‘We Bought a $1 Historic House To Move to Our Burned Lot in Altadena After Our Home Was Destroyed by Fire’

A year after losing their house in Altadena, CA, in the deadly Eaton fire, Lauren Martinez and her husband are homeowners again—thanks to an unconventional real estate move involving meticulous planning and some steady-handed truck drivers.

Instead of rebuilding from the ground up, the displaced California family purchased a $1 historic home that was set to be destroyed and moved it in two pieces onto their burned lot, where in the coming months it will be "sewn" back together.

"We're hoping that this inspires other people and it makes it easier for other people to do it too," Martinez tells Realtor.com® of her nontraditional approach to post-fire recovery.

Martinez, an animation executive, was eight months pregnant with her third child when on Jan. 7, 2025, while out at her final work dinner before the start of her maternity leave, she received a flurry of text messages telling her not to come home because there was a wildfire raging in her neighborhood.

The next day, Martinez's husband headed to their street to find their home where they had lived for eight years and raised their two eldest children reduced to smoldering rubble.

Martinez’s home was among an estimated 12,000 residential properties that were ravaged by the Palisades and Eaton fires that overwhelmed the Los Angeles area's Pacific Palisades community and Altadena in the first days of 2025.

A new approach to post-fire rebuilding

Months later, the Martinezes—now a family of five—were living in a rental and making plans to rebuild their burned home, like so many other displaced families, when Lauren says she learned from friends she met in the wake of the fires about the Historic House Relocation Project.

The Los Angeles-based architecture firm Omgivning launched the initiative last summer to help area residents impacted by the natural disaster rebuild their lives faster and more affordably. 

The concept is straightforward: The firm identifies older, history-rich homes with good bones slated for demolition, facilitates their purchase from willing owners, and then coordinates their relocation in sections to clients' lots, where they are reassembled and fixed up.

"It's not for everybody," Morgan Sykes Jaybush, creative director at Omgivning, tells Realtor.com®. "I would say this is really a path for somebody that wants the old character of an old house. ... One of the great parts about this is to be able to bring that character back to the neighborhoods."

Martinez’s new friends, Caitlin and Evan Chambers, were the first family to buy a home approved for teardown—a 1911 Craftsman-style four-bedroom located in Hollywood—and have it moved to Altadena as part of Jaybush's relocation project. 

As Jaybush points out, house moving was relatively commonplace in L.A. a century ago, with thousands of single-family dwellings being scooped up and relocated to make way for freeways and multiunit developments. Today, however, the practice has become increasingly rare, with only a handful of companies still undertaking such moves, which are logistically complicated.

Each project requires a careful a balancing act among interested buyers, owners willing to sell a home they no longer need instead of demolishing it—inevitably delaying redevelopment plans—and experienced house movers.

From rebuilding to relocating

Inspired by the Chamberses' experience, Martinez says she and her husband "pivoted" to the house relocation idea, having realized that they would get more home for their money.

"The cost was a big one, because we couldn't even build the same size house that we had before with what insurance gives you, because it's roughly around 70 cents on the dollar," she explains. "We would have gotten a box of a house and smaller. And it was just devastating."

Instead, with Omgivning's assistance, the family found a nearly 100-year-old home in historic Hollywood—well-preserved and with hardwood floors throughout—which they purchased for just $1, saving it from the wrecking ball.

Built in the Tudor revival style, the one-story, 2,500-square-foot property features four bedrooms and three baths—and plenty of character.

"She has really good juju, as they say," says Martinez of her new home. "There's so much love in that house, and it's pink inside and out, so we all call her 'Pinky.'"

"Pinky" was the third historic home the Martinez family considered buying for relocation, but the first two contenders were demolished before they were able to secure all the necessary permits.

"I think she was always meant to be the one," says Martinez. "I loved her first time I saw her on the list."

Purchasing "Pinky," however, was just the beginning.

How to orchestrate a house move

What came next was months of planning and discussions with architects and contractors on how to split the century-old home along its most natural seam—Jaybush describes the process as "slicing the house like a loaf of bread"—move the two halves on trucks the 26 miles from Hollywood to Altadena, and then "sew" them back together.

Jaybush explains that it's a complicated endeavour that involves three different contractors: one in charge of deconstruction, one in charge of transportation, and one in charge of reconstruction on site. And each of those steps must be fully permitted.

Finally, on Jan. 12, the first half of the Martinezes' new home was packed in with wood in the middle, mounted onto steel beams, loaded onto the flatbed of a tractor-trailer, and hauled to their empty lot in the middle of the night. The second half followed four days later.

It will be a minimum of five months—and possibly double that, the way construction sometimes goes—before the family can finally settle into their new home, Martinez says.

For now, it rests on pylons awaiting the next stage of the rebuilding process, which entails pouring a new code-compliant foundation, and installing plumbing and electrical systems. After that, the house will be "stitched back together," its roof, which had to be removed ahead of the move, will be rebuilt, and its kitchen renovated.

When all is said and done, Martinez says she expects to have spent $900,000 to $950,000 "for a basically new home but with old bones."

The homeowner points out that if she opted to have a new home constructed from scratch on her Altadena land parcel, It would have taken longer and likely cost significantly more.

"And it has character that that we would not be able to get if we built new with the budget we had," says Martinez, referring to "Pinky."

'It's bigger than us'

Martinez admits that it was not all smooth sailing. In November, torrential rains that drenched the L.A. area nearly destroyed the family's new home as it sat beneath a hole-riddled tarp with its roof already removed.

"There was a big moment where I was like, I don't think we're going to be able to do this," recalls Martinez.

In the end, after the contractor agreed to repair the water damage, the family decided to go through with the house move—and not just for their own sake.

"Looking at our neighborhood and all our neighbors and what this means, if we were able to make it work and keep it viable, we want to do everything we can so that more people can move back faster and more affordably, and not have to settle for less than what they had before," says Martinez. "And so it was bigger than us."

Martinez has been documenting the entire house moving project on her Instagram page "The House That Moved LA" to share information with other displaced families and demystify the relocation process for them. She says her hope is that other people will recognize it as a practical alternative to rebuilding while keeping beautiful architectural gems out of landfills.

"Some people are interested in the process and want to see how it goes," she says.

So far, Omgivning has helped three families move homes to their lots, with Martinez being their latest client, but 200 people are on the waiting list.

Jaybush says the two main selling points of this nontraditional approach to post-fire recovery are cost and preservation: on average, it’s about 20% cheaper than building a new home and allows soundly constructed, character-rich older houses to be preserved for future generations.

"People hate to see an old house get torn down, but there's not a lot that you can do normally about it," he says. "So everyone's excited to be able to both see these kinds of houses get saved and for them to be able to help people. ... Plus, it's really cool to see a house on a truck being driven down the street."

Jaybush reminds, however, that salvaging and relocating a historic home is complicated, and would-be clients should be prepared for possible bumps in the road.

"It can look scary when the house is cut into pieces, but it will come back together and it will be great in the end," he says.