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We Planned a DIY Backyard Renovation. Here’s What Really Happened

My husband and I poured concrete ourselves and built a carport—but not without delays and setbacks. (And we still have a ways to go.)

"By this time next year," my husband said, the morning after our wedding, "we’ll have the backyard completely renovated."

"We’ll have a party," I said. "An anniversary party," he agreed.

Larry and I were sitting underneath a somewhat shabby overhang on the edge of our garage, watching the sun rise over the garden where we had gotten married the previous evening. Our DIY backyard wedding—which included 60 guests, a chamber choir, a potluck dinner and a $15 eyelet lace dress—had been so successful that we felt like we could do anything.

So we committed, in the way that one commits on the first day of a marriage, to completing the backyard renovations by June 2025. Larry began making concrete molds for our patio in September, with the goal of pouring concrete in October. That’s when we learned that fall was one of the busiest times of the year for outdoor contractors, with everyone hoping to get their projects done before the winter. We weren’t able to get anyone in to do the initial pour until late November, at which point Larry decided that there wasn’t any reason he couldn’t learn to make and pour concrete himself.

The winter weather held long enough for Larry and a friend to do a second pour in December, at which point we decided that there wasn’t any reason I couldn’t learn to make and pour concrete as well. So, when the spring came, I put on my overalls and got to work.

At left, learning how to pour concrete. At right, trying to get the pontoon boat under our new carport.

Courtesy of Nicole Dieker

Mixing and pouring concrete is remarkably similar to making a cake, in the sense that you need to add the right amount of water, stir everything around really well, pour it evenly and get all of the air bubbles out before it sets. You’ll want to avoid slopping too much concrete over the sides of the mold, for the same reason you’d try to avoid getting globs of wet cake on the outside of your baking dish, but anything that gets spilled can be cleaned up afterward.

It’s also an excellent project for a newly married couple, in part because it allows you and your spouse to work together without getting hung up on the persnicketiness of, say, hanging wallpaper. There’s no tiny little flower that has to match up with another tiny little flower while one of you is standing on a chair with the weight of the paper and paste dangling from the ends of your hands, which are, of course, held over your head, and everything starting to dry before you can get the seam in place, and there’s always that one little air bubble that never gets ironed out, and whose fault was that, anyway?

Concrete, despite or perhaps because of its strength, is incredibly forgiving. Which gave Larry and me the strength to forgive ourselves when it became obvious that we would not have our renovation completed in time for a first anniversary party in June 2025. "And now that this is becoming a multiyear project," Larry said, "I think the next component that needs to be completed is the carport."

Our house came with a single-car garage, which Larry had already turned into a tool shed and workspace. Our single car is parked in the driveway. The carport, which would be built in place of the overhang we had been sitting under the day after our wedding, would hold our pontoon boat during the winter, so Larry and I wouldn’t have to pay the marina to winterize and store it.

Larry estimated that it would take two weeks to build the carport. It took two months. During that time, he calculated the optimal angle for drainage, since the roof needed to be both high enough to accommodate the boat and low enough to line up with the garage. He had maybe 10 degrees of wiggle room, and ended up giving the boat just four inches of clearance. Larry also carefully measured the notches required to make the rafters flush—there were 19 of them, and each needed to be precise—and designed and printed 3D jigs to help him get the job done."It turns out I didn’t need the jigs, once I figured out how to cut the wood," Larry explained, "but I’m not sure I could have figured out how to cut the wood without making the jigs first."

Almost a year to the day of our first concrete pour, we had a group of friends over to the house to roll the pontoon boat into the carport. This couldn’t be done with a winch because we had to take the boat around a corner, which meant manipulating it back and forth like a piece of furniture, with six people pushing and pulling and me shoving chocks under the wheels every time we paused to recalculate the angle.

Our completed carport.

Courtesy of Nicole Dieker

We actually got the angle wrong, that first evening—both the horizontal and the vertical, since it became obvious that unless we packed part of our backyard with bricks and dirt and any other material we could scrounge up, the boat would roll ever-so-slightly and then inevitably down an incline that could take it straight into our neighbor’s house. So Larry moved piles of dirt from our patio excavation and placed them in the necessary spot, and we invited everyone back over for a second round, and this time the boat rolled precisely into its place.

