Extreme Home Makeover in Alabama - Chaos is Commonplace for Harris Family of Nine

When the "extreme" nine-member Harris family from Birmingham, Alabama received the remarkable news that their house would get an "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," Chris and Diamond Harris were thankful that some of the exhaustion that stems from taking care of their toddler sextuplets and nine-year-old son DeWayne would finally be relieved. Relive the excitement and scroll to the bottom for updates on the Harris family since this article was originally written in 2005.

By Michelle Garland Segrest

Originally published in Alabama aLIVE! | Volume II, Issue 2, 2005

The doorbell rings and six toddlers scatter.

One bolts up the stairs. Another begins knocking over six small foam chairs, toppling them one by one. Mom stops another in his tracks to lift his pants, which have fallen to his ankles. He’s much too busy to pull them up himself.

Something spills. No one saw what happened. In an instant, another enters the room with a mop to “help.” Mom sends her back into the kitchen, but the youngster’s quick half-turn with the long mop handle smacks the flower pot on the end table. Moving with the grace of a gazelle, Mom catches it before it hits the floor.

“One, two, three, four, five...”

Mom counts bodies.

“Where’s Kaleb?” She instantly identifies the child missing in action. “Here he is!” cries a male voice from downstairs. Dad, who is working with two contractors, has captured the escapee.

And within minutes, all six 2-1⁄2 - year-olds are corralled back into one room within Mom’s sight.

Big brother Dewayne, exhausted from his day of school and typical 9-year-old activities, sleeps soundly on the sofa. This is not a home for light sleepers.

Diamond Harris is unfazed by the activity and never breaks her stride. After all, multi-tasking is no problem for this mother of seven.

“I used to watch TV and see people who had a lot of kids and say, ‘How in the world do they do that?’” Mrs. Harris says. “But this is just our normal. You just do it.”

First-Ever Surviving African-American Sextuplets Get Extreme Home Makeover

On July 7, 2002, Chris and Diamond Harris increased the size of their family from three to nine with the birth of the first-ever surviving African-American sextuplets. Kiera, Kalynne, Kaleb, Kobe, Kieran and Kyle were born at UAB Hospital on that summer day, changing the dynamic of the Harris family forever.

“We are so blessed,” the parents agree.

After struggling to get pregnant, the parents of then 7-year-old Dewayne tried fertility treatments and were told they were expecting twins. When the ultrasound revealed five fetuses, doctors recommended selective reduction. But the Harrises say they wanted to see what God had in store for them and refused the procedure. Surprisingly, the birth revealed a sixth child. After 3 months in the neonatal intensive care unit, the Harrises brought home six healthy babies.

Chris Harris is a third-grade teacher at Barrett Elementary School. His wife attends school full-time at Birmingham’s Jefferson State University, trying to earn the nursing degree she always desired. Before the sextuplets were born, she worked at Estes Nursing Home as well as Birmingham’s Carraway Hospital. Her enlarged family halted her career plans.

Both parents were the oldest siblings in large families, which they agree prepared them for this stage of their lives.

“With this many kids, you almost have to have the patience of God,” Mrs. Harris says. “I’m not saying it’s not hard, because it is. But we are so grateful for this wonderful family.”

Recently, the Harris family was blessed in another way. ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” chose them as a family deserving of a brand-new home with all the trimmings. The 5900-square-foot home was built in one week.

Large Alabama Family Receive Large Home Upgrade on Extreme Home Makeover

The Center Point family of nine was living in a home less than half that size, which was in desperate need of repair. A tree smashed through the roof when Hurricane Ivan swept through the state in September 2004. The gaping hole had not yet been patched. Meanwhile, the master bedroom was converted into a nursery with toddler beds pushed together to make enough room for them all. The parents slept in the drafty, leaky basement. Six potty chairs lined the hallway. Toys and highchairs took the place of sofas and a dining room table.

