The long road home

Faith has kept Robert “Bobby” and Tabatha Nolan, formerly of Branch, on the path they know God has for them, and their strong belief in a higher power recently brought them a Godsend.
“God has a plan for us, but he has not revealed it all,” Tabatha said. “I read the scriptures. God is not a flaky God. God will take care of us. We do our part, and he does his. Without God, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
While the Nolans believe that more changes are in store for the future, they are currently celebrating as the winners of the Home for the Holiday contest, an annual project of the Acadian Home Builders Association and KATC-TV 3 in Lafayette. The $450,000 home has four bedrooms, four-and-a-half baths, formal dining area, laundry room, mud room and a fireplace in the living room. Each year, the builders and associate members of AHBA construct a new home to be raffled off right before Christmas, and proceeds from the ticket sales are spread among local, shelter-related charities including Lafayette Habitat for Humanity, Faith House, Healing House and St. Michael’s Center for Veterans. In the last decade, more than $1.2 million has been donated to charity through the contest.
The Nolans have purchased a ticket each year since 2005, but their long road to winning the dream home began three years earlier on October 3, 2002, the day Hurricane Lili made landfall in Louisiana.
The Nolans and their children, Brent, Ciji, Blake, Hayleigh, Caleb and Jacob, who then ranged in age from 15 to 3 years of age, had battened downed the hatches at the their Branch home, the first home the family had ever purchased.
“We rode out Hurricane Lili in our home, which was a bad idea,” Tabatha said. “Our roof started leaking really bad, and water had gotten into the carpet. We had no way to clean it because we had no power for almost two weeks.”
“We pulled up the carpet because it was moldy, but the mold kept growing in other parts of the house.”
Months passed as the Nolans stayed in the home, working to find and remove the mold and battling with their homeowners insurance to cover the mold removal and repairs on the home. Highly allergic to the mold, Tabatha’s health started to decline.
“We tried to get all of it out, and we just kept finding more,” she said. “Bobby looked everywhere. I was in and out of the hospital because of the mold, but at first, doctors thought I had lupus. I was having trouble breathing, and I had rashes on my body.”
The Nolans eventually brought in a mold specialist, who informed them that there were seven different types of mold growing in the home, and it was living in the walls of almost every room.
“I thought, ‘We have to get out of here,’ but we didn’t know where we were going to go,” Tabatha said. “We run our business (Nolan’s Appliance, A/C and Heating Repair) out of our home.”
The Nolans reached out to their neighbors for help. One family offered Hayliegh and Ciji to stay at their home and loaned the Nolans their camper as a temporary home for the rest of the family. Their oldest son Brent moved to Church Point with a friend’s family.
“The mold specialist said to even leave our toothbrushes (at the mold-infested home),” Tabatha said. “I tried bringing my clothes to the dry cleaners (to get the mold out) and even then, it still caused rashes. We did manage to salvaged some photos.”
With all their worldly possessions gone, the parents began to feel the pangs of being without all of their most precious possessions -- their children.
“We had never been separated from our children for so long,” Tabatha said. “The kids would maybe spend one night at my mom’s now and then. Hayleigh eventually saw the counselor at school. It was hard not being able to be with her mom and dad every night.”
“We felt like failures as parents. We did not have all our children with us, and we could not be parents to all of them.”
Hoping to eventually find a way to fix their home and ultimately get their family back together, the Nolans did what they had to do. Bobby turned an old, broken work van into an office for his wife so that she would have a place to do their company’s books.
“I ran electricity to the van, put a television in it and a window unit,” Bobby said. “Tabatha could do her computer work and watch her inspirational Christian shows.”
“I’m sure the neighbors thought we were crazy. The kids would play their video games in the van in the evening, and the van gave us more (living) space. There were lots of three-minute showers during the months we lived in the camper.”
The couple continued to look for somewhere permanent to live while accumulating credit card debt and still paying the note on the home they could not inhabit. They eventually scrapped together the money to buy a used mobile home in 2004.
“The trailer was as old as me, but everything in it worked,” Tabatha said, laughing. “We wanted everyone back together.”
“We ordered one living room chair for the new house, and we all fought over that one chair,” Bobby said, laughing.
As the family settled into the house, court dates with their homeowners insurance company were repeatedly pushed back, and the house they had long hoped to keep fell into foreclosure.
