My name is Gina Centauro, and I run a charity called Rescuing Families with my husband, Vinny and my brother, Michael.

We rebuild homes for families in need to make them safe and handicapped accessible.

- VINNY: Our charity helps underprivileged families get back in their homes and live like normal human beings again.

That's the main goal of our charity.

- MICHAEL: Because everybody deserves to live in a home thats safe, comfortable and functional for their needs.

- We don't want these people to feel forgotten.

We want them to know that there are people that want to help them have a better life.

- That's how it's done, folks.

- This particular project that we're on now is extremely personal to us, because when we started this process, we sought out to help so many families like ours.

Our families, personally, have been through similar situations that the families that were working with have been through.

For us to come full circle, it's time for us to come back home to help my sister, Dina It's time now to give, not only this house a new lease on life, but my sister and our family.

There's been so many things that have gone on.

- All right.

- in the past few years that have been holding her down holding us down and we have to be able to move past it at this point and give all of us a new life and better memories in this house.

- As a young child, she was just Dina.

She was just the older sister, you know, we were always playing together.

We never excluded anybody.

I didn't really see it as a challenge.

You know, that's who we grew up with.

But as we got older, you know, you can see, Gina's parents dealing with certain things that had to happen with Dina.

And it was hard.

It was hard on the family.

The home definitely needed to be renovated.

It need work.

It needed work.

It was, a bit depressing, to be honest.

- They definitely faced a lot of challenges with Dina, but the family was was always great.

Anything they needed to do for Dina, even though there was a lot of, a lot of roadblocks, a lot of trouble getting what they needed for her.

Gina's mother, Gina's father You know, they did everything they could.

And, you know, Gina and her siblings definitely was not pretty.

It was not conducive to living her best life.

You know, definitely needed more sunlight, easier access, and the bathroom, her room, It definitely needed to be renovated.

One of the biggest renovations here that were going to be doing on the exterior is the front steps.

As you can see, these front steps are really falling apart from our northeast winters.

The water and the freezing is just separating all the brick.

Obviously, we're going to be replacing all of the windows.

These windows are very old, drafty, not functional anymore.

The other exterior modification that we're going to be doing here is all new siding throughout this home.

We're going to be giving it a new roof as well.

This room is actually it's like a combination dining room, living room.

This room doesn't really require much other than- I always say it doesnt require much- - VINNY: It requires a lot.

I'm going to be feeling it for weeks.

All new sheetrock, obviously.

We got paneling from the 70s, so we're going to do a complete overhaul in here.

- New windows in here, two flooring- - New windows, new flooring.

Again, this is another very small space.

I think we're looking at a ten by ten kitchen here.

It's a lot of tile.

- It's a lot of tile.

So what does that mean?

That means were ripping the whole thing down again.

- This kitchen is going to be completely reconfigured.

It's not going to look like, - No it wont.

- anything like this As difficult as this is going to be for Dina, especially because she's now living in a house with a room that was once her dads which is- she can't go in, she can't find comfort in it, and, I think by finally going through my dad's stuff as a family, It will help her as well as me and Michael, - Some of the improvements that we're going to be making in this room We're going to be re-sheetrocking this room New insulation, new doors, and new lighting fixtures.

We're going to give this room a total makeover.

One of the biggest renovations that we're going to be doing on this house is a new roof.

and this house is from the 1930s.

So right now we have a ridge board here, which is only three quarter thickness by six inches, which we've seen a lot of structural cracks, throughout the length of the house, we're going to be putting an lvl beam in here.

It's going to be about 30ft long.

We're going to be replacing that beam.

What we're going to have to do to be able to do this safely, we're going to have to build two walls on the left and right of us, structural walls to hold up the rafters as we cut this one out and replace it, with the new lumber.

- This house is very drafty, and you can really see why now, once we uncovered everything, there's absolutely no insulation in here.

This goes right through the paneling on the inside.

That's one of many things that we're finding as we're removing the cedar shakes.

The front of the house is missing entire areas of the clapboard, water was definitely getting in We're going to see more when we get inside and start doing demo.

- Today, we're getting ready to install our ridge beam.

