From Heartbreak To Hope

Graeme Opens Up About How The‘Give Back’ Home Changed His Life.

Imagine walking into your house and the roof had caved in and all your possessions were ash. Well Graeme, and his family, didn’t have to imagine.

After a call from the police on November 22 last year telling Graeme that his house was on fire, he raced back home only to find it burnt to the ground.

“Before I got to the house, I knew the severity because they had blocked off the street, so I had to get out the car and walk up the street to the house,” Graeme tells New Idea.

“When I saw the house, the roof was collapsed in and at the time I didn’t think how bad it was, I just thought, ‘I can recover from this’, until I got inside then I knew I was in trouble.”

As he walked through his burnt down house, every surface was dripping with water, light was coming in through the collapsed roof, there was nothing left but ash.

Graeme bought the house five years ago and renovated it to create a place that Mary, their two children, Cole and Jade, and his two daughters from his first marriage, Lily and Sky,e could call a home.