As the babies began toddling around, the already cramped walls were closing in.

“We didn’t know much about this show,” Mrs. Harris admits. But a non- profit organization, Legacy Ladies, who had adopted them 18 months earlier, encouraged them to submit an audition tape to ABC.

Legacy Ladies is based in California and adopts families in crisis. The group identifies the family’s most essential needs and then finds a way to provide for them. “We told them our most desperate needs were home repair and scholarships for all these kids,” Mrs. Harris says.

The Harris family waited anxiously. Six months would pass before the show’s star, Ty Pennington, stood on their front lawn and bellowed through a bullhorn “Good morning, Harris family!”

“We knew we were in the running because we’d get calls from people who would say ‘If you had this or that, what color would you prefer?’” Mrs. Harris explains. “At one point they told us that a few local contractors had turned us down and if one more said no, then Birmingham would be out of the running forever for anyone to get an extreme home makeover.”

In stepped developer Signature Homes. This Birmingham-based company said yes to the ambitious project.

Extreme Home Makeover Requires Extreme Deadlines

The company builds about 400 family homes each year in Birmingham and Baton Rouge. Senior Vice President Barry DeLozier was one of five project managers on site. He helped coordinate the more than 700 volunteer workers who built the Harris family’s dream home the first week of February 2005.

“This project required all the same processes that goes into building any home, but all the steps are performed one on top of the other. And we worked around the clock,” DeLozier explains. “The only difference from this job as opposed to any other was speed. With most jobs, you have a Plan B. But in this case, the one thing that wasn’t flexible at all was the deadline.”

The Signature Homes crew beat the deadline, giving the ABC crew plenty of time to tend to the details of decorating and providing the finishing touches.

The Harrises agree their favorite new room is the master bedroom suite, elegantly decorated in dramatic black and white. It has a luxurious bathroom with whirlpool tub. A huge plasma TV was installed in the bed- room, which also includes surveillance equipment so the parents have a birds-eye view of what’s going on in other rooms of the house. A staircase serves as a passageway to the huge nursery directly above.

“When we finally get into the bed at night, I try to sit up for a while and enjoy my new bedroom, but I’m usually too tired and just crash,” Mrs. Harris says.

Extreme Home Makeover Can’t Solve Everything for Large Alabama Family

DeLozier admits the new home alone will not be the answer to all of the Harrises prayers.

“We came quickly to the conclusion that no extreme home makeover will ever solve the problem of the Harris family’s chaos,” DeLozier says. “We’ve cleaned up and moved on to the next project, but Chris and Diamond Harris still have to raise this family.”

This realization prompted Signature Homes Chief Executive Officer Dwight Sandlin to spearhead a drive to provide eight college scholarships for the family, one for each of the seven children and one for their mother.

“This was one of my main worries when these children were born,” Mr. Harris states. “I wanted these children to have the privilege of an education. No fancy house will ever compare to the peace of mind of knowing this will be taken care of.”

Meanwhile, the daily frenzy still exists.

The Harris family still gets six toddlers bathed, dressed, fed and ready for their day each morning. The parents still face a $200-plus grocery bill each week. A pack of pull-ups disappear each day. When the sextuplets were babies, about 50 diapers were changed every day.

Laundry is never-ending. The family washes and dries about 45 loads of clothes in a week. “We get up in the morning and wash two loads before school, then we do two loads when we get home and at least two loads before bed,” Mrs. Harris explains. “And the laundry is still piled up all the time.”

Mr. Harris chimes in. “One of my co-workers was complaining the other day about how he didn’t get to bed until midnight the night before. I just laughed. We were still doing laundry at midnight!”

When the sextuplets were babies, it took about an hour to load the six children into their car seats to go anywhere, Mrs. Harris says. As the children have grown, they now have it down to a science. The kids hop into their seats and the parents just have to buckle them. But first, they have to figure out who needs to go in which car. The family has a 15-passenger van which seats everyone when they travel together. However, sometimes they are not going in the same direction. This requires coordination.