What we're replacing it with today is an lvl.

So this is a laminated veneer lumber.

We're going to use structural screws that are going to go into the lvl.

And also into the two by four, which is going to give this lvl tons of strength making it safe and secure again.

And having, never ever having this roof collapse.

Your plans of how we're getting this beam- - Thats it.

- Yep, into the house today Alright, you just- - You want me to tell the camera I'm not- he's going to film it, right?

- Hes gonna film it but- - Hes gonna just show it - You know, this is your idea.

- I would rather visually, I would visually display it as opposed to - Lou, lawyer up!

- But I can- - Lawyer up!

(laughs) - I can explain it if you want to.

- Take the fifth!

Dont do it!

- You want me to explain it?

- Explain the process of the truck and- - Absolutely, we're going to back this truck up so the rear of the truck will be right over here up against the front stoop.

I'm going to get on the roof of the truck.

Vinnys going to be on the roof of the house and Ted is going to be inside the attic.

We're going to start from the height of that truck.

We're going to start passing that beam over to Vinny Okay?

Vinnys going to keep moving it forward right through the window up in the attic to Ted.

Ted's going to keep pulling it - Right out the back window into the backyard.

(laughs) This wasn't a great addition.

It wasn't done properly.

The main house from the 30s was done okay.

But anything added on in the 70s, or maybe the porch was in the 60s possibly, wasn't great.

So you could really tell this is all the exterior of the house.

These- the clapboard here, that they built it out - GINA: They built it out with two by fours.

- VINNY: and they just built- they just- they did a lousy job here.

- GINA: This is insane.

- You want your wiring in the wall with your hanging pictures or anything.

You're going to be hitting your wiring.

So these are all things that we got to take care of.

I think we got to take this wall down put a two by four wall in here, so they can run their electric properly and do all that correctly.

How the hell are we getting this up, Ted?

- We're going to lift this up.

- Okay.

Okay.

I'm going to put it like this in here.

- Yep.

- Okay.

Teds going to come with the stand.

He's going to put the stand like about right here.

The reason here, Ted, is I got to get in behind that with this.

So we can nail it in.

- Yeah.

This is a adjustable stand.

So what Teds going to do is when we when we get the lvl up in here okay, he's going to raise this stand to get it underneath the lvl and hold it temporarily so that then we can put in the header which is this piece over here.

- Yep.

You want to turn it upright first?

- Yeah.

Thats fine.

Thats fine.

- Okay.

- Alright.

- Wait, wait, wait Okay.

Keep going.

- Alright, Ted.

- VINNY: Don't worry Ted, I'm okay down here.

I think we have pretty close to original We have shingles on top.

that we tore off, and then we have these two, two layers of tar paper.

One looks like a pitched tar paper.

And then we have cedar.

And then under that you can see that there's laff strips there.

And those strips hold the cedar down.

They get nailed to.

So what we're going to do is we're going to get down to those last strip, and we're going to put plywood on top of those last strip.

One of the couple things we don't want to do is drop the roof.

So if we take those last strip off and put plywood, then the fascia board here will be higher than the roof itself.

It's tough to make an old house be energy efficient and not create more of a problem, because we can create a condensation issue here that would create mold, that would push down into the living space.

And so it's very tricky in order to have a balanced attic.

So the air has to come on the inside and it has to balance itself out as it goes out the top of the roof.

And, we want to do that in combination with all these different materials.

And, and if you do it wrong, you can create a lot of problems within the house with mold, condensation and an excess loss and energy.

And so all this stuff, you got two by four rafters which are undersized and under code at these, these days.

Vinny added these knee walls to protect from that from these guys dropping down and having bows in them.

He's also got this lvl here that he added and then put these joist hangers here, and those joist hangers are going to hold everything from going this way so the house doesn't sag out.

You can see there's a little bit of a bow.

So this thing is solid.

We just have to do all the stuff.

The finishes, the roof has to vent right The attic has to be conditioned right.

In order for the livable space to work correctly for everybody.

- Doing roofs is probably one of the most dangerous jobs.

- It is.

- You got to hire professional crews to come in.

We've been doing contracting for so many years - Yeah.

