Support the Wiberg Family in Crisis Recovery

My sister and her family have been going through a very challenging season of life and could use the support of friends and family to help them rally.

In December of 2023, they experienced a house fire in the middle of the night due to unknown faulty electrical wiring in their basement. Thankfully, all of them (Jeff, Farrah, and their two kiddos, Liam and Ava, along with their sweet pups, Luna and Ellie) were able to make it out safely. However, the smoke damage from the fire wreaked havoc in the entire house, with nearly every belonging being impacted and their entire home needing to be gutted.

Since that time, they have been displaced, staying with family initially, then eventually into an insurance-paid rental home. But as we all know, working with insurance can be a hard-fought battle. In the efforts to restore their life back to what they had before, insurance has proven challenging and has been slow to respond, difficult to communicate with, and has been steadily cutting payments, resulting in work being severely delayed or denied, consistently postponing their ability to return to their home and their lives. Insurance stopped payment on their rental home at the end of February, and they were forced to move out. But having a home that is still, over a year later, nowhere near livable, they are now having to stay in the basement of their gracious friend’s home while awaiting the next steps of their own home to be restored just enough on one of the levels to move in some beds, a microwave, and a mini fridge to get by and lessen the burden on others.

They have been diligently working with insurance and the restoration company to move along the process, but delays and back orders have stalled the process further. As of last week, insurance has also stopped payment for the storage of all of their salvaged belongings from the fire. This resulted in mountains of boxes needing to be delivered to their home and stored in the basement, which had just finally finished being drywalled and the new flooring installed.

Then another crisis… this morning, April 2nd, they went to their home to start looking through the boxes only to find standing water in the basement. The one spot in the home that had finally shown some progress in the restoration project now has to have drywall removed and flooring replaced due to water damage from their sump pump that gave out during the recent precipitation.

Friends and family, it has been well over a year of heartache, loss, grieving, battling one fight after another, all while trying to establish some sense of normalcy on the day-to-day while living in limbo. There is a TREMENDOUS gap in the costs that have accrued from the fire and what insurance is willing to compensate for, and now with even more financial burden with the basement flooding.

If you know my sister and her family, you know their character, their kindness, their selflessness. They would help anyone in any way they could without question. They are simply the kindest and most loving family I know, and in no way deserving of such sustained emotional turmoil and financial burden. They are now the ones in need. Any help you can give to this family, financially or in any other way, would be undeniably appreciated beyond belief and would mean the world to them.