"How long did that take?" Larry asked a young boy who had come along with his dad and had been instructed to stay out of the way and keep the time. "Twenty-seven minutes!" he replied. Yes, on the second try, after a two-week estimate became a two-month project, after the idea of renovating a backyard by an anniversary deadline became a lifetime dedication to our garden and our marriage and our agreement to do as much as we can ourselves, because that’s how we learn. And we still feel the way we did, the morning after our marriage—as if we could do anything.

Top photo by Ellinnur Bakarudin/500px via Getty Images

I Tried Peel-and-Stick Wallpaper—and Learned the Limits of My DIY Skills

What Have We Learned About the Design of Attracting Employees?

Another wave of companies is emphasizing returning to the office—but that doesn’t mean they’re addressing workers’ needs in meaningful ways.

In 2023, John (a pseudonym) was called back to the office. As an engineer in Chicago, he was one of thousands of workers across the country who left a desk to work from home in the wake of Covid’s shelter-in-place orders. In the two-bedroom apartment that he shared with his wife, he set up his workstation at the kitchen table each morning and put it away for dinnertime, every day for two and a half years. Though he liked waking up later, spared from a transit commute, he longed for his old office, where he had multiple monitors and camaraderie with his team. The initial mandate to return, which required two days per week minimum in their downtown office, was soon expanded to three days. John seems ambivalent about the new policy—and his office.

"They only have two microwaves on the floor that I’m on, and that fills up very quickly. And they also have a fridge policy where you can’t leave anything overnight, and they will throw anything left away," he says. There’s no free coffee or silverware for his lunches. This is no different from his office life before the pandemic, but like many workplaces that reduced their footprints to save money during Covid, returning to work has meant that more people are using the reduced facilities. Sure, he enjoys the comfort of multiple monitors, but these details have become daily frustrations. Five years since the pandemic first began, many companies like John’s are mandating that employees come back to an office, including more than half of Fortune 100 desk workers—up from five percent in 2023. As work-from-home employees are getting back to their desks, the question of what role the physical office can play in bringing workers back remains prominent. After years of working from home, can an office makeover be tantalizing enough to draw even the most adamant remote workers back?

Covid’s onset today feels like a haze: Early on, many office workers moved remote with the understanding that it would be temporary. From variant to variant, offices pushed their reopening. A Gartner survey of CEOs conducted in August 2021 found that two thirds of companies postponed reopening plans, per the New York Times. Building managers and employers rightly turned their attention to small-scale interior updates, making swift changes to keep people distanced and improve hygiene: circles drawn on linoleum floors, and hand sanitizing podiums went up in front of doors. Social distancing in the office, however, prompted many company leaders to begin rethinking how their office might look. Gensler, the world’s largest architecture practice, developed an algorithmic tool in 2020 that applied Center for Disease Control guidelines for social distancing to spatial design.

Eric Gannon, a project director at Gensler, says that the tool helped generate a lot of new conversations about what those guidelines might mean for post-Covid offices. For potential clients, the prospect of changing an office from 100 people to 30 to accommodate a six-foot radius seemed daunting. As states issued stay-at-home orders, the Covid interior safeguards proved irrelevant; remote work seemed to become a permanent future: The U.S. Census reports that the number of remote-only workers tripled between 2019 and 2021, a possible death knell to the office (and to business districts) as we know it. But Gannon feels the office had already been in decline for years prior to the pandemic.

"Everything from how the work environment supports people doing solo work to group work, to socializing and learning, all of it was on a pretty steady decline and heading up to the pandemic—it was, honestly, starting to tank," he says. "The pandemic drew a lot of emphasis on it, but we were aware that workplaces were starting to shift in terms of needs."

Empty desks at the Fuze office in Boston on March 10, 2020, one of many that became ghost towns during the work-from-home era of the pandemic.

Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

Open offices, popularized in the late 1990s, had been especially fading into irrelevance. The scheme supposedly ‘broke down barriers’ of cubicle walls to encourage a more socialized and collaborative workplace, but a 2021 New Yorker article documenting the office’s evolution notes that, by the early aughts, the ‘open plan office’ became more of a grift than a gift, a ploy to cram more people into less space. In 2010, reads the story, "the average North American employer allocated two hundred square feet to each worker; by 2017, that number had shrunk to about a hundred and thirty square feet." As anyone who works in an office can attest, noisy distractions abounded, forcing employees to hide away in their headphones.