“Each night before we go to bed, Diamond and I look at our master calendar and figure out what’s ahead of us for the next day,” Mr. Harris explains. “We figure out which car seats need to be in which car and who is taking who where.”

Big brother Dewayne attends school during the day while the sextuplets stay busy at an early head start program. This gives Mrs. Harris a few hours each day to attend school and study. Weekdays seem like a breeze compared to the weekends, Mrs. Harris says.

“It’s like they know it’s the weekend,” she says. “I’ll wake up at about 5:30 and there are already kids running all through the house. I am constantly counting heads.”

Being outnumbered by children can often have an affect on their parents, Mr. Harris says. “The kids might all be taking a nap and we will be sitting here with Barney still on the TV. At some point we say, ’I guess I could change the channel.’ One day I was in the car on my way to work, and I was just singing along with the Sesame Street CD... I looked behind me and there was not a single kid in my car. I thought to myself, ‘I have officially lost it.’”

The parents agree that Dewayne has sacrificed some of his childhood to help care for his two sisters and four brothers. He still finds time for Boy Scouts, church-league basketball and is in the gifted program at Erwin Elementary. “He would like to do more,” Mrs. Harris says. “But we need his help here.”

Dewayne doesn‘t seem to mind the trade-off. His younger siblings truly admire him, Mrs. Harris says.

“You know how most kids will wake up in the middle of the night and get in bed with their parents?” she explains. “Well, these kids just pile up in Dewayne’s bed. I’ll go in there some mornings and find three or four kids cuddled up with him.”

Extreme Makeover Home Edition Answers Prayers for Alabama Family

Throughout their new home, the “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” decorating crew left subtle reminders for the Harrises about the trials and treasures of a large family. A wall hanging in the big-top themed nursery reads, “If two is company and three is a crowd, then six must be a circus.” And another reads, “Blessings come in half dozens.”

Chris and Diamond Harris have advice for any large family, but especially for those who are parents of multiples.

“Stay on a schedule,” Mrs. Harris insists. “Every day we have the same feeding time, the same bedtime, the same naptime, the same snack time. Even if we are out of town on a trip or something, we will stop that car and pull over on the side of the road to feed them in order to stay on our schedule.”

Mr. Harris says staying calm is the key to raising a large family. “With this many kids, you must learn patience,” he says. “It’s something you’ll need from here on out. Everything requires a patient response. And eat your Wheaties.”

Mrs. Harris says that although some days are difficult, she wouldn’t trade her life for any other. “It is hard right now. But we also have a lot of joy. And I know that when these kids get older they will all have chores, and I won’t have any housework! I am just waiting for that day.”

Birmingham Builder Provides Home and Security for Harris Family Extreme Home Makeover

As a teenager, Dwight Sandlin spent his summers framing houses alongside his father. With each home he helped build, he was shaping his own future. He learned the trade.

Then he learned the business.

“I learned enough to know that I didn’t want to frame houses for the rest of my life,” Sandlin admits.

Sandlin’s father gave him the genes and the formative training to become the chief executive officer of Signature Homes, which builds about 400 homes each year in Birmingham and Baton Rouge. After an especially productive 2004, he decided it was time for his company to give something back to the Birmingham community.

He gathered his executives for a brainstorming session.

Many ideas were exchanged, but the gem came from Scott Roher, the head of the company’s estimating department. “We could bring together all our sub-contractors and crew members and orchestrate a valuable project,” his memo proposed. “Let’s go find a needy family and build a home for them . . . kind of like they do on extreme home makeover.”

Coincidentally, two weeks later ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” contacted Sandlin.

“It was just meant to be,” Sandlin says.

