NEW CARLISLE — A sprinkle of rain is falling from the sky, but Dylan Ebersole, still in the clothes he wore to bed, just stares at the remains of the house.

Standing next to him in the driveway, wife Haley is tallying the irreplaceables.

Their wedding pictures. Her son’s baby pictures. Her wedding gown and her mom’s wedding gown. Her son’s footprints, in plaster.

Suddenly Dylan, who on normal days works a shift at AM General, speaks up.

“Stop reminding me,” he says. “It’s too much stuff.”

Sensing their mutual frustration, they both laugh.

“It’s been a long, long day,” Haley says, and the clock hasn’t struck noon.

Almost nine hours earlier, Dylan woke to what he thought was his alarm clock, only to breathe in smoke from his burning house.

The couple, along with their 2-year-old son, rushed out of the home to call 911 from a neighbor’s phone. By the time they had returned, the fire was hot enough to blow out the windows in the rear of the house.

Dylan says he bought the home in the 29500 block of Edison Road, in western St. Joseph County, five years ago as a project to fix up — eventually marrying Haley two years ago and having a baby.

As the couple renovated the house, they created a family room and extra bathrooms at the rear, putting down the last of the new carpet just a few weeks ago.

Haley Ebersole said investigators said the fire was likely caused by a malfunction in an in-window air conditioning unit in the home’s newer addition.

But by the time the family woke to the sound of smoke detectors, the rear of the home was in flames and smoke was pouring into the rooms where they slept.

Walking through the remains of her home Wednesday morning, Haley pointed to the charred remains of couches and a TV.

She showed how the smoke in her son’s room had turned the blond hardwood flooring a dark, smoky black.

In the kitchen, she pointed to where cabinets had fallen off the walls, smashing dishes and becoming entangled with the damp, burnt insulation that now covered their floors.

Standing outside, minutes after getting off the phone with his insurance company, Dylan wondered if the deck he just finished last month would have to be bulldozed.

“You spend five years of work remodeling the place, and then it’s all destroyed in 30 minutes,” he said.

Besides waiting for the insurance adjuster to arrive, the Ebersoles said, they had to go shop for clothes to wear and had to find a place to sleep for the night, if not the next several weeks.

Haley said her son, who she left in the care of family, wasn’t traumatized by the fire but instead enjoyed seeing all the fire trucks.

But with the fire trucks gone, along with much of their first home together, Dylan and Haley Ebersole said they were happy to be alive, even if they aren’t sure what the future has in store.

“If it wasn’t for the smoke detector ...,” Dylan says, leaving the thought unfinished.

“We got out,” Haley says, picking up where her husband left off. “That’s the important thing. The rest is just stuff.”

Staff writer Dave Stephens:
dstephens@sbtinfo.com
(574) 235-6209