Joe Brown remembers when the street in front of his house was a real dirt road, watching as a boy while his dad made it through the mud with a stomp on the gas pedal and a quick prayer.
Growing up at the top of a hill in Loudon, where he spent his childhood and most of his life, Brown always dreamed of growing old there. Retirement from the U.S. Army meant coming home to his 200-year-old farmhouse on Currier Road, tinkering in his woodshop and growing raspberries on a rolling meadow where, on a clear day, he can see both Mount Monadnock and the White Mountains.
He never imagined a fire would rip through his father’s house, reducing it to rubble and leaving him to rebuild both his home and his life at age 80.
“I grew up here, and it’s hard to leave,” Brown said. “I inherited this place, and I said, ‘Geez, I don’t want to throw it away.'”
Last May, a fire caught in Brown’s woodshed and spread to the rest of his house. Low water supply caused firefighters to spend hours extinguishing the flames, but not before the home was reduced to a total loss. Brown made it out uninjured with nothing but his phone, wallet, keys and the clothes on his back.
What incinerated in the span of a few hours, however, has taken more than a year to rebuild. In the immediate aftermath, Brown leaned on his neighbors. Some housed him when he had no place to go; another lent him an apartment for a longer stay. Others gave him boxes of clothes.
“When you’re growing up in a rural area, you have to be good neighbors,” he said. “You can’t do without your neighbors.”
Brown spends his days sifting through mountains of insurance paperwork, tax filings and construction plans that are scattered all over the trailer he’s living in while he oversees the building of his new home.
He’s learned more than he ever wanted to know about insurance claims and construction blueprints, he said, as he leafed through a gigantic booklet of house plans that spanned the entirety of his couch. They denote the most minuscule details of his future home, down to the grip size of the handrails on the stairs.
Before he could even start to rebuild, it cost $60,000 just to clear the rubble of his former home. Thankfully, Brown said, he lives just up the hill from the Loudon-based construction company Benevento, which came to extract some of the larger, remaining foundation pieces for free.
Brown garnered some advice over the past year that he hopes people heed: It’s important to know what’s in your insurance policy, he said, and how the process works. For example, he hired someone to help guide him through the process and had to wait for insurance investigators to assess the damage before he could clean up the property.
He also learned that not everything is included in the insurance policy, including some of his childhood items, and urged people to take photos of their homes so they have records of what they’ve lost in the event of a fire.
“You can put it down on a piece of paper,” he said, but “then they’re going to haggle with you.”
After months of work, the walls are up around his new home, woodshop, garage and guest house. He’s taking the opportunity to tailor the new house to his own liking, with bigger closets and an in-law apartment that he may use for a home healthcare worker someday.
Brown hopes to get the certificate of occupancy soon so he can live there while the rest is completed. Insurance stops covering the cost of his trailer at the end of May.
The expenses are beginning to pile up. Brown anticipates the insurance payouts will come up several hundred thousand dollars short of what it took to rebuild, not to mention the contents of his house.
As he builds back up, Brown mourns the items that can’t be replaced.
Besides the expensive things — several of Brown’s cars burned, along with his woodshop equipment — he misses the one-of-a-kind antiques and hard-to-replace oddities. Among them were 4-foot scales he picked up during his travels in Europe, which were used to weigh ship cargo, a Jacobean-era dining set and a century-old baby grand player piano that his father got in New York City.
“It’s a disaster,” he said. “I’d give anything to get my old house back and all its furnishings and stuff.”
Closest to his heart, however, were the hundreds of Disney and Looney Tunes comic books he learned to read as a boy.
“I miss them dearly, even though I haven’t looked at them for years,” Brown said. “I knew they were there.”
