Alabama Extreme Makeover Home Edition

When it came time to rebuild a home for a family in need, the participants of the Alabama Extreme Makeover Home Edition banded together and created something very special for the Gaudet Family. If you have ever watched this popular show then you may have wondered what it would be like to actually participate in the building of an Extreme Makeover home.

In this LoveToKnow interview, Frank Lott III, home builder and President of Heritage Homes in Mobile, Alabama, describes how he went from getting a phone call out of the blue from the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to witnessing how one community project can potentially light a town's desire to help other people.

I was the builder. I organized with my leadership team all the labor and materials that went into the house. It started out as a small 60's style run-down house with one bathroom, and we tore it down and rebuilt it as 3,600 square feet home with five bedrooms and three bathrooms.

Now I do. They're the Gaudet Family. They were a pretty interesting family. Even though their house had some damage from Hurricane Katrina, the father had been laid off from his job. The mother, Lydia, worked as a social worker and the youngest son, Peter, has Down’s Syndrome and Cerebral Palsy.

Yes. It was interesting because I’m a builder and so building a house was our number one thing. But we had cameras and wireless microphones around, so it was a whole different deal for sure.

I would say yes because it’s definitely changed the way I see the sense of community and volunteerism. Every person that works on the house does it out of the goodness of their hearts and is not guaranteed to be on TV. At the same time, it’s like a wedding; you only plan to have it once. It was an once-in-a-lifetime experience. It was an unbelievable experience and if given the opportunity, I would do it again.

Definitely, and I didn’t realize that until we started building the house. That is definitely what it was and I still hear from people who worked out there and just yesterday I heard from the people at United Way.

They worked. Those guys worked hard; I was working with some of them when the sun came up and when the sun went down. They all play a role in the building and it’s amazing that the crew can turn a neighborhood into a set for a hit TV show, film it, produce it and then take it all back down in a day with no evidence they were ever there except for a brand new house.

It was a very good feeling. The night it aired on Easter, the local minor league baseball team let us use their field and we had an eighteen foot inflatable screen and invited everyone who worked on the house to come out and watch it there. There were a couple thousand people who watched it together. Of course, all of the family and their friends came out to watch it too. It was cold, but everyone was cheering.

My experience was definitely positive. What I would say is we went into the show as a business…not doing it to be on TV, but thinking it would be a great public relations move. We got so much more out of it than that. Since then we’ve planned three other projects in our community with the same crew who helped on the house to help these types of families in need. It’s gone a whole lot further than we thought; it was a fantastic experience that jump-started something that without it I don’t know what we’d be doing.

It really did. You think people do this to be on the show because of the movie stars and cameras and excitement, but now there’s nobody around and we don’t issue press releases and they are still there to help people out.

LoveToKnow thanks Frank Lott III for taking the time to share his positive reality show experience.

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