My Wife (Lisa) and I (Brian), with 4 of our children, experienced a home fire at 1 am. A robotic pool cleaner was charging under our patio by the pool when the batteries exploded, catching everything on fire, including the Plastic Lanai. This caused the fire to get into the attic within seconds. Luckily, Lisa woke up from the noise and set in motion to wake everyone up. She made it out of the house with our youngest daughter and son. Our older son and I weren’t as lucky. The smoke had filled the inside of the house within three minutes. As we struggled to find the exit and breathe, giving up felt like an option since I was just running into the walls. Finally, I found the exit and pushed our son out and followed behind him. I then realized our oldest daughter was still in the house; she stayed inside trying to get the cats. I tried to run back, but the some and flames stopped me. I ran around the house to get to her window, which was already engulfed with flames. As I heard Lisa yelling my name, that our daughter had made it out, I ran back around.

Three of us went to the hospital to be checked out for CO2 poisoning. We were released the same day. From this disaster, we lost eight of our family pets: Three dogs, two cats, and three sugar gliders.

We are all in therapy and working through the constant nightmares and PTSD we all developed.

We learned that medical bills are not covered for people living in the home, so we have to come up with a few thousand to pay those bills. I have also learned that homeowners’ insurance doesn’t expect the 100% loss of a home when calculating coverage. Because of the demolition and clearing costs, we will be short on funds from the insurance to complete our rebuild. This rebuild is expected to take over a year.

We have been blessed with strangers helping us with clothing. We found a rental within five miles of our home. For now, insurance is helping with the majority of the rental costs; as long as the rebuild doesn’t take much longer than a year, that will be covered. We are still waiting for the engineers to complete the structural designs for the overall estimated costs; however, the final estimate is expected soon. Currently, we are already $20,000 over the estimated costs of what insurance covers.