My name's Rachael Ray, and this is my house.
(somber music)
On August 9th, my house burned.
15 years of memories,
40 years of notebooks,
drawings, thoughts, my life's work.
In the years that I lived here, I learned an awful lot.
In the few weeks since it burned,
I think I've learned even more.
Today, we're gonna share what's left of our home with you.
(light rock music)
So on August 9th,
I thought that our summer vacation was going to begin,
because John was going to go play golf for the first time
with other human beings.
And I thought they were gonna have this perfect day.
So I was going to make a big pasta dinner for John,
because that makes him the happiest.
And he comes in and he's very grumpy.
The golf game did not go too well.
So I thought, "Well, while he's upstairs changing,
I'll start a fire, he'll see the pasta water going,
the sauce is bubbling, this will make a nice evening."
So, John comes downstairs a bit later,
and this man comes running through the backyard.
He jumped off an ATV, and he's in our backyard screaming,
and he's like, "Your roof is on fire.
Your roof is on fire. Your roof is on fire.
Hey, you guys. Hey, you guys."
So we run into the backyard,
and we look up, and, yeah, roof's on fire.
So, I ran upstairs.
The gentleman in our backyard said
that he had called for the fire department, of course,
and first responders.
John also called on our house phone.
I ran upstairs to get medicine, my notebooks,
my mother's high school ring,
things that when your house is burning down,
you don't want to leave.
But when I ran to the top of the stairs,
I could hear the fire in the wall.
I could hear electricity.
I could hear danger.
(dramatic music)
Because I am a part
of the Denis Leary Firefighter Foundation
and the first female member of their board,
I'd been in enough fake, controlled fires
to know to be very scared
of sounds and fire itself.
So, I immediately turned to run out,
and there was a Hadley-Luzerne firefighter
standing literally next to me.
"Get out! Get out!"
I'm like, "I'm trying, I'm trying!"
(chuckling) And we're yelling at each other.
And I said, "Go! Go!"
And we ran down the stairs,
and we got, John was coming up the stairs
as we were going down the stairs.
And I said, "You can't go, you can't go in there.
You can hear the fire in the walls."
(dramatic music)
Well, it's a whole house of stuff.
You don't know what to grab.
The first thing that popped into my mind
was, "Take your laptop and take a phone charger."
And that's all I thought of.
(Rachael laughs)
And then I heard, those are the two things I thought of,
and then I was gonna get more stuff, but I, like her,
I heard crackling on the other side of the wall.
I said, "Nah."
No. "We're gonna leave now."
We're good.
We left our house.
We came down the hill, me in my flip-flops,
but that's all we left with, basically,
was our dog, the clothes on our back,
flip-flops, and John's shoes.
We literally were just watching our house burn
and burn and burn, and it wouldn't stop.
And you're just thinking, "Oh God, what's gonna be left?"
(dramatic music)
The next morning, Greg Amyot,
the fire investigator, put me in boots up to my hips,
and in gloves up my arms, and
in a really good quality face mask
to walk through the still-burning house.
Went up there the next day,
and you just don't know what's gonna be left,
and what you're gonna lose.
So, neither of us had any clothes at all,
other than what we were wearing.
So, we walked in, and there's just devastation everywhere.
We're like, "Oh my God. There's no house left."
And then we went upstairs to our bedroom,
figuring, "Oh, maybe there's some clothing or something."
Ash, just piles of ash.
So, guys,
this is more B-roll
of what happened upstairs.
Greg's with us.
I asked him for permission to come up here first.
This was our bedroom
and our library.
And that was our bathroom and our dressing area.
(dramatic music)
It has a nice breeze. No need for air conditioning.
There's nothing funny about this.
It's incredible that something
that wasn't even 15 years old.
What caused the fire was simply,
and we have our fireplace cleaned twice a year,
and our house was less than 15 years old.
It was 14 years and change.
Creosote buildup in the chimney.
It is just buildup in the chimney,
and the chimney basically spit,
and a fire ember fell on the roof,
and the whole house came down.
(sighs) Okay, we're good.
Maybe we should go now 'cause this is creepy. (chuckles)
Okay, I'm good. I don't want to see no more.
(somber music)
This was our entryway.
It was filled with paintings and pictures.
This melted piece of wall here
is where Tony Bennett's picture that he sent me
of children tobogganing used to hang.
This was our dining room, ugh.
This was our living room.
We did a whole lot of living in here too.
So, I think that what we've learned since the house burned
is just waves of gratitude that we're alive,
and all the people that have reached out to us,
people that we know,
but total strangers from all over the world.
But the waves that come over us, we never see them coming.
Thankfully, we haven't had them on the same day.
One of us has a breakdown at a time. (chuckles)
For me, the first one was knowing
that I lost most of my mom's handwriting,
because my mom has very bad macular degeneration.
And this year on my birthday,
she tried to write on my birthday card
so I'd have another sample of her handwriting, (chuckling)
which is very sweet.
But so many books that were special to us,
and letters, and notes, of course, my life's work,
notebooks that date back decades.
(somber music)
Unfortunately, this is where I kept
all of my notebooks and papers.
This was where John and I nested.
And this was where all my photo albums used to be.
John lost all of his music charts,
going back decades, all of his work.
Notebooks, first editions, special letters, photographs,
our history with Isaboo, our 15 years with our dog.
I have to say, the remediators,
the people that work on fires, the wonderful professionals
that do this day in and day out that live
in other people's sadness and loss, they're remarkable.
And we don't even know what they can save from the fire.
So we may get some of those things back.
No problem telling what the weather is.
If you can climb over this, that used to be the guest wing.
John's music studio was over the garage,
and it's a separate building,
and they feel that they can save that.
I thought that my pizza oven had survived,
and 12 or 13 days later,
some beam work, or, I don't know, something fell,
(chuckling) and broke the pizza oven too.
So, as of today, my house is being bulldozed.
(uplifting music)
Losing stuff is really bad,
especially stuff you can't replace.
Clothes can be replaced.
Your notebooks, my music books,
they're not so easily replaceable.
But the most important thing is life.
And we were lucky that we got out unharmed.
We got our Bella out unharmed,
and that's really the most important thing.
The house, we'll rebuild the house. It'll be back.
I couldn't be more grateful, grateful for my life,
grateful that I can survive this and rebuild a home,
and grateful for people like Greg in our community
that help us all move forward
and onto the next great chapter of our lives together.
We're gonna get there stronger and better than ever.
(chiming music)