Same house, brand new home

When Senior Airman Sarah Peschel returns from the Middle East in September she will not recognize her own home. Her family is secretly undertaking an ambitious home makeover to surprise her.

In July, Peschel, a boom operator from the Fairchild Air Force Base, received the keys to her Orchard Center neighborhood house the same day she flew out to the Middle East; since she joined the Air Force in 2001, she has been deployed six times.

“It was not very pretty when we got here,” said Jennifer Peschel, the servicewoman’s sister-in-law. “(The grass) was so dead that it crunched when you walked.

For about a month now, family and friends has been hard at work remodeling the 1930s house, located on East Marietta Avenue in Spokane Valley, and moving in Sarah Peschel’s things. In the living room, they have stripped off some of the carpet, which was a bright pink, to restore the hardwood floors. They have scraped off the dirty wallpaper and reworked the walls with lavender and white paint and cleaned and repainted the area around the brick fireplace. Outside the mustard-colored house, the lawn is turning into a healthy green, after being raked and watered.

Jennifer Peschel said the servicewoman is in an “undisclosed location” in the Middle East, but she has been in touch. Although she asks about the house, she has no idea what her family has been doing. She explained that her sister-in-law doesn’t quite know what the house looks like because she did a walkthrough before she bought it when it was still full of the previous owners’ things.

“She does so much for us,” Jennifer Peschel said. “She protects our family from all the way over there. She’s just a military girl who doesn’t ask for anything in return.”

Both of the 24-year-old woman’s parents were in the Air Force, and that may have inspired her to join, her sister-in-law said.

Frank Peschel, Sarah Peschel’s father, said he never expected his daughter to become a combat veteran, but she is good at what she does.

“Being in the Air Force is not a big deal because it’s just a job, but being at war is different,” said Frank Peschel, who is building a new mantle for his daughter’s fireplace.

On Friday, Brett Watkins, a general contractor and one of Sarah Peschel’s best friends, was busy transforming the basement into a bedroom. Signs of what the old basement looked like are still evident – old white boards on the walls and a layer of green mold in one corner. Jennifer Peschel said it had been full of spiders.

Watkins said he plans to strip off all the boards and sheetrock the walls, and he has already started building a large closet in one section.

“Hopefully it’s done and she likes it. It’ll look better down here than it looks upstairs – it will be a brand new section of the house,” Watkins said.

The team has about two weeks to finish their work in time for the Sarah Peschel’s Sept. 5 arrival.

Watkins, who has been working for free, said current repairs and supplies will probably amount to about $2,500; if the work had been done professionally the basement remodel alone would have cost close to $10,000, he said.

“This is a lot more complex than just throwing paint on it,” he said.

The house also has its two original bedrooms, which still need to be worked on. Frank Peschel said friends and family have chipped in with donations, and he has been withdrawing some money from his daughter’s account.

“The military is grossly underpaid, so she doesn’t have a lot of money,” he said.

As labor-intensive as the work can get, Sarah Peschel’s friends and family have no qualms about doing it.

“I’m just doing it out of brotherly love,” said her brother Marcus Peschel, who has been working on the living room floor. “I know she’ll be happy for what we did for her.”