“This was the only house we had ever owned together as a family,” Tabatha said, tearing up. “We wanted to hold onto it. We picked the house out as a family. We were so sure that we were going to get it that we had the septic tank put in before we finished closing.”
Eviction notices began to arrive in late 2006, and the Nolans’ home was eventually put up for auction by their bank.
“I was frantically trying to find somewhere for us to move the trailer to,” Bobby said. “I finally found some land for sale (south east of Church Point), and I went out there to see the land.”
“I was waiting to meet with a man about the property, and I saw a sign that said ‘18 acres for sale’. I realized I was on the wrong road, but I took down the number anyway.”
After viewing and deciding against purchasing the other property, Bobby called the contact number for the 18 acres. At first, the seller was only interested in selling the land as a whole, but when Bobby told the man about his family’s situation, over a cup of coffee, the landowner agreed to sell the Nolans three acres to put their trailer on.
“The Bible tells you to write down goals and a vision for yourself and run with it,” Tabatha said. “I bought this poster board and glued a picture of a house and the things I wanted for my family on it. I prayed over it. I believed. God restores.”
“My son Caleb would tell me I was crazy because of that poster,” she continued, laughing. “My son would question me, ‘When will we get back on our feet?,’ When will we get a house?’”
Finally, in July 2013, the family was able to purchase a new double-wide mobile home, and their homestead now included the new dwelling as well as the older mobile home, which is occupied by one of their daughters, her husband and one of their three grandchildren. Of their six children, youngest sons Caleb, a senior at Beau Chene High School, and Jacob, a junior at BCHS, are the only two who still live at home.
For the first time in almost a decade, purchasing a ticket for the Home for the Holidays contest was not at the very top of the Nolans’ December 2014 to-do list and praying over her poster board had finally landed Tabatha the home she had so wanted for her family.
“I actually threw the poster away,” Tabatha said, laughing. “This was the first year I didn’t pray over that poster. I accepted that we were probably going to grow old and gray in this house.”
“We weren’t really thinking about buying a ticket this year, but we give to charities like Samaritan’s Purse each year. We believed (in the years after the hurricane) we could give our way out of debt.”
As Bobby brought Tabatha her morning cup of coffee one early December day, he asked his wife, who usually entered them in the contest each year, if she had purchased their 2014 ticket. When she told him no, the contest was briefly forgotten until Bobby saw a commercial counting down the days left to enter.
“I was on my way home from a service call in Lafayette, and I started looking for a Home Bank, one of the places you can buy a ticket,” Bobby said. “I stopped at the wrong bank first, and when I left there, I thought ‘If there’s not one on the next corner, I’m not buying one.’ Sure enough, there was one.”
“The tickets are $100, and that’s what I got paid on the service call I had just done.”
The day of the drawing arrived. Instead of watching the drawing on live television, Bobby was on his way home from work, and Tabatha was at home taking a bath.
“About 10 minutes after 6, a customer called my cell phone and asked if I had won the house,” Bobby said. “Then my phone started blowing up. Finally someone from Acadian Home Builders called me and told me that we had won the house. I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.’”
“They told me they would call me back in 30 minutes because I hadn’t spoken to Tabatha yet, and that Channel 3 was on its way to our house.”
“My phone started ringing, and it was the wife of the pastor from New Hope Fellowship,” Tabatha said. “She said that we had won the house, and we hung up. At this point, I’m still calm. It hadn’t sank in yet and then the phone was ringing again. This time, it was the church secretary, asking if Bobby’s real name was Robert.”
“That’s when I started calling him and couldn’t reach him. When I finally did reach him, he said he was about to pull in the driveway. Everyone knew before we did, and we are usually watching the show.”
Channel 3’s reporter finally arrived at their home, and in the midst of the excitement, Tabatha went on television with a head of wet hair.
“I looked like a drowned rat,” Tabatha said, laughing.
Now that the dust has settled, the Nolans, who have been married 22 years, look forward to getting the keys to their new home and waiting to see what the Good Lord has in store for them next.
“Our hope for the future is to be debt-free,” Tabatha said. “With all of things we learned, emotionally and financially, we learned to appreciate things more. We are still on a journey and what the next step is is up to God.”