EL MONTE, Calif. — “There are people who like to help and people who like to receive help, and we like to help and not receive help," Steven Seagle said as he sat on his new sofa in an El Monte warehouse. "So it’s been very difficult.”
He’s referring specifically to accepting the outpouring of assistance that he and Liesel Reinhart have received since the Eaton Fire destroyed their home of 20 years. Since then, the couple said, they’ve just been in survival mode. It’s exhausting.
“It is a full-time job to have your house burned down,” Seagle said. “Your whole life turns into lists and paperwork.”
“Decision fatigue is 100% hitting us,” Reinhart added. “I always tell people that you have no idea how many decisions I make every day and some of them are massive.”
But accepting help from Homebank LA — an offshoot of A Sense of Home — was an easy choice and one that Reinhart is relieved came with no decision fatigue whatsoever.
Georgie Smith founded A Sense of Home a decade ago, a nonprofit dedicated to furnishing homes for former foster youth as they age out of the system. When the fires hit, she realized they already had a system in place to help meet a giant need.
“We knew that people were moving into empty rentals, having fled the fires, and they had absolutely nothing,” she explained. “And we are now utilizing our amazing systems to get those families that have lost everything in the fires, everything that they need to create a whole new home in the new empty spaces that they've moved into.”
Each family receives a customized home kit that contains more than 330 essential items needed to furnish an empty space and make it functional — everything from that new sofa to a bar of soap. Brand partners like Living Spaces donated larger pieces and Rexford Industrial donated the warehouse space to hold everything, but with more than 400 applications and counting, Smith says the need for the smaller everyday items is huge.
“We desperately need all of these items for cooking,” she said, pointing to a list that hung over some empty shelves. “So everything that it takes, tongs and all the utensils and the pots and the pans.”
Among those helping the effort is Drew Scott, who introduced himself as the “better looking Property Brother.” Scott serves on the board of a Sense of Home and now Homebank LA. He helped stage the model rooms to show Seagle and Reinhart what they are receiving, carefully choosing accent pillows and lamps and hanging artwork above the sofa. All of it will be loaded straight onto a U-haul but he knows what they really get goes far beyond furniture.
“You're creating that sense of safety and security of home again for families who have lost everything,” Scott said. “When you don't have that foundation, when you don't have that sense of home, it affects every aspect of your life. And especially with children as well.”
Seagle and Reinhart understand this. The couple began fostering teen siblings Johnny and Madison at the start of the pandemic and have since adopted them. Their older brother Guillermo, whose place in Altadena also burned down, will now be living with them as well. While they’ve been grateful for all kinds of donations that have come in since the fire, there are some they avoided.
“It's been hard to present our kids with anything that comes in a garbage bag or something could be retraumatizing for them,” Reinhart explained, “because they've been through experiences before where they left in the middle of the night with nothing but their clothes in a garbage bag.”
Now with a truck filled with couches and cookware, kindness and comfort, the five of them will now move to a place in Arcadia. It’s a temporary address for this forever family, but one that will now feel a lot more like home.