These problems persist, according to Gensler’s 2025 Global Workplace Survey, a study of more than 16,000 full-time office workers across 15 countries and 10 industries. They found that space-effectiveness for all activities including working solo, collaborating in person, socializing, or learning, haven’t improved since 2008; the majority of respondents report that their biggest distractions—overhearing phone and in-person conversations, as well as foot traffic—remain inherent to open offices. These open office plans "fail to accomplish one of their major stated goals—increasing collaboration. Instead, researchers have found, they drive workers into more isolation," reports Scientific American.

It’s no wonder that working from home makes people happier, yet employers still want their workers back. A 2024 study by KPMG shows that 79 percent of American CEOs envision "corporate employees whose roles were traditionally based in-office to be back in the physical workplace in the next three years." That’s up 34 percent from the year prior. JPMorgan Chase concurs: Their recently completed Foster + Partners office building, a 2.5-million-square-foot "supertall" in Manhattan that cost $3 billion (with interior workspaces designed by Gensler), is "a bet on the idea that working from an office is a competitive advantage in a business landscape that is rapidly changing," designed with a goal "to make workers healthier in mind, body, and spirit—and therefore equipped to do their best work efficiently and effectively," writes Dwell contributor Diana Budds in Fast Company. Communal spaces on each floor, ample light, and clustered workstations all contribute to making workers "feel like they have more personal space."

Time will tell if a fancy HQ will be enough to attract workers back or just a post to which disaffected employees will be chained, and CEOs around the country might be taking note. But among those employers who chose to up their workplace game, JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon is an outlier. Many CEOs (or architects) aren’t billing their new builds or rehabs as a means to get butts back in seats, framing them instead as recommitments to attracting and retaining talent by providing more holistic workspaces. Still, 59 percent of organizations plan to increase investment in office renovations that "support return-to-office" efforts, reads an op-ed in Constructive Dive by the Americas market lead for project and development services at global real estate investment firm JLL. Despite that excitement, Gensler’s research found that only 30 percent of offices have been renovated post-pandemic, and "that’s sixty-plus percent that have been untouched where [workers are] trying to live a new life in the same environment," says Gannon.

Realistically, few corporations have the capital to build entire new buildings, and renovations aren’t cheap (and as the JLL piece notes, becoming even pricier under labor shortages and material costs). Some employers have instead retooled workplaces, using strategies like "hoteling," where workers ‘book’ a desk daily or weekly, a means to cheaply provide the type of flexibility and change of scenery that employees crave. Redditors have taken to the forum to discuss the practice, calling hoteled workplaces "cesspits." One tech employee in Chicago described how "flexibility" and "collaboration" are undermined when employees who refuse to use the booking system and instead "make their own rules and take the desks closest to the windows."

If there’s budgeted capital, employers might renovate their space, or, says Gannon, depending on when their lease is up, may choose to relocate and begin anew. But it’s not just about adding a cafe or letting employees book the desk of their choosing that may make these spaces desirable to workers wearily returning from their homes. Gannon sees the glitzy, "almost laughable" amenities of the past, popularized by start-ups—like ping pong tables—as a big turnoff; those employers who might now be trying to entice their employees out of their houses by making the office into a home-like environment, like creating ‘living rooms’ with residential seating, are also missing the mark. "At some point you want your nest at home, and you think of your personal space differently than trying to personalize your office space," he says.

"It’s like the consumer mindset," Gannon adds. "Workers aren’t people you just push things on. They have opinions, and that’s, I think, a reality for us now." Instead, Gannon emphasizes the need for more authentic or purposeful interior redesigns that can be adapted or reconfigured over time and rooted in data sourced from employees. (Though he warns, "don’t ask if you’re not going to do something with it.") Workers, it seems, know when the carrot is just a stick in disguise: It could explain why, according to Pew Research, 46 percent of remote workers say they would rather quit than return to the office.

Instead of trying to convince employees that the office is perfect for them individually, then using policy to force it on them, Gannon explains that employers would be better off investing in spaces that genuinely enable them to work better by focusing on what employees need to perform their best—technology, flexibility, and meaningful amenities. Building managers and owners also have a stake—and responsibility—in the equation; a paper by the Chicago Fed reported by The Hill in July 2025 shows that massive amenities like gyms have little effect on overall office vacancy rates. However, "meaningful amenities" might look like free parking, which, writes The Hill, "eliminates a major logistical headache and financial burden, especially when downtown parking prices are high or public transit is unreliable." Relieving daily frictions is the way to go.

