Year of recovery: For Gatlinburg couple, rebuilding a home is rebuilding a business

Knoxville News-Sentinel (TN)

Feb. 26--The shell of a room off the carport of Kevin and Lisa McCarter's rental house now has insulation, paint and lights. They poured more than a yard of concrete to level the floors, ordered countertops for a desk and bought a new printer.

The former storage room is still a few weeks away from becoming a fully functioning office, but once it's finished, both Lisa and Kevin can begin relaunching their businesses.

When the couple's Gatlinburg house went up in flames during the deadly November wildfire, so too did Lisa's design consulting firm and Kevin's home inspection business.

Not only did the couple lose their home and irreplaceable family heirlooms, but they also lost their two primary sources of income.

"We found out pretty quickly, I want to say in three or four days after the fire, whether we still had a house or not," McCarter recalled. "Then, you know, everything else just kind of stops. You know that you can't continue to live as you were and to do business as you were until you can get that central base again."

Their business records, equipment and computer software are all gone. Because they had only a homeowner's insurance policy, most of it will have to be replaced out of pocket, Lisa McCarter said. That includes specialized flashlights, software templates and other equipment for Kevin's job.

It means a collection of paint wheels, flooring samples, books of fabric and wall coverings that took years for Lisa to accumulate will have to be rebuilt.

The couple's income came from a combination of their two businesses, part-time work Lisa McCarter does as a diver for Ripley's Aquarium and the rental property they own a few yards from their own house. The insurance company, though, has given them a living stipend and they also receive the monthly $1,000 check from Dolly Parton's My People Fund.

"Knowing that the insurance was going to give us a living expense stipend, it alleviated the need to go back to work immediately," Lisa McCarter said.

Now their focus is on making upgrades to the rental property -- primarily converting the one-time covered storage space into an office where they both can run their businesses again.

"When (Kevin) would get a call from a potential client, he would tell them, 'I'm sorry but my business was in my home and all that's gone,'" Lisa McCarter said. "He told anyone who contacted him, 'I've got to get a handle on somewhere we can be and we'll have to try to put our business back together when we find somewhere we can live."

After bouncing around from hotel rooms to two other temporary houses, the McCarters finally moved into their own second property earlier this month. In a stroke of luck -- or as Lisa has insisted, at God's hand -- the tenant who had been renting the house asked a few days before the fire if he could break his lease early. And, though it's only a few yards from the McCarter's torched primary home, the rental property sustained no damage at all from the fire.

Still, how quickly either can get back to their businesses depends on other factors. For Lisa, a lot of her clients are in the same holding pattern she and Kevin are facing: waiting for the properties to be rebuilt. Because most of her work was with out-of-town property owners, it could take even longer for them to see progress since the priority has been to replace primary residences first, she said.

"My work is going to depend on how quickly other people's structures can come together," she said. "I've worked with a couple clients already in terms of the directing them where they need to go (for permits and contractors), but until a house comes out of the ground, I really can't be on site to do work."

For Kevin, the decision to go back to work is one of how his time is best spent, she said. As a former general contractor, he plans to coordinate and even do some of the work on their own rebuilding project himself. That should allow them to stretch their insurance money farther, she said.

"We'll have to weigh, is it going to be less expensive for him to work on our house and put his business off for three or four months, or would it benefit us for him to go back to work as an inspector." she said.

The excavation on their shaded hillside property has already wrapped, and the crew will begin pouring concrete footers in the coming weeks, McCarter said.

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