Love repairs a family home

When the women from First Tuesday’s Circle of Giving began planning this year’s charity project, it didn’t take long to find a worthy prospect.

How about seven former foster children, ages 12 to 23, crowded into a ramshackle house with the 71-year-old disabled woman who has been raising them all since infancy?

Start there, then imagine a cross between Extreme Makeover and Habitat for Humanity, and you get the gist of the “ Cinderella Makeover” unveiled in Lawndale on Sunday.

Two dozen members of First Tuesday, a professional networking group, spent weeks transforming the home of Wanda Burton, whose adopted brood of children includes three 16-year-olds, a 20-year-old daughter with lupus and a 12-year-old autistic son.

Burton “was just praying for a new couch,” said First Tuesday founder Marcy Cole, who was steered to the family by South Bay social workers.

Instead, she got a whole new home.

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The family’s disheveled rental home reflected the tight budget and the failing health of its matriarch, whose leg was amputated three years ago.

“We were doing all right until I lost my leg,” Burton told me. “Then I just had to let some things go.”

The First Tuesday women were shocked at their first walk-through: The carpet was moldy, there were holes in the wall, the kitchen counter had rotted through. The sink sometimes had to be scooped out with a pot. In the cramped bedrooms, children’s clothes were stored in piles against the walls.

“Cluttered,” one woman discreetly called it. “Stomach-turning,” whispered another.

The women themselves did much of the work — pulling up carpet, refinishing wood floors, repainting the walls, hauling mulch for a backyard vegetable garden. They lost count of how many trash bins they filled.

On Sunday, the house looked like a work of art, and it was hard to tell who was more excited — the Burton family or the First Tuesday members. There was new furniture in every room, the wood floors gleamed, the walls were spotless and painted in soothing earth-toned hues.

But what impressed me most was not the decorator touches — the gauzy curtains, matching linens and tasteful art — but the love that seemed to flow into, and through, the project.

Every room had a team and a budget. And every team’s members busted their butts, and their budgets. They hit up friends, scoured Craigslist, begged store owners for discounts. And everyone they asked seemed to answer from the heart.

There was the family in Manhattan Beach, about to move across the country, who donated a bedroom set that would have fetched hundreds of dollars. And the military vet who said she had grown up in foster care and donated furniture she had planned to sell. And the manager at Pottery Barn who slashed the price of a $200 rug because $99 was all they had left.

There were the carpenter and plumber who worked without pay. The lumber store, carpet company and gardening shop — all struggling businesses that gave when asked. And the women in the club members’ social circles, who offered a big screen TV, a computer and cash donations.

“We went way beyond the plan, because we love this family,” said contractor Don Ogden, a volunteer who spent every night for weeks working on projects for the family.

“There was no bickering, fighting, name calling, yelling,” Ogden said. “These kids, they come home from school, study hard, clean up, do chores. It’s been a fabulous experience just watching. I’ve gotten so much more than I put in. Wanda is really the hero here.”

Wanda Burton smiled when I shared Ogden’s comments. It wasn’t easy letting strangers in to poke through her stuff and dump it in bins.

On Sunday, as they celebrated with their First Tuesday sponsors, she didn’t want to talk about the cluttered bedrooms and pock-mocked walls, but about her children’s good grades and accomplishments.

Her house might have been messy, but her family wasn’t. “I’ve raised 10 children. The oldest is 58 and the youngest is 12. And I never had no trouble with none of them,” she said. “We never had much, but all you really need raising kids is a bunch of love.”

And that bunch grew this weekend.

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The unveiling on Sunday had a new-age vibe. First Tuesday’s Cole, a bouncy, blond psychotherapist, gathered all of us in a circle and led cheers and thanks. Everyone shared their feelings about the project, the importance of feng shui and color choices, what they learned about one another in the process. Cole passed around a bag of angel wings and everyone held hands while she prayed for us.

Wanda’s oldest daughter confessed to being amazed that the house turned out so well. “The first time we met them and they said ‘How does your mother want her room?’ I figured they’d never get it,” she said.

But the finished product, with its soothing colors and soft lighting, “is totally my mother. Like they were inside her head!”

The women who belong to First Tuesday — therapists, entertainment execs, business owners — aren’t the type you typically find pulling up moldy carpet and painting over grime. So I asked Cole if they would have taken a pass if they had realized how much work the Burton home would require.

Not a chance, she said. “When we went to visit them, the entire group — Wanda, the kids, her older daughter and her kids — they were all in that room looking at us. And there was such love in that house, such light in their eyes.

“They were just what we were looking for … a family doing the best they can, working really hard, just needing a helping hand.”

sandy.banks@latimes.com