The popular television show chooses a deserving family for each segment and builds that family a new home in one week. The show’s producers were looking for a Birmingham builder to take on the project of providing a large home for Center Point’s Chris and Diamond Harris, the parents of a 9-year-old and the first-ever surviving African-American sextuplets. The family of nine was bursting from the seams of its 2,000-square-foot home, which had suffered damage from Hurricane Ivan.

The show had been turned down for the ambitious project by two other local builders. Producers were ready to give up on Birmingham as a potential site for the show. But when opportunity to take on the seemingly impossible job was offered to Sandlin, he knew it was fate.

“Since we had already talked about doing something like this, and then they just walked into our door, how could we say no?” Sandlin explains.

Signature Homes was recommended for the job thanks to positive relationships with Weyerhaeuser, one of the show’s sponsors, and its distributor, 84 Lumber.

Sandlin knew that if he took on the project, it would have to be done the right way. “We do business with the best vendors in the world,” he says. “I was confident we could get it done.”

But Sandlin also knew it would take an extreme effort to complete the extreme project. Signature Homes had only three-and-a-half weeks to prepare for the show’s arrival in Birmingham.

Sandlin told his crew the job would require three things from its participants. “First, you have to have a kind heart to give this amount of time and energy to provide something meaningful for people you don’t even know,” he explains. “Secondly, we had to have some talent, and I knew we had that covered. These people know what they are doing. Finally, and most importantly, we’d have to have the will to keep going even when we didn’t think we could.”

The more than 700-member crew, which consisted mostly of volunteers, had five days and nine hours to build the home from start to finish. It beat the deadline, completing the 5,900-square-foot, two-story English Tudor-style home in four days and 10 hours.

Most of the materials were donated or traded for sponsorship.

The project profoundly affected Sandlin. “People always talk about making a difference,” he says. “For the rest of our lives, we can drive by and see this house and know that we made a difference. That’s a cool thing.”

Sandlin was on site around the clock to coordinate workers and manage the flow. But he also grabbed the nail gun when needed to help install frames, just like his father had taught him years ago.

“Dwight is not the kind of guy to just watch from the sidelines,” says Signature Homes Senior Vice-President Barry DeLozier, one of five project managers for the Harris home. “He would never ask someone to do something he wouldn’t do himself. That’s just who he is.”

Sandlin didn’t stop there. He decided the Harris family needed more than just a fancy new home, so he spearheaded a campaign to provide college scholarships for the Harris’ seven children. Once again, time was of the essence.

“I called every business associate I have ever had in my entire life,” Sandlin says. He did the math and realized he needed $135,000 for seven pre-packaged in-state tuition plans. “We were having a tough time getting it all, and then miraculously we got a call from Jeff State.”

Jefferson State University President Judy Merritt donated two-year scholarships for each of the seven children and their mother. The money raised by Sandlin provides the funds to purchase Prepaid Affordable College Tuition (PACT) plans to get all the children through another two years at an in-state college.

“The house is really cool,” DeLozier says. “But it’s the education that will change the Harris family’s lives forever.”

Sandlin agrees. “Education changes things,” he says. “If people are educated, they have choices.”

POSTSCRIPT: The Harris sextuplets graduated from high school on June 2, 2020. They are all continuing their education in Alabama. According to an article on today.com, "Girly-girl" Kiera began attending Lawson State Community College to study cosmetology, while her "outspoken" sister, Kaylynne, chose Alabama State University for its physical therapy program.

Kaleb and Kieran attend Alabama A&M. Kaleb, the "father figure" of the bunch, plans to major in computer science. Kieran, the "thoughtful one," is interested in art.

Kobe, who Diamond describes as "Mr. Smooth," and who wants to play college baseball, joined Kaylynne at Alabama State University. Kyle, the 6-foot-4 "gentle giant" who has autism, will be doing a life skills program.

Chris and Diamond divorced in 2012, and have both remarried.

Michelle Garland Segrest is a veteran reporter whose work has appeared in several Alabama newspapers and publications. She is an Alabama native and is proud to have only two children.