See pictures of the homes and the building progress online:

• Royce Builders’ East Bernard build
• Style Craft’s Washington County build
  
  
  

by Sommer Hamilton

On the last day of a 105-hour push to build a new home for a family, Royce Builders workers and volunteers propped their elbows on fence posts and shook mud off their boots while others whisked remaining items into the house for placement — a landscape painting, wooden bookshelf, pillows for a deck chair.

Shonna, John '71 and Shawn '96 Speer discuss progress on the Extreme Makeover home they sponsored in East Bernard

The Speers on the day of the Extreme Makeover "reveal." Photo Courtesy of Jorge De La Garza (H-E-B Public Affairs)

The Kubena family, with show star Ty Pennignton, reacts to seeing their new home.

The new 4,300-square-foot home in East Bernard.

Touring the grounds of a 4,300-square-foot Extreme Makeover home, John Speer ’71 squinted into the January sun with satisfaction. The cedar-shuttered 5-bedroom home had a week before been the site of a 2-bedroom trailer for a family of six with two sick children. In a little more than four days, 300 Houston-area Royce Builders employees — 90 of them Aggies — and hundreds of contractors and volunteers laid the foundation, framed the two-story house and built a home, complete with a cheery backyard playground.

“We look for the opportunity to do good things,” said Speer, president of Royce Builders and a Mays accounting and MBA graduate. “We can’t make a difference in everybody’s life, but we try to do what we can. I’m just glad we were able to do this for this family in need.”

The home is for the Kubenas of East Bernard, Texas, and their 7-year-old twins, Tara and Sara. The twins are both battling leukemia — a statistical rarity, since the disease is non-genetic. Medical bills and long stays with Tara at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center taxed the family’s resources, and left part of the family living in a tiny mobile home next to the children’s grandparents. The Kubenas story touched producers at ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, who contacted Royce Builders executives and asked them to take on the construction of a home where all the family could live and Tara, with special respiratory needs as she fights her illness, could be safe.

Royce Builders sponsored the build and provided the floor plan, though many materials — down to a year’s worth of H-E-B groceries and a Gallery Furniture interior — were donated by companies committed to improving their communities. Sponsorship is no small job: Royce employees halted work on all other projects and put a week of labor into the build, while the company footed the bill for items that weren’t donated.

The project captivated America’s Sunday-night TV audiences in mid-February when it aired on ABC’s Extreme Makeover. Tara and Sara’s 2nd-grade classmates chanted their names and waved “Welcome Home” signs as the family saw their new home for the first time and were ushered inside by show star Ty Pennington.

The generosity of the community, of Royce Builders, and of the Extreme Makeover effort means the Kubenas will get everything — their mortgage, a new car, all medical bills — taken care of.

“You’re supposed to do what good you can in the community,” Speer explained. He would know: among numerous efforts, Royce Builders has sponsored Mays’ Freshman Business Initiative learning community, partnered with the Houston Astros for their “Astros in Action” program and awarded more than $357,000 in scholarships through Royce Builders Foundation for Youth.

Making a house a home
Another recent Extreme Makeover: Home Edition build on a home in Texas’ Washington County aired in mid-January, with College Station-based Stylecraft and another host of contractors and volunteers — more than 500 of them Aggies — constructing a house, barn and kennels for a family of animal rescuers.

What makes a house a home? Sometimes, it’s all the people who put their back into it to help raise the frame. The first day Stylecraft cost analyst and senior accounting major Matt Henderson saw the Navasota construction zone on a chilly December day, nearly 200 people in blue Extreme Makeover sweaters were hammering in studs and beams. They got the frame up in two hours.

Two days later, Henderson helped construct the ranch-style perimeter fence, putting the finishing touches on the ranch gates that will always swing open for the DeAeth family as they enter their driveway.

“I thought, ‘this is awesome.’ All these volunteers, all these contractors just giving their all and wanting to get this house done,” Henderson recalls. “I mean, look at what we did — we helped this family.”