- and we dont do roofing installs - No.

- You want to bring the proper crew to come in, because you want to make sure that this roof obviously never leaks.

- Yup.

- You want to make sure it's installed properly and you want to have guys up there that know what theyre doing Alright?

Its very very dangerous.

- Well, and they operate safely - Yeah.

- You know, safety is of the utmost importance on our job sites, and it should be on everyone's job site, truthfully.

- VINNY: It's amazing this this space is only nine by eight.

- I love the fact that we are opening up this entire wall.

We need - Visibility.

- Visibility.

Her safety is at risk in this house with the way it's situated now.

- So we are opening up this wall and we're gaining some space out there.

We are doing a small- a very small extension.

So we're going to be pushing out this wall, opening this up.

We have our foundation already.

- Yup.

The goal of the staff and us is to teach my sister independent living skills.

In this house, - It's impossible.

- It's impossible to do that with the way it's laid out right now.

So one of the things we want to do with the starters is just give it a little bit of a height, just, from the bottom of this drip cap here.

So we don't want the water to kind of sit in here.

We want the water to come in and then just kind of drip.

If we actually take this product and jam it down on the bottom, we're not going to allow any water to come out of here.

So we kind of want this to sit up a little bit, which is why you'll see this this starter strip elevated a little bit.

- VINNY: Alright Dom, So what do we got going on here today?

- So right now, we're trying to figure out you know, our layout on the, on this wall.

One of the easiest ways to do that is to build a story pole per, you know, the stone that shows up in the box.

I just laid some stone out here randomly.

You know, mixing- mixing and matching the, the different heights.

And basically what I'm doing is finding the breaks.

- Gotcha.

- And I'm just going to square these off, and then we're going to use this pole as reference of the stone on the wall to see where our breaks are going to be and determine if we need to make a rip cut at the top, or would it look better at the, you know, the window, or are we going to do it down at the flash?

- Okay.

So basically we don't want to see no, no small pieces along the bottom of the window.

basically?

- Exactly.

What we're trying to do is maximize our factory pieces.

- Okay.

- And minimize our cut.

- Gotcha.

- Or the difference is the existing rafters already have a bow in them this way over the weight of time, the dimension from one side of the structure to the other is going to be- is the new constant, which is like nine foot six and change.

It's actually nine foot, three and a half, is what we have.

So we need to split 50% of the way normally here for the rafters to mate up exactly in the right spot, which this would of worked out.

But it ends up being a little bit higher than the roof line, a little bit higher than the roof line.

Because this old roof has a bow.

So can I possibly push this up, or do I need to make an adjustment just by bringing this down and marrying it at the new ridge?

- GINA: We keep finding one issue after another, after another.

There was a box in the floor.

Right?

In the kitchen by the basement.

No cover on it, sparking everywhere.

God forbid there would have been a fire here.

- This was another hazard.

There's junction boxes in the ceiling that were never accessible, like you said, in the floor, not accessible - With no plates, no covers Just the wires exposed.

- Live wires!

It would look great as one big living room.

I've seen it.

This is hard, I think, because it's still- I always still look at it as this is where my dad, you know, that was my dad's room.

The change is good.

Whoops, whoops.

- Yeah.

Whoops.

It's like mixed emotions.

I'm happy that it's going to change and that we're in the process of making it so much better and so much safer.

But I'm also sad because it's really- this is like the end.

Dina couldn't leave the house, so we were kind of working around her.

She was very capable for a very long time.

I'd say the majority of my life with my sister was pretty challenging from like maybe nine years old on.

Her and I also didn't always get along, you know, take the disability away.

and we just sometimes were like oil and water.

You put two girls living in the same room.

So Dina is autistic.

She's deaf, profoundly deaf.

She has no hearing at all.

And she is developmentally disabled.

She is a 54 year old woman that is socially approximately about a nine year old.

With each trauma that she sustained, it traumatized our family.

It kind of disrupted the entire family structure, because then I had to become more of a protector of my mom and dad and less of a sister to her.

This bathroom, as you can see, is really tiny.

I can't even completely spread my arms out in this bathroom.

