First Louisville family to rebuild offers hope
Jessica Carson dealt with the devastation of losing her Louisville home in the Marshall Fire by focusing on the future and rebuilding.
She contacted Louisvillebased Wood Brothers Homes the day after the Dec. 30 fire, then secured the city’s first building permit. Construction on her Larkspur Lane house started in June. Friday, she received the first residential certificate of occupancy for a new build as friends, family and Louisville officials cheered the accomplishment at a ribbon cutting.
“I needed to move forward,” she said. “It was forward thinking rather than looking back.”
While her rebuild is the first to be completed, she’s watched construction activity slowly increase in the Cornerstone neighborhood, where every home burned. As she celebrated her move-in day, the streets around her house were jammed with construction trucks and equipment.
“Every time we come back, there’s another house, another foundation, another bulldozer,” she said. “It’s really exciting.”
Altogether, the Marshall Fire destroyed 1,084 homes. In Louisville, 550 homes and businesses were destroyed. To date, the city has issued 123 rebuild permits and has another 60 under review.
Superior counted 387 homes, plus four businesses, destroyed and has issued 97 rebuild permits with another 66 under review. Superior also issued a certificate of occupancy for one business, Target, which reopened in August. In unincorporated Boulder County, 157 homes were destroyed, 28 rebuild permits were issued and 16 permits are under review.
The Boulder County commissioners earlier this month agreed to reduce building permit fees for those rebuilding after both the Cal-wood Fire and Marshall Fire,
acknowledging rising construction costs and financial challenges of being underinsured.
The Colorado Division of Insurance also is asking insurance companies to extend additional living expenses coverage from 12 months to up to 24 months for those displaced by the Marshall Fire.
“A lot of people are still evaluating and working through insurance issues,” said Boulder County Community Planning Director Dale Case. “Everyone is in a different place in decision making. It can take two to three to four years to go through the process. We’re trying to really meet folks where they are at and provide enough certainty in the permit process so it isn’t a deciding factor.”
Carson’s rebuild is both a personal and community milestone.
“So many people have helped us get here,” she said.
As her house was being built, she and her kids — Addison, 9, and Connor, 13 — visited at least once a week.
“It made us happy,” she said. “It’s been quite a year. Moving back will be great for my kids. It will give them some security.”
After Thanksgiving, with her house still under construction, she and her children set out a brightly lit Christmas tree by a front window that’s visible to traffic on Via Appia. She’s since received many messages of thanks from people who said seeing the tree glowing in her new house gave them a bit of hope as they navigate both the holidays and the fire’s upcoming one-year anniversary.
Carson and her kids had only lived in the house about a year and a half before the fire, moving there in June 2020 after Carson and her husband divorced.
The day of the fire, she was talking to her ex-husband on the phone when someone began pounding on his door, telling him to evacuate. He lives nearby and brought his girlfriend, her children and their cat to Carson’s house, only to have to evacuate again along with Carson, their two kids and their two cats.
He also lost his home, and Carson lost the chickens in their backyard coop. She returned to her house the day after the fire.
“I parked at the skate park and walked to the backyard,” she said. “I just sat there and kind of cried. I had to see it. I knew it was gone, but I had to see it. For three to four months after the fire, the neighborhood looked like it had been bombed. With all the smoke, it felt like you couldn’t take a breath.”
She didn’t spend much time sifting through the debris, saying the reminders of what they lost only fueled her anxiety. She focused instead on completing all the steps to get her house designed and built before the one-year mark.
“For me, making decisions was healing,” she said.
As she was coordinating with the builder and architects, she found a place to rent in Longmont and drove her children back and forth to their schools in Louisville. Other than the commute for school, activities and work — her office is in Aurora — she said the main challenge was dealing with insurance.
She initially wanted to rebuild the exact same house, thinking it would be faster, but ended up making a few improvements. Her new house is a little bigger, with a office instead of a sitting room, a mudroom and a finished basement. She added she’s thrilled with how the house turned out, praising Wood Brothers for getting it built so quickly.
“We just kept moving forward,” she said.