(hopeful piano music)
- [Angie] We bought this house in June of 2014.
You know, all the houses in the neighborhood,
at least then, were 1950s-built.
It's a little over 2,000 square feet.
The lot itself is almost 10,000,
so we knew we had a big yard,
and it's a three bedroom, two bath.
The kitchen had been remodeled within the last ten years,
and the bathrooms had not been remodeled,
but they were very well kept
considering it was still a lot of the tile from the 1950s.
We envisioned us having kids here, and it felt like home
from the minute we walked in.
- The floodplain is a very big deal,
and noticing out our back door,
you know,we're two blocks, three blocks away from the bayou,
and this house was built in 1952 and it had never flooded,
and it's been through four significant hurricanes.
- The hurricane that hit the year before,
it didn't really affect us,
my husband had sand-bagged everything up,
and we were just like,
we're not gonna go through that again, it's fine.
- We did prep, I had water, we had food.
Sunday rolls around, bluebird day.
We actually went on a walk with our dogs
and we were on the bayou,
and the water was at the bottom.
Shortly after, I'd say a couple hours,
that's when armageddon seemed to start breaking loose.
Previous hurricanes that we've had have been fast-moving.
They'd come in, and they'd dump rain
and they'd get out.
This one just stayed, it just created
the perfect storm to flood.
(water sloshing)
(foreboding digital music)
- I woke up at six o'clock in the morning
to my phone going off with text messages
and swung my feet over the bed,
and we had about two or three inches of water in the house.
Let's just say 30 minutes later,
it was probably 10-plus inches.
A good, dear friend of ours, our neighbor,
was knockin' at the door.
In just our general vicinity of maybe just this block,
there's about four or five houses that didn't flood
that are newer-built, and they are two-story,
so they took in everyone else that was here
and that was flooding and couldn't retreat
to their upstairs, so we ended up with around 14 people
and I wanna say six dogs,
all in his house by 9:00 a.m.
- [Austin] I had never seen anything like it.
I mean, it's just so much water everywhere.
I mean, everywhere where
there should be a road is just water.
- I would say the water left our house
within maybe 30-something hours.
That next step is just go,
you get everything that could've absorbed water,
you get it out of the house.
It was hard to see, 'cause you could see a clear water line,
you imagine a bunch of brown water in your house,
you could see exactly everything it had touched.
My husband is in construction, so that helped a lot.
- I know what was driving me was the mold.
My primary focus was,
strip everything outta the house,
including sheet rock and insulation.
- We found out the day the insurance adjuster came over
and did the whole assessment of the house
was that we did not have contents coverage.
My response to him, and I wasn't trying
to sound tough, was "I don't have time to be heartbroken."
No one was gonna come in and do this for us.
I don't remember crying at all,
which I think is very strange when I think about it now,
but it was, we've gotta get this done.
Michelle entered the picture right away.
- In a natural disaster,
you take on a little bit different role
than you might if it were a traditional design project.
It was very hard for everyone.
You are part designer, part therapist,
part shoulder to cry on.
There's a certain degree of chaos
that comes with just that whole experience for people.
It looked pretty much like a war zone.
Austin being in construction was a great help,
we both spoke the same language,
so we looked at this as an opportunity.
We could rebuild this house and get them back in,
but we could also make some improvements.
They have a small child,
they want to add to the family in time,
and so we wanted to create a much more family-friendly home,
and so ultimately, we left a lot of things
in its original place to save on money,
but at the same time, we improved it.
- The main wants in the house
were to open it up, and make it
a more breathable space, so to speak,
'cause it felt choked off with walls.
- So that was one of the reasons
I really wanted to open up the wall
between the kitchen and the living room,
is because our little guy would like
to lay in there and play, or do whatever he was doing,
and I couldn't see him.
Austin and I's idea about the house in general,
but especially the kitchen, were very different,
and I always thought having someone help you with design
was gonna be something that we couldn't afford,
and that couldn't have been further from the truth.
We started using Houzz right away.
Michelle said, "Hey, take a look at some of these ideas",
she knew that blue was my color, in all different shades,
and so one of the first photos she sent me
was of a kitchen island that had been painted teal.
