From homeliest … to home

At first, Rusty Kurtz thought the call was from one of his old military buddies, playing a joke on him.

But the call wasn’t from an old friend, and it was very much real.

Just three weeks passed from the time Kurtz found out the outside of his Blue Springs home would receive a significant makeover until the transformation was complete.

Rusty and Melinda Kurtz’s home of 17 years, which is directly between Franklin Smith Elementary School and Plaza Heights Christian Academy in the 1500 block of Southwest Clark Road, received national coverage Friday morning on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” program as a winner of the “Homeliest Home” contest.

Yes, the exterior improvements are nice, the contest organizers say. But what makes this project special is the story of the family who lives in the home.

Rusty, 59, is a 34-year retired veteran of the U.S. Army and Air Force Reserve. He’s traveled to 28 foreign countries and taught Air Force cadets at the Air Force Academy how to build houses. He served on a tour in Iraq in 2006, and a year later, Rusty retired from the military after he injured his shoulder in noncombat duty.

Today, Melinda and Rusty are raising their nieces, 13-year-old Alex, and her sister, Robyn, who turns 7 next week, as their own children. By his estimations, Rusty says the couple together, throughout their adulthood, have taken in and helped out 20 children.

“Good things always come around,” Rusty says. “A lot of times, some people get down, and it takes someone to help them before they get back up. There ought to be more people out there helping people.”

Rusty and Melinda were in need of a little help themselves, as their nearly 50-year-old home was suffering from the outside. Rusty’s brother, John Kurtz of Independence, initially saw the contest on “Fox & Friends.” John called Melinda and Rusty, telling them they had to enter.

“I knew we wouldn’t,” Melinda says, smiling, of whether she thought her family would win, “but I did it anyway. I mean, you enter contests all the time, and you know that you’re not going to win.”

In describing the “before” state of the home, Melinda says pointedly: “It was falling apart.”

Rusty kept having to do patch jobs in mending the garage doors.

“We had all kinds of wood,” Melinda says, chuckling, “on the inside and out, just to keep them from buckling under. In fact, three days before these doors came in, the cable broke.”

GAF, North America’s largest roofing manufacturer, sponsored the “Homeliest Home” contest, selecting a winner from across the United States in each category – affected by an illness, affected by a weather-related event and a military family.

“We get so many calls for donated roofing materials,” says Alyssa Hall, GAF’s corporate communications manager. “We can’t give to everyone who calls in, unfortunately, so we thought it would be great to put together this contest where we could pick a few winners.”

But GAF wanted to take the contest beyond just putting in a new roof, Hall says. So, the company reached out to Ply Gem, which helped out with the siding, stone and windows. The Kurtz family also got to help in selecting the final design of the home.

The roof, she continues, also was in “bad shape.” The shingles were lifting, and it contained many soft spots. The home’s pinkish paint was originally supposed to be beige, Melinda says, but it ended up as pink.

“So, we had to wait until we could afford to get more paint,” she says.

The Kurtz family is on a fixed income. Both Melinda and Rusty receive disability payments, and Rusty suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Melinda uses a wheelchair, a walker and a scooter to get around – a new, improved wheelchair ramp also was constructed as part of the improvements.

“I even ran off of it one time, because there was no railing around it,” Melinda says of the former wheelchair ramp.

Several local companies also chipped in with the Kurtzes’ home, including the Kearney-based Tice Exteriors Inc. Since Ply Gem has a Kansas City presence, the company asked Tice Exteriors’ owner Todd Tice if he could help out with the Kurtz home makeover in completing all of the exterior work, except for the roof.

Tice says he was totally on board – but he did get a bit nervous when he heard they had just three weeks to complete the work. Once he heard the family’s story, however, Tice says he was sold.

“To me – to be honest with you – that’s why I took the project. The story is everything to me – that’s what kept me motivated to do,” Tice says. “It almost felt like a mission project for my church. That’s how much it meant to me.”

These days, Rusty Kurtz says, he feels better.

“He has a better outlook on life,” Melinda continues in describing the recent transformation in her husband. “Before, he was just down. At least now, he smiles more.”

But despite all of the changes to the outside of the home, the family wanted one element to remain the same: A handful of angel land ornaments went back into the front landscaping.

In 2002, after Rusty’s youngest son, John, died at age 20, Melinda began collecting angels, including the lawn ornaments. It was important for her to keep them outside.

“That gives me my time with John,” Melinda says. “He is buried at Cole Camp, and we can’t get down there as often as we’d like – so, this is our memorial to him.”

Another important change: Rusty says Alex’s classmates aren’t teasing her on the bus any longer about how her house looks.

“Now, they are envious about it,” he says. “The whole experience has made out family closer – all of us are pretty proud. The girls are really excited about it – that’s what is most important.”