By Rachel Knight
Representatives from Magruder Homes, Pitman Custom Homes, and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital® grabbed shovels, joined forces, and broke ground on the inaugural St. Jude Dream Home Showplace in College Station on Tuesday, Oct. 30.
The groundbreaking ceremony marks the beginning of a charitable project in which Magruder Homes and Pitman Custom Homes are building and selling a home to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital®. The home will be featured and sold during the 2019 Spring Parade of Homes™. Throughout the building process, community members can follow the project’s progress on social media and vote for design elements within the home every other Monday starting next Monday.
According to Russ Laney, St. Jude Dream Home construction field operations director, the Dream Home program has raised $400 million dollars in its 27 years of existence. The St. Jude Dream Home Showplace is a newer part of the program that makes the community the center of the project.
“This will probably raise four to five hundred thousand dollars, and every bit of that goes to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital® to fight childhood cancer so that we can take survival rates from 20 percent to 80 percent and beyond,” Laney says.
The decision to reach out to St. Jude was easy for the Magruders and Pitmans. Their journey to building a St. Jude Dream Home Showplace started when John Magruder attended a charitable golf tournament after a summer in which his children experienced a few injuries of their own, according to Tyan Magruder, John’s wife and business partner at Magruder Homes. At the tournament, John was browsing silent auction items when he came across an item that stuck out to him and sparked a deeper desire to give. The item was a can of oxygen for a St. Jude child.
“We really started paying attention,” Tyan shares. “We started making donations from the two of us. Then we started getting our company involved, and when John learned about the St. Jude Dream Home project, we reached out to the Houston office and said, ‘What do you have that we can do.’”
Courtney and Jimmy Pitman, the owners of Pitman Custom Homes, said teaming up with the Magruders and building a St. Jude Dream Home Showplace was an obvious choice.
“We were fortunate enough to be able to go to Memphis and tour the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital,” Courtney says. “We got to meet patients, families, doctors, and it was life-changing for us. After that point, we knew that as a company, as a family, this was something that we really wanted to get behind. We also knew that Bryan College Station was the perfect community to get behind the St. Jude Dream Home Showplace with us.”
Laney says homebuilders and communities that house Dream Homes tend to choose St. Jude just as much as St. Jude chooses them. Magruder Homes and Pitman Custom homes were no exception.
“When I met with them and experienced the depth of heart that Jimmy and John and their wives have, it was a natural fit,” Laney explains. “It didn’t take any stretch of the imagination for us to decide this is the right thing to do in the right city with the right builders.”
Throughout the building process, The House That Social Media Built will give B/CS community members a chance to voice their opinions on their Facebook and Instagram pages. Various design elements in the home will be posted to The House That Social Media Built’s Facebook and Instagram pages so those following the home’s progress can vote on their favorite design elements like flooring, paint colors, cabinetry, and more.
“On this project, we’ll be voting once every two weeks and the followers will get three choices on each thing along the way from flooring to paint colors on a Monday,” says Michael Riccio, co-owner of The House That Social Media Built. “Then on Thursday we reveal the winning one. It’s a fun way to get involved.”
The question the home builders said they receive most often is, ‘What can we do to help?’ The builders all say they have had a great deal of help from both national and local partners so far. “For example, our framer has framed three or four thousand houses in his career, but he is more excited about this one because he’s getting to drive nails for children and incorporate it into our daily work,” Jimmy shares. The project’s greatest need at the moment is monetary donations to purchase the land the home sits on and to pay various city fees. Donations can be made online on the Magruder Homes and Pitman Custom Homes Facebook pages.
Supporting St. Jude Children’s Hospital is important for a couple of key reasons, according to the builders.
“A real important thing with St. Jude is that no family receives a bill for treatment, travel, housing, or food,” Jimmy says. “Seventy-five percent of all the funds roughly come from individuals like us who donate. Most of the stuff that’s done at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is not covered by insurance, so a majority of all of it is through individual donations like what we are doing here.”
Another reason supporting St. Jude is important is that every child is a St. Jude child because St. Jude shares the findings in their research both nationally and globally, according to Tyan. “[Your child’s] doctor probably has information that St. Jude researchers provided, so even if they’re not a St. Jude kid, they’re probably getting treatment that St. Jude founded or helped sponsor or researched,” she explains. “Every kid is a St. Jude kid.”
