John Littlefield, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition: The Drumm Family
This week, ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (Sundays at 8 pm/ET) is in Fayetteville, Pennsylvania to meet the Drumm family. Matt and Blasia are a pretty amazing couple, and they're pretty incredible parents. After the birth of their two children with autism, Mathew and Blasia devoted their lives to the needs of children with disabilities. Today, they help manage a special needs Little League and during the school year, Blasia works as a special needs teacher's aid. To meet the needs of their autistic children, Matt works from home as a writer so he is available to accompany the boys during therapy sessions and doctor visits.
Being a part of the development of special needs children, including their own, has been extremely rewarding but their low-income positions have left them struggling financially. They have very little, when you think very little cut that in half and that's exactly how much they have. They struggle every single day to put food on the table, and they have three mouths to feed, but they still continue to give, and give, and give to the community. We're here this week to get them out of a house that's literally crumbling around them.
Demolition is going to be a little different this time, looks like we're gonna go into the nighttime because the house sits on what used to be a dumpsite and all of that soil is contaminated. So before we can even demolish the house, we have to remove all of that soil. Our builder, Dan Ryan, of Dan Ryan Homes, and his crew are taking on these incredible challenges because they saw how this selfless family was living before. It was literally a shack falling in on this family...When dad said love was the only thing that held up the walls, he was pretty much right. So as if they needed another reason to help out their community and help out this family, after seeing the Drumm's home, they knew they were in the right place at the right time, they're definitely the right builders for the job.
This week I have the pleasure to design for Ben. Ben's the oldest son and an awesome big brother to his two younger brothers that have autism. He has a lot of responsibility. He's real serious. He's a serious kid. He's also very serious about his dream, and that dream is to someday wrestle in the Olympics. So this week I want to give him a room that's all about Ben, all about wrestling, and it always inspires him to go for the gold.
This family had absolutely nothing. They live far below the poverty line, but the one thing they have is hope and love. Love is what keeps their walls up and hope is what keeps 'em going day after day, after day. But if we didn't show up this week, who knows how long they could've survived with just hope and love. So this week we're celebrating the Drumm family, and the love they have for each other, the love they have for their community, and the idea that hope is the best thing. Hope keeps you going. It keeps you persevering, and, with hope, anything is possible.