It echoes John’s experience: workers see optimism in returning because of the technology tools and relationships they’ve built with their team; the day-to-day frustrations of commuting, sitting for long periods in one place, being unable to collaborate effectively, and being exposed to nuisances can all be detrimental to the back-to-work project. Luring people with shiny objects or novelty spaces simply isn’t an effective strategy. For some it may require more complex renovations. For others, it might mean smaller interventions like ensuring that workers don’t return to half-hearted offices where even the mistake of forgetting a spoon can lead to a headache.

Top photo of JPMorgan Chase’s new office in Manhattan by Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images.

How Adaptive Reuse Can Help Solve the Affordability Crisis

I Defied the "Landlord Special" and Replaced My Electrical Outlets

Picture this: You bravely excavate layers of caked-on paint with screwdrivers and Exacto knives, only to get behind the curtain and realize...it’s definitely time to call the professionals.

I Defied the "Landlord Special" and Replaced My Electrical OutletsRenters who fix or undo the "landlord special" should get an automatic pass into heaven. Removing glops of paint from fixtures. Connecting the gaps where the wall and floor are supposed to meet. Peeling off shoddily applied contact paper or tile decals. This is all God’s work and will be duly rewarded in the afterlife.

As such, I should get an automatic pass into heaven for replacing two of my electrical outlets that were covered in layers of decades-old paint and therefore unusable, a project I paid for out of pocket, of course. I couldn’t imagine my landlord reversing the work of the painters he hired two years ago to give my walls a fresh coat. But a girl needs access to electricity. These outlets were so heavily coated in paint that a plug wouldn’t even stay in—and they were two-prong, and I really wanted to upgrade to three-prong.

I initially planned to replace the outlets by watching YouTube tutorials because I didn’t want to spend much money on this project. It seemed straightforward enough: turn off the breaker, remove the plate, detach the wires, swap in the new outlet, reattach wires, screw in the new plate, turn on the breaker, and then plug in your blow-dryer or whatever. In reality, the ordeal was more complicated.

To start, I had to remove the paint, which took a handful of hours over the course of a couple of days. Furniture needed to be pushed aside so I could comfortably crouch down. I didn’t have proper tools for removing caked-on paint so I used a flathead screwdriver to chip away what I imagined was five layers of cancer-causing lead paint. I felt like an archaeologist—one working in extremely hazardous conditions.

Paint chips were all over my floor and getting stuck in between floor boards. I have never had to mop and vacuum such specific areas in my apartment so many times in a row. Removing the paint from the tiny grooves of the screws was arduous. At one point I introduced an Exacto knife into my paint-removing toolkit. I’m lucky I didn’t accidentally stab my hand with a screwdriver or knife.

Finally, after a week of excavating and unscrewing the plates, I peeked inside the holes. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but the YouTube tutorials made it seem like I’d be presented with easily identifiable colored wires that were neatly wrapped around the terminal screws and grounding screws of the outlet. Ha ha! Instead, every wire was rusty and black, thick and impossible to bend. It was clear that some of the wire coating would need to be removed and pulled back. At this point, I knew I had to call a professional.

After scrolling through tons of folks on TaskRabbit, many of whom were charging upward of $250 (out of my budget), I got a recommendation from a friend who said her local handy guy could do this for cheap "as a favor." The dude came in, checked out the wires, and as I’d expected, said this job would be a breeze for him, and maybe take him 15 minutes tops to replace both outlets.

Incredible, I thought, how much could he charge, right? When he finished, in his most Brooklyn accent, said in a single breath, "Okay miss, that will be $100, but just so you know, my normal rate for this would be $250, and that’s my baseline fee for surviving and doing this kind of work, but I told your friend I’d cut you a deal, so you can pay me whatever you want on a sliding scale starting at $100, but just so you know, my normal rate for this would be $250 and if you could pay my usual rate I’d appreciate it."

He looked right into my eyes as I said, "Okay, let me run to the ATM," where I withdrew $260 since the bills came in increments of $20. People ought to get paid for what they think they deserve, I thought, and this handy guy has done me a huge solid. I forked over the cash, thanked him, and went into my apartment to plug in a bedroom lamp.

