The home’s large and open first floor living space. The show required 10-foot ceilings for filming.
Featured Homes
Extreme Giving
When Extreme Makeover Home Edition chose to help a Manchester family of four who lost their house in a flood, the local community didn’t hesitate to donate time, money, and some big-ticket items

The home’s exterior.
The show’s designers didn’t spare any extra details when they created the kids’ rooms. Each one is designed to reflect the interests of the four Voisine boys, which include (from the top): baseball, snowboarding, complete with a snow-making machine, cars, and skateboards.
Contrasting with the “extreme” designs of the four kids’ rooms, the master bedroom is a place of elegant tranquility for the couple to relax. 

Though the local builder wasn’t worried, the Hollywood pros of Extreme Makeover Home Edition were getting nervous. The build in Manchester, N.H., was an especially difficult case. Not only was the site on a narrow lot in a flood plain on a dead-end street, but the project was also the show’s first three-story house. Plus, an unexpected 16-hour delay dramatically cut into an already tight, four-day build schedule. Would there be enough time to get everything done before the family’s return and the big reveal?

“The project manager had come up to us and said, ‘Reggie you don’t look worried,’” remembers builder Reggie Moreau of R.J. Moreau Communities in Bedford, N.H. “I said, ‘I’m not: In the end whether we’re late or not late the family’s going to get the house.’ He said, ‘That’s not funny.’”

But that spirit of giving pervaded the air and uplifted spirits; despite setbacks, chaos, and sleep deprivation, the Voisine family — Reynald, Casey, and their four boy — would soon be moving into their new home. The Voisines’ previous house had literally been swept away by a flood on Mother’s Day 2006, and although FEMA condemned the house, they had not granted the Voisines a loan to rebuild, which meant the family still paid a mortgage for a house they could no longer live in.

At that point so much had already happened in a very short time. Producers from the ABC television program first told Reggie they had selected R.J. Moreau as the builder for the Extreme Makeover home in Manchester at the end of September 2007. The shoot would be scheduled for October.

The show’s producers invited Reggie and business partner Jon Lariviere to watch another build going on in Maine. On the way back, they used the long car ride to call suppliers and tradespeople asking for donations of time and materials. “In that five and a half hour time we didn’t have one no,” Reggie recalls.

For the design of the house, Reggie called childhood friend Jonathan Halle of Warrenstreet Architects in Concord, N.H. All Reggie could tell him at first was “I promise it’ll be exciting,” remembers Jonathan. At the meeting, they asked Jonathan for an immediate commitment: the build was going to take place in just three and a half weeks. He agreed, and his firm designed the home in less than ten days, with special considerations to suit not only the family but also the fact that it would be a television stage. For instance, ceilings had to be 10 feet high because low ceilings supposedly make people look fat on screen.

“We had to close down our company and spend all the time just focusing on coming up with a design, ordering products, signing up volunteers, assigning tasks, making sure nothing was forgotten,” says Reggie.

The week of the actual build began with the “door knock”—the moment the Voisine family found out they have been selected for the show. After a day of filming, they were then whisked away on a vacation, their first ever as a family, to return in one week to their new house. The door knock was the first time Reggie and the crew met the Voisines.

“After Rey Voisine came out and stated, ‘Why us? There’s so many other people,’ I knew we had the right family at that time,” remembers Reggie. “His family was well-deserving of it. That’s what’s key.”

However, construction could not begin until after the neighborhood was prepped with tents, and a concert and square dance were held in the neighborhood. The next day volunteers were filmed doing the “Braveheart” march toward the site, delaying the build another day.

When work finally began, excavators uncovered a dump site on the property with not only pieces of the old house, but also older materials that had been buried on the site. Reggie joked that the old saying “everything but the kitchen sink” did not apply in this case. “No we pulled out the kitchen sink too. It was there. That delayed us 16 hours from the get-go.”

Fortunately, there was help. The build registered 4,500 volunteers and had to turn away many people from a line that ran up the block. There were so many volunteers that they were able to work on other projects in the neighborhood during the build, raking yards, painting fencing, planting annuals, and other small jobs.

“It’s amazing the amount of outpouring this project got. Everybody wanted to be involved,” says Jonathan. “Five hundred to six hundred people were standing in line. It was overwhelming. They honestly didn’t expect that kind of turnout.”

According to Reggie, it was the first time that everything been done with only volunteers. To date, the project also had the largest number of corporate sponsors and was the only project where volunteers did everything, which included a lot of skilled detail work, including laying hardwood floors, tile work in the bathrooms, and unique features such as a snow machine in one of the kids’ bedrooms, murals, special lighting, and supercharged garage with climbing walls and zip line.

Among the many local business donors, Community Electric of Derry provided, Palmer Gas gave the family a three-year supply of heating fuel, Builders Insulation donated the installation, Wallis Prefab framed the house, Paradigm put in windows, Rothman Furniture donated $30,000 of furniture, and Bow Landscaping provided $15,000 of plant materials.

“We were placed wherever they needed skilled people,” explains Dave Calkins of Alternative Solutions, who brought his crew for a couple days to help out. “Initially it was chaos but there was a good energy about it. Once everything fell into place and there was a system it actually worked extremely well.”

“Everything was donated,” says Jonathan, including a 10-person hot tub from Oasis Hot Tub and Sauna on the back porch, which was never even shown on the television program, and lots of food for the many volunteers. “Nobody went hungry. Three dozen restaurants stepped up and provided food and beverages during the build.”

“The hard part was trying to figure out what to do with all the Tupperware,” says Reggie. “We ended up giving it to food kitchen. In fact, they also donated a small box truck full of extra donated food and drink to a soup kitchen after the show.”

The week ended successfully with the “Move the Bus” moment that’s familiar to viewers of the program: the family is brought to the site and the house revealed after a bus is moved out of the way. But the spirit of the show did not end there. A big part of the program’s message is for participants to keep “paying it forward.” For the show’s first airing in January, the Verizon Center donated their space to air the program. At that event, more than a dozen charitable organizations were given booth space to recruit volunteers. Reggie has gone on to participate in more Extreme Home projects, including ones in New Orleans area, New York state, and Maynard, Mass., which he brought the Voisines to so they could also experience the other side of “Extreme” giving.

“I think it’s a great experience for everybody,” says Reggie. “If you have the opportunity to spend some time there it changes your life. It really does. It’s changed the life of almost all the people that I’ve talked to.

“They called it the gift that gives back. That was our motto. Because you get more out of it than you give.”

Design Details

Builder
R.J. Moreau Communities, LLC

Architect
Warrenstreet Architects, Inc.

Work Crew
4,500+ local volunteers