to interfere with his work even after the pandemic. After spending all of the money we had agreed on and thousands more, he quit, leaving us with a partially constructed house. We were pretty upset.

However, we soon realized that without feeling like we needed to follow his timeline, and with the help of supportive family members, we were getting the work done faster than before. As a matter of fact, we are almost done!

Unfortunately, we have had to go into quite a bit of debt to get here. We would be devastated to have come this far just to lose our home.

During this extended time, our oldest daughter got married and has started a family, and our middle daughter is getting married in a week! We are so happy for them! So, it will just be my husband and I and our youngest son moving into the home.

Since our builder quit, we have hired someone to stucco our home and hired out the floor installation. With the help of family, we have put insulation in the ceiling, finished the drywall work and painted, begun installation of the IKEA kitchen cabinets we’ve had in storage for almost 3 years, installed bathroom vanities, and fixtures in the guest bathroom.

We still need to install a hot water heater, tile the master bath shower, finish the kitchen cabinets and install countertops, paint the outside of the house, including trim, and install interior doors. We greatly appreciate your help in reaching these goals.

We know that times are tough all over, and we really don’t love to ask for help, but help would be really appreciated.

Thank you for taking the time to read our story and considering helping our family make this dream a reality.