Top photo by Tacojim via Getty Images.

Sofa Sagas: When a Custom Couch Is a Reminder of the Life You Once Had

My 2026 DIY Resolution Is to Commit to a Gallery Wall

It’s a classic for a reason.

I often find myself admiring well-staged photos of tastefully arranged and resolutely simple living spaces; intellectually, I understand the appeal of several harmonious shades of beige. But my ideal scenario is much, much different: pure aesthetic chaos.

Over and over again, I’m drawn resolutely toward dizzying maximalism. Outdoors, I prefer a cottage garden to almost anything; inside, I like innumerable layers of colors and textures. Bold rugs with rich, dense patterns; gingham linens; kooky-shaped velvet sofas; centuries-old British farmhouses with wooden rafters so low they graze your head; tartan wool blankets; aggressive wallpaper patterns; pressed-tin ceilings; weird lamps and funny little items sourced from thrift stores. Picture a 17th-century painting full of paintings, or perhaps Sir John Soane’s house.

In reality, in such a space, I would find myself overstimulated to the point of vibrating clear out of my skin. The question is how to tap that feeling of abundance, without letting it take over. Enter the gallery wall, which presents an opportunity to play with the chaos that I enjoy—but firmly within guardrails.

Unfortunately, I always collapse a bit in the face of the steps involved. First you have to pick the wall, then you have to choose (or worse, acquire) the art, then you have to frame the art, then you have to figure out how to arrange all that art, then—God help me—you have to get out a hammer and a level. It’s not that I’m incapable of tackling a complex project with a lot of stages, it’s just that such things have to be crammed in around the complex project with a lot of stages that I’ve already committed myself to for 18 years, i.e., parenting.

And yet, I always find myself back on Pinterest, pinning photo after photo of cheerfully crowded walls, the opposite of my blank, boring walls (or worse, the half-assed ones). Clearly, it’s time.

Part of the problem is that I need a greater variety of stuff to put on the wall, but my time and budget are both limited. I’d like to solve this problem with some of the ephemera I’ve collected over the years. Recently, for instance, a piece of paper fluttered out of a secondhand cookbook—an orange piece of Doubleday stationery with the relevant publication details. I have so many similar things tucked into drawers: postcards, vintage prints, bookmarks from every bookstore I’ve ever visited, covers from old Harlequin paperbacks, family photos from back when we still developed film. All of it could be tucked into frames. (Though I’ll always regret the ephemera I didn’t snag while I could—why didn’t I think to grab a placemat from Astoria’s Neptune Diner while it was still in business?)

If I were to frame it all professionally, it would cost a small fortune. But I don’t have to. A close friend DIYed her own gallery wall by simply buying up every nice-looking frame containing hideous art she spotted at thrift stores and replacing the picture, then taping up the back, which nobody sees. Custom mats are widely available on Etsy for a nice polished look, too. I have all the pieces at hand—I just need to do it. And this year I will. What else are long January weekends for?

The Art World Is All Wrapped Up in Textiles Right Now

These Are the Home Design Trends That Will Rule 2026

Experts we talked to said they were done with white minimalism, and looking forward to ornamentation, tactility, and even a connection with the cosmic.

A private residence in Brooklyn, NY, by Hans Lorei that embraces a moody palette.

In 2026, one big looming question within design—and well outside of it—is how artificial intelligence will shape the future. But designers and other industry experts we spoke with seem certain that even as the powerful but still-unruly tech plays a yet larger role in our lives, homes will go in the opposite direction, becoming refuges that support connection not with screens or computer-generated thought, but with one another.

Some say that sentiment will be supported by a movement away from anything white, including Pantone’s 2026 color of the year, as well as sterile minimalism. In its place will come interiors that feel warmer, darker, and more expressive, ones that favor moody atmosphere over brightness and tactility over seamless finishes. Midcentury aesthetics might prevail, but not in the bleached Scandinavian or American style that has dominated in the past.

This emphasis on something warmer and more human-centered is matched by a broader rethinking of values, too: What is lost when technology is relied on too heavily? some are asking; sustainability is still a refrain, but now with a deeper consideration for the circularity of materials and the possibilities of re-use; others are questioning what inclusivity should mean going forward, casting a critical eye on tokenism and calling for more intention and accountability when elevating unheard voices in the design world.

Here’s what five design experts loved about 2025, what they’re definitely ready to let go of, and the trends they think will define 2026.

