FORT MYERS, Fla. \u2014 A Fort Myers woman, who had been living in her Hurricane Milton damaged home for more than year, got an incredible surprise from her community on Friday.<\/p>\n
Watch Fort Myers Community Correspondent Miyoshi Price’s report:<\/p>\n
Fort Myers woman gets surprise home makeover after Hurricane Milton<\/p>\n
I was with 77-year-old Valentina Pereira when Lennar Homes and Lee Builders Care revealed her completely renovated home.<\/p>\n
Pereira was emotional when the big reveal happened. Her neighbors, friends and family stood in the street and welcomed her back to a home she thought would never be fixed.<\/p>\n
“Oh my gosh this is beautiful. It’s perfect,” Pereira said.<\/p>\n
A tornado that spun off from Hurricane Milton severely damaged her home, and she couldn’t afford to fix the damage, so she lived with it for more than a year.<\/p>\n
Lee Builders Care agreed to help her out, and she thought they were just going to fix her roof and garage door.<\/p>\n
“These individuals that got together, that put everything together, I couldn’t ask for any better,” Pereira said.<\/p>\n
Ray Kershaw from Lennar Homes says it took a village. Several companies helped to renovate Pereira’s entire home within three weeks through the Holiday Homes program, a partnership between Lennar Homes and Lee Builders Care.<\/p>\n
Both Kershaw and the Lee Builders Care executive director say Pereira had tarps still on the roof a year after Milton and her hot water heater didn’t work.<\/p>\n
“So she was taking cold showers,” the executive director said.<\/p>\n
Not anymore. Pereira walked through her home and found all remodeled bathrooms, a guest room for her grandchildren, a sewing room and even a cat house called Casa de Gatos.<\/p>\n
There were a lot of tears, not only because of her new house but because her granddaughter from her late son was there to surprise her on her big day.<\/p>\n
“I was like I tried to call her at first this morning and then I said to myself she’s busy,” the granddaughter said.<\/p>\n
They were busy hanging at grandma’s new house.<\/p>\n
“I went to bed last night thinking how am I going to come up with this, fix all this, but God knows it’s all done thanks to you,” Pereira said.<\/p>\n
Lee Builders Care relies on partnerships with local contractors to make these life-changing renovations possible at no cost to homeowners.<\/p>\n
“This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FORT MYERS, Fla. \u2014 A Fort Myers woman, who had been living in her Hurricane Milton damaged home…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210,4277,4489,897,49164,49166,1802,42016,356,49165,1521],"class_list":["post-91376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news","tag-community-support","tag-downtown-fort-myers-florida","tag-fort-myers","tag-holiday-homes","tag-home-renovation","tag-hurricane-milton","tag-lee-builders-care","tag-lee-county","tag-lennar-homes","tag-southwest-florida"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}