“We just pulled off one hell of a coup,” said Lawrence Fiano of the project.

	More than 1,500 volunteer hours were put in by employees of Lawrence F. Fiano Builders and Developers and Northeast Foundation Coating LLC to create an accessible home for injured Iraqi war veteran, Marine Sgt. Jared Luce.

	Jared and Melanie Luce

Sharon and Peter Robbins, owners of Northeast Foundation Coating, first read of Sgt. Luce’s injuries in a local paper. As it turned out, Luce was the son of a friend of Peter’s, so the husband-and-wife team volunteered their firm’s waterproofing services to Homes for Our Troops, which was coordinating the construction of the Luce home.

Homes for Our Troops is a non-profit organization founded in 2004 to help build homes for severely injured servicemen.

When the Robbins first volunteered to help out the Luce family, they discovered that there was no builder to supervise the project and contacted Fiano, who agreed to help.

“Being a Marine himself, Peter approached me to see if I would build the house for the wounded Marine,” Fiano recalled. “I agreed to do this project right away.”

The project, both the Robbins and Fiano agreed, had some challenges ― starting with the lot itself which sloped heavily toward the street and was difficult to build on.

Luce, however, owned the lot, and even though a local builder agreed to swap it for one that could be built on more easily, Luce did not want to swap it.

So the volunteer team worked with the lot, created an 8-foot by 8-foot retaining wall and added more than 1,000 yards of fill to make the lot buildable.

The foundation was no picnic, either. “It wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill, easy box foundation,” said Robbins.

Hundreds of people helped build the home, Sharon Robbins said. She estimated that the volunteers, many of them from the Home Builders Association of Hartford County, put in about 1,000 hours on the project, while Fiano and the two employees he donated contributed another 300 hours.

“We were encouraged right from the beginning. I knew I could count on my fellow builders, but the response was unbelievable,” said Fiano. “Everything was a challenge, but we overcame it all.”

Luce was overwhelmed when the home was finished. “He had tears in his eyes when he accepted the key,” said Fiano. “He’s rather quiet, a very decent individual with three little boys and a wife. But he never complained once about the fact that he had one good arm and one good eye.”

The Robbins have continued their efforts for injured veterans, completing one house a week before Christmas for a 26-year-old wounded soldier “who had only the shirt on his back” when they met him, said Sharon Robbins, who added that the HBA is creating a non-profit organization to help veterans.

“It really doesn’t matter very much what your politics are,” she said. “These are people coming home with injuries, and we need to help them.”

As part of its award, Lawrence F. Fiano Builders and Developers received a $1,000 donation from the endowment, which it gave to the endowment of the Bolton Scholarship Fund.

Seven other builders were honored with 2007 Builder Achievement Awards for Outstanding Community Service during the presentation at the Builders' Show.

The awards were established through a grant to the endowment by Isaac Heimbinder, chairman of Rockville, Md.-based BuildTopia, a provider of Web-based construction management software for home builders, and his wife, Sheila.

For more information about the awards, e-mail Gwyn Donohue at NAHB, or call her at 800-368-5242 x8447. [ return to top ]