Mike McMahon—Mike McMahon Studio

Loved It: Ornamentation

After years of restraint, ornamentation is making its way back into architecture, says London architect Mike McMahon. This renewed interest reflects a desire for buildings that engage the senses. "Ornamentation is making a comeback, with designers turning to sculpted brickwork and patterned facades to bring buildings to life," he says. "Our [installation] at the Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival and the fluted brick facade at Royalty Studios in Notting Hill both explore this renewed appetite for tactile, expressive surfaces."

A rendering of Royalty Studios in Notting Hill by Mike McMahon Studios, which is a refurbishment and renovation of a 1980s office building. The architects have added a "contemporary crown — A proposed renovation of Royalty Studios in Notting Hill by Mike McMahon Studios features a "contemporary crown" with a fluted, tactile wall.

Mike McMahon Studio

McMahon also sees a shift toward more low-impact, sustainable innovation among manufacturers and material suppliers. For his installation at U.K.’s Hampton Court, for example, the studio used Kenoteq’s K-Briq, a masonry unit made from more than 95 percent recycled construction waste.

McMahon says the K-Briq masonry units show "how circular materials can slot seamlessly into contemporary design."

photo by Gary Morrisroe

Hated It: AI Shortcuts

While AI is becoming increasingly visible across the design world, McMahon is wary of how quickly it’s being used as a substitute for architectural thinking. "Social media is flooded with AI-generated designs, and while the technology clearly has its place, its influence on architecture is more complicated," he says. "When it’s used as a shortcut to ‘design’ buildings, the results tend to feel flat and soulless, missing the nuance, intuition, and humanity that real spaces need."

My son as a Sim, with another house too close to mine. — In a story for Dwell, writer Leslie Horn Peterson used YardAI by Yardzen—an AI-powered landscape-design tool—to reimagine her own yard, with mixed results.

Photo:

See the full story on Dwell.com: These Are the Home Design Trends That Will Rule 2026

These Are Dwell’s Most Popular Real Estate Stories of 2025

The year’s top listings include a Frank Lloyd Wright gem, Bob Dylan’s Harlem residence, and Burt Reynolds’s mountain cabin.

Frank Lloyd Wright protégé Jim Fox used wood, glass and stone to build the monumental residence in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

From a Taos Earthship to a sky-blue Bay Area Eichler and a 19th-century Ontario mill (complete with waterfall), 2025’s most popular real estate articles spanned a wide range of styles, locations, and price points. What connected them, however, was a good story: Almost all the homes have a history that’s out of the ordinary.

Some were designed by iconic architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Rudolph Schindler. Others had a star turn—like the apartment Bob Dylan lived in while recording his World Gone Wrong album or a home featured in the Netflix series Nobody Wants This. And some were deeply personal projects, like a New York farmhouse renovated by a mother-son duo or a decades-old family home in the Pacific Northwest that hit the market for the first time.

In 2025 we also launched Ask a Realtor, an advice column about the ins and outs of home finding, renting, buying, and selling from expert Douglas Elliman real estate agent Nicole Reber. (Have a question? Submit it here.)

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Weisblat House Hit the Market for $2.2M

The house is made of concrete and mahogany, two materials Wright relied on across his work. — Like many of Wright’s homes, the Weisblat House is appointed with custom-built furniture, shelving, and cabinetry.

Photo by Andy Schwartz

Listed for the second time ever, the Weisblat House is set in the Acres, a landmark Michigan community designed by the famed architect.

Photo by Andy Schwartz

In North Carolina, Burt Reynolds’s Favorite Home Listed for $3.7M

See the full story on Dwell.com: These Are Dwell’s Most Popular Real Estate Stories of 2025

The Year L.A. Burned

2025 was quickly marked by a climate-fueled disaster that ravaged much of my community in Altadena. The path forward has connected us far outside of the devastated zones.

It was incredibly windy in Altadena, California, on January 7. We’d known the Santa Anas were coming—the news and neighbors had been touting it for days—but the 60- to 80 mile-per-hour gusts still felt jarring. Trees, branches, and power lines were down all over the neighborhood and I spent the day worrying that one could come crashing through the roof of my home office at any minute. When the Palisades Fire kicked off on L.A.’s west side, I turned on the news in the background while I wrote, watching as Steve Guttenberg evacuated his neighbors and the LAFD tried to battle the quickly moving blaze.

