On the evening of June 19, 2018 the unthinkable happened.

We lost our home and most of our belongings to a house fire. We were not insured. If you would like to donate a few bucks to help us rebuild or even just share it along, we have a GoFundMe set up here.

We were just finishing up dinner when we smelt a burning plastic smell. After quickly looking around the house for any signs of fire or burnt out electronics and finding nothing suspicious I decided to go outside and check our converted bus which was parked up close to the back wall.

As soon as I walked out the back door my stomach sunk as I saw orange flames flickering in the front window of the bus. I raced over, kicked opened the door and saw what I thought was probably something I could deal with (how wrong I was!). I raced back to the laundry, half filled a bucket of water and raced back to the bus and, well, lost all hope. In just a minute (at most) the fire had multiplied many times in size. I threw the water in, more in despair than in any hope it would help (which it didn’t), and ran back into the house to help save what we could, knowing that it was highly probable the house would soon catch alight as well.

In just a few more minutes the entire bus was completely ablaze, sending flames flickering high into the sky and radiating tremendous heat such that plastic and/or flammable items several metres away were melting and/or smouldering, some eventually bursting into flames.

Of course, as we’d dreaded, it wasn’t long before the house also caught alight. By the time help arrived the roof was on the ground and our home and most of our belongings gone. The complete and utter destruction was incredible.

Thankfully we all survived relatively unharmed as did all our animals except for my wife’s and daughter’s cats which were sleeping in the bus.

Believe me when I say: in a house fire, you have seconds, maybe minutes at best.