- Michelle's design work is invaluable.
I'm a very visual person, so being able to see that
and work within our space,
and see what things are gonna look like
really helped me making decisions.
- Austin likes industrial styling,
and that really wasn't appropriate for this architecture,
but we wanted to give him something
that he felt he could connect to as well,
and so he settled on a metal backsplash.
- [Austin] So, the backsplash,
I think gives me that industrial feel
as well with our appliances, so I think
we get that good blend with our chairs as well,
it pulls into the space.
- We ultimately chose things like wood plank tile flooring
so that if their little boy now
and kids for the future want to rollerskate on it,
they can, it's easy on them in terms of their dogs.
We chose porcelain countertops,
and they're non-porous, non-staining,
or scratch-resistant, so we just really thought through,
let's make it beautiful, let's make it
easy living for them, so they're not worried about things.
- In a 1952 house in Houston,
a lot of the laundry was located in the garage,
and we have a detached garage,
so I told my husband from day one,
I want the laundry in the house.
When you're lookin' at a 2,000 square-foot house,
you have to, in order to get a laundry room inside,
she had to really kinda play with
what areas were open to even do so
without taking away a lot of the living area of the house.
When Michelle had the idea to incorporate the pantry
within the laundry room, it really just saved us some space
from tryin' to build it somewhere else in the house,
the same square footage.
- [Michelle] We re-did the wiring
to improve the lighting throughout the house,
we re-jiggered some of their bathroom layouts
so that we could have more storage,
double vanities, things like that,
that maybe they didn't need immediately,
but long-term, as they continued to grow their family.
When I do a design for any client,
I try to look at the whole house,
and the cohesion between rooms.
You don't need to do every room the same,
but it does need to flow somewhat.
- You know, we started off looking at websites,
and I was drawn to Houzz quite a bit
because we needed something where we could
furnish an entire house on a very small budget,
and Houzz really offers everything,
from very inexpensive to, you know,
somewhat if you wanted
to spend a little bit more on a piece,
and that was a big draw for us,
because we had to replace everything,
and in order to do that,
it had to be budget-friendly.
All of the stuff in here, the furniture,
to the rugs, to everything, I wanted to have something
that looked nice, that was on-trend,
but durable enough for a three-year-old.
The one thing that was saved was the dining room table.
We had to get it refinished,
but it was able to persevere through the flood.
When it came to color, we were both excited
to add some color to the house.
Michelle started building more into the idea book
off of what she found based on,
hey, if we have this really cool island,
pretty big focal point right when you walk in the house,
how can we link that
to the rest of the house in different ways?
And so, a lot of the design, from the kitchen island
being with teal, our bathroom vanity is teal,
Axle's vanity is a deep navy.
She knows me well, she knows if she puts
a little bit of blue or teal in something,
I'm going to be drawn to it.
- You don't always have grand budgets,
and so I did not want it
to not feel as though it all went together.
So I love tile, so we use tile as a way
to add personality, and you don't necessarily
have to spend a lot of money to do that,
so it was a way to make that budget go a lot further.
(uplifting keyboard music)
When we got ready to furnish Angie and Austin's house,
we looked at Houzz as a resource for buying furniture,
and so I used my relationship
with my Trade Account Manager there
to help us find pieces
that we knew were not only
family-friendly from appearance,
but that they had had good feedback.
- So when we were selecting the sofa,
she said, "why don't we take it
"and make it a right side chaise
"so that it goes towards the kitchen?"
And I was like, that's gonna look so weird.
And she said, "Trust me on this,
"we're gonna open it up by putting the chairs
"on the other side", and it opened it up beautifully.
(hopeful piano music)
- I would say this project
is a tremendous source of pride for me.
It's full of fun colors and warm energy,
and lots of memories that they're making,
and such a long way from where they started,
following the floods.
(hopeful piano music)
- Being able to just relax, and realize
that it's all behind us, 'cause we have nothing else
left to do to this house, it's done,
so that's been just relief.
(uplifting orchestra music)
There we go, good job, Axle.
- Oh, you found your brakes. - Look where you're goin'.