House for double amputee and family nearly complete

KNIK — In less than two weeks, Jim White will be living in a new house — and it couldn’t come a moment too soon.

White currently lives in a trailer that has been kept habitable long past its intended lifespan by the sweat of his brow.

“It wouldn’t make it through another winter, there’s no way,” said Israel Nelson, who has spent the past two years shepherding the home-building project through to completion.

White put the problems with the trailer more succinctly.

“It probably rained as much inside the house last night as it did outside,” he said Monday.

White is a double-amputee and the subject of a 2009 profile in the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman that dealt with the long series of medical procedures that led to his amputations and frustration with the government bureaucracy that had all but bankrupted him.

White happened to call Nelson after Nelson wrote a letter to the editor upset about many of the same issues with the social safety net White had shed light on. When Nelson saw the story and the state of White’s trailer in the photos accompanying it, he decided to do something about it.

“They’re going to deliver the keys to us we expect by this Friday the 19th, so we’re trying to schedule the move-in to give ourselves a week to make sure everything is ready and that everybody knows,” Nelson said. “What they’re finishing up is installing some of the appliances, baseboard trim, they have to install a carpet in the master bedroom this Thursday.”

It’s all basically the tail end of the project, but there is still one big piece remaining. Nelson said they’re about $5,000 short of funds needed to put siding on the place.

White, though, said he’s not upset at all to be living in a house with Tyvek siding. He said he wouldn’t be the only person in the Valley to do so.

“I’m going to be really glad to get out of this dump and have some room I can move around instead of just one little pathway through the house,” White said.

The home will have three bedrooms and two bathrooms; just the right size for White, his wife and the couple’s two sons.

Though he ran into some transportation trouble recently, which led to him hitchhike for a spell, White, a trained mechanic, said he’s taken possession of a donated pickup he’s able to get running periodically. One of his boys has a pickup, though, and White has a four-wheeler, so he’s more-or-less mobile, he said.

And medically he’s doing OK, but he will be back in surgery soon to fix an old injury.

“About 20 years ago I had a truck tire explode and hit me in the face,” White said. “I had one neurologist look at it and he said you need surgery, like yesterday.”

In periodic updates on the project, Nelson has given shout-outs to everyone who has helped — everyone from hardware stores to contractors to volunteers to donors.

Monday, he had a pair of new people to thank.

“Art Gravely — the man has not only contributed money, but he’s contributed time and energy doing the various parts of this final push and he’s just an incredible man, he’s a living saint,” Nelson said.

Gravely is a retiree who was volunteering at Bishop’s Attic in Palmer when he came to Nelson to talk about volunteering with a nonprofit Nelson works with — Habitat for Humanity.

“I started telling him about the Jim White Project and he bit on it right away,” Nelson said. “He’s just been this phenomenal guy. Whenever I said, ‘Gee, Art, such-and-such needs to be done,’ he says, ‘I’ll take care of it,’ and he goes out and does it.”

And Nelson also had nothing but great things to say about the general contractor who took on the project.

“Bob Pevan, our contractor, has done a miraculous job of organizing everything and getting discounts,” Nelson said. “We couldn’t have asked for a better general contractor. He’s amazing.”

White, too, was very grateful, even if he was having trouble believing that he would be the beneficiary of such generosity.

“It still doesn’t seem like it’s really real yet. I don’t think it actually will until I’m really in there,” he said.

It’s been a long couple of years, with lots of ups and downs, he said.

“When Israel started this, and we looked at it, we kind of planned it that it might take two years to do it,” White said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.