Year of Recovery: Construction begins for Gatlinburg family who lost home

The last time heavy machinery made an appearance on Lisa McCarter's wooded mountainside property, it was to clean up the charred remains of her 30-year-old two-story home. 

On Thursday, five months later, the giant yellow equipment returned — this time to begin construction on her new dream house. 

"I went up there and the footers are dug," McCarter said gleefully. "They're just holes in the ground, not anything special. But you go up there and it's like, 'Woohoo, we have holes in the ground!'"

The journey to this point has been tedious and exhausting, full of paperwork, bureaucracy and frequent moves to other temporary homes. 

Still, McCarter is quick to point out how lucky she and her husband, Kevin, have been since narrowly escaping the Nov. 28 wildfires that ravaged Gatlinburg and killed 13 people. Despite losing their home on The Spur, the place they'd built together in the 1980s and where they raised their son, they were insured. 

It took them four months to list 79 pages worth of belongings they'd accumulated over three decades and lost in one night. They had to document every piece of clothing, every dish, every heirloom and furniture piece, and then work with the insurance adjuster to look up each item, a replacement cost and whether it had depreciated in value. 

Last week, the company closed the claim, and the McCarters now have their check. It's just one more step toward normal life. 

They have added upgrades to the rental home they own next to their primary property, moved in there and built an office for their businesses. Though McCarter has been advising clients for her interior design business, she just took on her first job since the fire.

She's redesigning the bottom two floors of a rental property on Ski Mountain that survived the wildfires only to have pipes freeze and burst in the weeks afterwards.

Kevin McCarter, a home inspector, is considering returning to work full-time this summer after losing his business records, software and equipment, Lisa said. A former general contractor, Kevin McCarter had planned to do much of the work on their new house himself, including the plumbing and electrical jobs. 

How quickly the new house goes up depends on when Kevin decides to return to work and if he does so full-time, Lisa said.

Unlike their two-story, wood-and-vinyl sided first home, the new house will have brick and low-maintenance siding. They plan to put on a roof that should last 50 years. The goal, Lisa said, is a house that's easier to maintain as they get older.

They will only finish the main floor and use the basement as storage, she said. 

"The other house was a 30-year work-in-progress," she said. "It took us 30 years to put (work) into it and pay for it, and since we have to start back again from scratch, the costs for building have gone up four or five times."

While there's no firm timeline for completing the build, McCarter hopes to return to her own house by the end of the year. 

"I would like to celebrate Christmas in my own house again," she said.