Quite a few deserving families are rewarded with all-expense-paid, top-to-bottom house renovations during Season One of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. First up is the Powers Family, whose daughter's life-threatening illness has sapped their financial resources. Next, the Home Edition team services the Woslum Family, whose dad has been shipped off to Iraq. The patriarch of the Cox family is a travelling minister who, thanks to Ty Pennington and his team of artisans, will finally have a permanent home to call his own. The Mendoza family is headed by a single mother and social worker who needs additional living space to accommodate the many needy children she has adopted. Similarly, the McCrory Family must expand their home when they find that mom is expecting twins. A house ruined by floods is given "the treatment" on behalf of the Harris Family, while the father of the Zitek family has been paralyzed in a car accident and needs all the assistance that the Home Edition staff can provide. A long estranged but happily reunited father and son can at last live under the same roof in the episode "The Hardin Family". The Walswicks, a family with nine children, has just lost its father. The members of the Powell family need a renovation to counteract the illness caused by the mold in their old house. The Cardigan-Scott family consists of eight youngsters, whose parents died within two weeks of one another. And in fixing up the abode of the Imbrianis, the crew is rewarding a woman whose marrow saved a child suffering from leukemia. Even with all these heart-warming entries, the first season of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition has time for a "very special" episode, "Friends Helping Friends", wherein a group of NYC firefighters ask the team to renovate the apartments of two of their number who'd lost close friends in 9/11. This project not only requires the resources of the entire Home Edition cast, but also some additional assistance from Regis Philbin and the New York Rangers hockey team!
by Hal Erickson
synopsis
