SALISBURY — Amanda Brown’s family has endured more in the past two years than any family should.
From their home nearly collapsing, to Brown’s personal medical emergency, the family has been hanging on by a thread. After all this time, Brown was hopeful that come Christmas, they would be in a new home, until a last-minute financial hurdle reared its head. Now, Brown is asking the community for help to give her four children the Christmas they deserve.
A doomed addition
The house where Brown and her family had been living was more than just four walls. It was home with a personal touch.
“My parents bought this house like 10 years ago,” Brown said. Since then they had made several improvements themselves, leaving their mark on the building.
“Everything in this house, my dad and I built,” Brown said.
Her parents refinanced the home in order to pay for an addition to make it more liveable.
“Two years ago, we hired a licensed contractor to build an addition onto my parents’ existing home,” Brown said. “(It was) space we desperately needed after choosing to live with my aging parents so we could support each other.”
Shortly after, disaster struck when the foundation began failing.
“Granite stone fell from the walls,” Brown said. “Load-bearing supports separated. The entire structure began collapsing.”
According to Brown, the contractor responsible had taken $85,000 but did nothing once the damage by the collapse was incurred. Brown said they tried to get their money back but the contractor filed for bankruptcy.
“They didn’t just leave us with a construction nightmare,” Brown said. “They left us in danger.”
The catastrophe caused by the collapse forced Brown’s family into tight quarters. Her four children were sharing a single room inside the home, their twin beds nearly touching, sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder. Brown was sleeping on a 30-inch foam mattress between the stairs and the attic eave.
“We’ve been living like this trying to survive a situation no family should ever endure,” Brown said.
Her own health catastrophe
Leading up to that time, Brown was working an engineering job in High Point that she had held for several years. The job required long hours, a long commute and was taking away time she could have been sharing with her family.
“I don’t think I worked less than 60 hours a week in two years,” Brown said. “The company was good to me. I felt valued. I felt appreciated but I hit a point where my children did not know what family time meant.”
She did not realize it, but it was not just costing her the precious commodity of time. It was also pushing her dangerously close to her own health catastrophe.
In June, Brown suffered a stroke. She was running on fumes and barely any sleep when she began to feel off at work. She requested to go home and began experiencing the symptoms associated with a stroke, like face numbness and droopiness.
Her parents took her to the emergency room, and she ultimately spent a week in the hospital. While there she made a pivotal decision.
“This cannot be how things are,” she said. “I cannot orphan my children over not having a boundary between work and my personal life.”
So Brown drafted a letter and sent it to her company informing them she could not continue. While it presented a bit of uncertainty for Brown, she was optimistic that with her work background she would still be able to support her family through self-employment.
Brown was not the only member of her family determined to help out their financial situation. Her son Nixon started a lawncare service, putting up fliers himself and knocking on doors to solicit work.
“My 9-year-old daughter Lincoln brought me her savings, and wrote a letter to the bank because she saw me breaking and wanted to help,” Brown said. “My son Carter set up a garage sale and tried to sell his Pokémon cards.”
She said she was so proud of her children, who even at a young age, exhibited resilience by wanting to help.
By October, Brown had registered her own company, working as an independent fire protection consultant. While that solved one problem, it armed a landmine that would later erupt.
Hope then hazard
Having been packed into uncomfortable quarters for too long, Brown decided she had to give her family a better home. She cashed out her 401(k), contacted a real estate agent and found the perfect place, a new home, that she could afford that offered buyer incentives from the developer, too.
“My plan was to wrap the front door in Christmas paper and bring my kids there on Christmas morning,” Brown said. “After everything we’ve survived, that was going to be our moment.”
Then, Brown got the news that because she was self-employed and without a W2, financing the home was going to cost more than they had. It left them $9,000 short of costs to close so that they could move into their dream home.
“The amount needed is now more than I can cover alone,” Brown said. “Our Dec. 17 closing is slipping away.”
Asking for help
Brown started a GoFundMe, asking for help with the final financial hurdle — the amount they are short to close on the house with the builder, who is offering the financial incentives to close by the end of the year.
According to her GoFundMe, Brown is officially short $8,293.00 to secure the loan. Her $9,000 goal is to cover GoFundMe’s platform and transaction fees.
“Every single dollar will go directly toward closing costs so we can finally move out of the single room we’ve lived in for two years,” Brown said. “I’m not asking for pity. I’m asking for a chance to give my children safety, space and stability.”
Brown described the weight of her family’s situation these past two years as a crushing boulder weighing down on her chest at all.
“This wasn’t just a bad construction job or a poor choice of contractors. It was trauma. It was betrayal. It was the unraveling of a future I had already promised my children,” she said. “We were supposed to move into the addition last Christmas. Instead, we’ve been surviving in a single room, squeezed together inside the shell of what used to be our dream.
“I cried, not out of weakness, but because after years of holding everything together, something inside me finally let go. I didn’t rebuild the same dream. I built a new path, one I carved when I had every reason to give up. I bought a house. A clean, solid, beautiful house. And on Christmas morning, when I walk my children up to that gift-wrapped front door with the bow… the healing will begin.”
To contribute to that healing, visit the online version of this article for a link to Brown’s GoFundMe.