Around 4 p.m., the afterschool program at my kids’ school sent a message: Things were getting too hairy on campus and they suggested parents come snag their kids if possible. I laughed—the winds were scary, but Californians also tend to make a big deal out of even the most minor weather change, from a slight drizzle to chill in the air. The fire was in the Palisades, I thought, and the kids would be fine. They’d stay inside, do homework, and they’d have a story to tell later.

I finally grabbed my kids around 5:30 p.m.—30 minutes earlier than I typically broke them out of afterschool, because I’m not a total monster—and made the quick trip home. Twenty or so minutes later, our house and street plunged into darkness. The power had gone out. A quick trip to the neighborhood WhatsApp revealed that the blackout was for good reason: A fire had broken out in nearby Eaton Canyon, and Altadena residents east of me were quickly being asked to evacuate.

Naively thinking the fire would go over the mountain rather than come down into our town, we begrudgingly packed up. My husband and I use CPAP machines at night, so sleeping is near impossible without power. And if I was worried about trees falling during the day, I knew my anxiety would be at an all-time high all night given the trees proximity to my kids’ room. As we drove out of Altadena, we stopped near the center of town at a light. That’s when we first saw the fire, which was by then already burning a vertical swath across the front of the town’s entire mountain backdrop. The flames were breathtaking in their enormity and intensity, and while we had to hope for the best, we also feared the worst.

I barely slept that night, and not just because I was sharing an air mattress with my very wiggly son. Waking up at 3:30 a.m., I grabbed my phone and saw a cavalcade of texts and posts. Whole neighborhoods and streets were burning, and no one knew whether their house was safe. Some neighbors had stayed—one of ours camped out on his roof the entire fire, watering spot blazes and posting almost hourly videos of what he could see from his perch in an attempt to calm panicked evacuees—but those who had left in the night painted a bleak picture. The town was burning, they said, and it seemed there was very little that could be done.

And the town did burn, not just on the night of January 7 but also for much of January 8. Friends and neighbors told me that they heard their house was absolutely fine at 6 a.m. but reduced to a pile of ash by 7:30, and slowly, slowly, over the course of the day, a picture started to emerge of what had happened.

More than 9,000 houses and buildings burned in Altadena that day. We’d eventually learn that at least 19 people died. In the Palisades, 12 people died and 6,800 structures burned. Generations of work and love and financial stability were swept away in a flow of fire, and while some of us were fortunate enough to not lose our homes and livelihoods, many, many residents and business owners in our beloved mountain hamlet did.

It wasn’t just structures that were lost—it was memories, baby blankets and Christmas decorations, height charts carved into walls and homes that were passed down through generations. Things could be replaced, but history had been lost forever, or at least dramatically rewritten. As former Dwell contributing editor Alana Hope Levinson noted in the wake of the fires, a lot of architectural history was destroyed as well, structures that could never be rebuilt or recreated in any sort of authentic way.

In the weeks that followed the fires, the stresses and sadness were only magnified. Suddenly, L.A.’s rental market was absolutely deluged—both for long-term and short-term rentals—with prices skyrocketing and availability plummeting. A friend who’d lost his house told me that he went to an open house for a rental and was told that 100 other Altadena families had come through that day, all with a version of the same awful story about loss and insecurity. (And, it’s worth noting, it’s not a problem that’s gone away. Almost a year later, a not-insignificant portion of fire-affected residents are still without long-term housing, often because of financial difficulties, struggles to find rentals that will take their pets, or lack of disability-friendly rentals on the market.)

Then, there were the struggles with insurance. Thousands upon thousands of fire victims in Altadena, the Palisades, and Malibu had taken to GoFundMe to launch crowdfunding campaigns in the wake of their total losses. More followed as it became clear that even those with houses to go back to would face a long path toward ash, smoke, and lead remediation. Some of those GoFundMes met their ask almost immediately, while others struggled to draw even a few thousand dollars. The marketplace was overwhelmed with those in need, and with insurance money slow to come—or, in the case of so many who were under- or noninsured, not coming at all—people needed money. There were meals and clothes and combs and shoes aplenty flying around at charitable pop-ups, but it’s hard to accumulate too much stuff when you don’t know where you’ll be able to store it that night or even that year.