This is going to be my favorite project because I'm very excited to get rid of this old horrible looking thing and give her something totally different and larger.

That's the key here with this.

Being able to widen the doorway, which we weren't going to be able to do, being able to make this bathroom a little bit bigger is very exciting.

- When you have a family member that is disabled that needs this bathroom right away, sometimes you have to use a totally different product line to get that accessible bathroom to your family member within days.

Very time sensitive, We've been into this bathroom almost three days so far, so we're showing you how to do a an accessible bathroom in a matter of seven days.

- LOU: We're doing a dry run.

We put the shower pan in place, and what we're doing now is trying to level it because the floor is uneven.

And to get an idea, we'll mark the studs when we get it level, and it'll give us an idea of where this is going to sit after we put the mud down.

And we also got it in, we had to outline the drain hole here, so that when we take it out, we can cut the drain hole to line up with the, plumbing in the basement.

- VINNY: It's still a lot of waterproofing.

You got to do the waterproofing no matter what.

- Well, you don't, you might waterproof the shower, I agree.

- You can put the panels on either way, waterproofed.

- But this seems pretty relatively easy for for a homeowner to do.

- Yes, it is.

- This isnt So, if you'd want to do your bathroom over quickly.

- Well, listen, if someone gets disabled from injury or become incapacitated and they need to do their bathroom quickly, - This is probably the best way, you drop in the tray and you- and you do this.

- So basically shower tray in in one day, the walls are all on.

In one day, they can actually shower tomorrow If they wanted to, 24 hours later.

- Thats great.

- Lets get this right.

Yep, we can do that.

- Alright.

GINA: Let me go get it with the rag.

so we can bang in the bottom a little bit.

(Dina cheers excitedly) Oh!

- Oh!

- Yeah, we're going to go to the party now.

Look at the pictures (Dina hums) - Who's that?

Yes, the bathroom!

Right.

(Dina cheers excitedly) The shower, yes, yay!

But come, come, come.

See the new sink?

Look at the pictures.

Dogs, dogs!

Wait, wait, wait.

You have to look, wait.

What is that?

Whos that- thats the dog Right?

Beautiful.

Your bed You can sleep here.

Tonight!

Your clothes look nice.

- VINNY: And she her gifts.

She loves her gifts.

You got to wait, it's not your birthday.

- Look, isn't that beautiful?

And look, look, look, come.

You have new plates.

You wake up, you eat, you shower So, you can wash your clothes here No more downstairs.

Dina's clothes are going to be here You can help wash.

This kitchen was only about ten by eight.

We added an extra 60 squared feet to this kitchen.

If you look over here, you'll see all the cabinets have combination locks on them.

Part of Dina's disability is she likes to hoard things.

So normally she would take everything out of cabinets, put it in her bags and hold on to them and not give it back.

Before, in this house, there was really no room to really gather and sit down and and have a meal together.

There just wasn't enough room.

So we're able to do in here, Once we knocked down the wall here, we opened up this kitchen.

Some of the other improvements that you'll see in here, Dina is not great on her feet.

In the future, if she needs a wheelchair.

we made an open floor plan.

That was the goal here.

Now, as we walk into the bathroom here, in this case, we didn't have to do a zero clearance shower like we normally do for people in wheelchairs.

So you'll see here this has about a four inch curb here, Dina will just be able to step over.

So we did a number of handrails here for safety.

So what we tried to really do in here was really brighten the room up feel at home for her.

That's the biggest thing, we wanted to do colors she loves She loves all the blues.

That's her favorite color.

We did add a closet.

Dina had never had a closet.

She really likes to be independent, so she likes to be able to pick out her clothes for each day.

So this room is very special to the family.

This is where her dad lived and cared for Dina.

So we wanted to make this room really a sitting area now.

A big part of this renovation is to keep Dina safe since she is deaf, an important, really important thing that that that really is a life saver here, to be honest with you, is the fire alarms.

It's a vital thing.

We have one in every room.

So if we do a little test here, we'll hold this down.

So, as you can see, not only will her staff member hear it, Dina will also visualize it and see the flashing lights and know something is wrong.

and to remove herself from the house.