For the fifth time, local homebuilding professionals have come together to build a home for a special family in only one week.

Many are familiar with the popular television show, Extreme Home Makeover—led by an enthusiastic host, Ty Pennington, contractors, designers and home furnishing vendors magically transform a home in just a few days for a well-deserving family. But that’s Hollywood. Here on the Cape, we don’t live on a television set, nor do we have the benefit of editing or fast-forward filming. Yet, the remarkable, local building professionals here on the Cape are seemingly able to perform the same miracle—without the film crew’s tricks—ONE HOME, FOR ONE FAMILY, IN ONE WEEK.

Sponsored by the Home Builders & Remodelers Association of Cape Cod (HB&RACC) and managed under Habitat for Humanity of Cape Cod’s Affordable Homeownership Program, this biennial process is known as Blitz Build Cape Cod. The first thing to understand is that this miracle takes much longer than just a week. Every other year for a week in September a tightly organized team of homebuilding volunteers starts with a capped foundation on Monday morning and hands the keys over to the homeowners at the end of the day on Friday for a move-in ready home. Yet that could never happen without the two years of preparation the HB&RACC Blitz Committee diligently applies to the process. One hundred percent of the labor is volunteer—requiring networking and requests to the building community to supply that labor, and ultimately a well-organized schedule for the week of the build.