Those small acts of kindness provided relief from the community’s growing frustrations, whether with the insurance companies, with SoCal Edison whose equipment likely caused the fire, or with L.A. County, who it seems were negligent in evacuating residents on Altadena’s west side, even as the fire bore down on them. Online, many Angelenos used their potential platforms to encourage donations and share recovery resources, circulating spreadsheets outlining everything from available rentals to furniture-building manpower or a nice hot lasagna dinner. Some watchdogs called out landlords who were price gouging, hoping to shine a bright enough light that an owner would either change course or get in trouble with the county. Local realtors with large online followings—this being L.A., at the center of the influencer industry and a hotbed for real estate reality TV series—temporarily pivoted their social media presences to share their knowledge and information (and promote their messages and opinions on how the city can and should rebuild). Meanwhile, artists took tintype photos of residents among their burnt out lots and drew line portraits of the homes people had lost, and community members set up plant stands so those who were displaced could snag a new succulent to brighten up wherever they’d crash landed.

Design professionals and tradespeople gave what they could, too. Some Altadenans realized that thousands of Batchelder tiles were sitting on the facades of the now-exposed chimneys that dotted their neighborhoods like lighthouses. They called architecturally, historically, and preservation-minded friends to produce a de facto architectural survey of what was left in town and enlisted vintage tile experts to pull down all the tiles they could, in an effort to preserve them not just for posterity but for the homeowners who’d already lost so much. Upon hearing tales of woe from flummoxed homeowners confused by the rebuilding process and cost, local architects, builders, and project managers came together to help streamline the process. They created services like the Foothill Catalog, which offers preapproved plans for a range of houses inspired by what was already in Altadena, and the Altadena Collective, which both helps buyers find good builders and contractors to work with and aims to drive hard and soft building costs down through the power of group negotiation.

Others offered more niche expertise. Angel City Lumber, for instance, has been cutting down and storing damaged trees from across Altadena’s burn zone, hoping to give residents access to the wood that had been on their land. Local adaptive reuse architecture firm Omgivning’s Morgan Sykes Jaybush enlisted the help of a friend, Brad Chambers, to begin helping Altadena residents find and move historic, well-built homes from across L.A. that had been deemed teardowns by developers looking to build something bigger or more modern. And midcentury preservationists and architects started to step up with thoughts and theories about how they thought the historic homes they loved could be saved—if not from the Eaton and Palisades Fires, then from the ravages of future environmental catastrophes.

But even with all the moral support, media attention, and helping hands, what’s become increasingly clear is that, even though the first Altadena resident reportedly just moved back into his newly rebuilt home, there’s still a long, incredibly difficult route to recovery ahead. (At least one new home has popped up in the Palisades, as well.) In Altadena, developers and Powerball winners have been buying burnt out lots in order to build new homes that will reshape the community’s architectural character, and likely its population also. At the time of writing, the first page of Altadena listings on Zillow includes at least two renderings of modern farmhouse-style houses on sale for upward of $1.8 million alongside listings with photos of burnt out lots of varying sizes and prices. In November, Disney announced it was directing $5 million toward the rebuild of a local park that was destroyed in the Eaton Fire, prompting at least one Mouse-crazed blog to dub Altadena "a new Disney destination."

It’s been a long, mostly soul-crushing road, and despite news reports about permits getting issued and the relighting of Altadena’s historic Christmas Tree Lane or local restaurants like Betsy getting national acclaim and attention, when you drive around much of Altadena, it’s still a ghost town—and one with quite a sad story to tell. And across town, it seems no different.

When I run into old neighbors at hardware stores or sit down with parents from my kids’ school, inevitably the conversation will circle back to where we were on January 7, or what’s going on in all of our latest battles, whether with contractors, insurance companies, or (at least in Altadena’s case) SoCal Edison. We’ve become begrudgingly trauma bonded, learning lessons together out of necessity that appeared incredibly suddenly. And while we know that our town is ensured a new beginning, we also now know something else: that one day—with global climate changes and devastating weather disasters only continuing to rise—we’ll be called on to share what we’ve learned. We’ll be there, with spreadsheets, neighborhood organization guidelines, and coping techniques, but we’ll always wish we didn’t have to be.

Top photos by (clockwise from left): Jason LeCras, Meg Pinsonneault, courtesy Altadena Collective

Deciding to Rebuild After a Fire Is Just the First Step