What has four bedrooms, three baths, 2,435 square feet of space?
It could be your new home in Hamburg.
And you could win it.
The Lexington St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway is currently under way, and Lexington construction and remodeling company DB Homes is donating the time and resources to build it for a third-straight year.
Each year, the St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway raises money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital while giving away a house to a lucky winner. Raffle tickets are open to the public for $100 each, and all proceeds go directly to St. Jude.
This year’s home located 2425 Pascoli Place in the Tuscany subdivision of Hamburg with a retail value of about $400,000.
Drew Brester of DB Homes said he was approached by representatives of St. Jude’s four years ago and after an interview, agreed to help with the project.
This year, the organization hopes to sell 7,500 tickets.
St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis is internationally recognized Comprehensive Cancer Center devoted solely to children. Its pioneering research and treatment of children with cancer and other catastrophic diseases have ranked it as one of the best pediatric cancer hospitals in the country. Families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing, and food—all costs are covered by fundraising.
The Dream Home Giveaway is one of the largest single-event fundraisers for St. Jude nationwide, and has raised over $290 million, more than $23 million annually. Thanks to DB Homes, Lexington is now the 30th market in the United States to have a St. Jude Dream Home.
“There is no better way to give back to the community than a project like this,” Brester said. “It helps so many kids and their families at a time when they are vulnerable.”
Brester said he has been touched by a sick child in his own life.
“That certainly reinforced this idea and what we are doing,” Brester said. “You want to do anything you can to help these children and their families.”
This year’s Dream Home winner will be drawn on June 29 at 5 p.m. and will be broadcast live on Lexington’s ABC 36.
This year’s home is estimated at $400,000 and is located in Hamburg’s Tuscany subdivision.
The home includes four bedrooms, three baths, an estimated 2,435 square feet, a living room with vaulted cathedral ceiling and exposed beams, a spacious kitchen with large center island, and covered front and rear porches.
“It’s a ranch plan with two bonus bedrooms upstairs,” Brester said.
Possibly one of the most attractive features of the home is the special walk-through shower in the master bathroom.
But the special touches don’t end there.
Erin Brester, Drew’s wife, co-owner, and designer, has been praised for her work.
“She has put together an incredible kitchen that will be something that Lexington has never seen before,” Drew Brester said.
If you would like a tour of the home, open house tours will begin May 20 and will be held each Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and each Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.
But buying a new home can be a daunting task. It would be a lot easier if the new owner just won it while helping children with life-threatening illnesses.
And unlike Powerball or the other lotteries, only 7,500 Dream Home tickets are sold each year.
In 2015, Peggy Seithers of Paris, purchased only one ticket, and she bought it at the house on opening weekend.
Every ticket helps St. Jude kids and the mission of “St. Jude: Finding cures. Saving children” and because of the support of the public, families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food — because all a family should worry about is helping their child live.
“We have seen the people and the families who receive help when they need it the most,” Drew Brester said. “It’s when they need a miracle. It’s an incredible place for people who have to deal with a very rough circumstance. Knowing that you can help just a little bit is an amazing feeling.”
Although St. Jude currently owns the property and building, Drew Brester said its from his company’s design and could be rebuilt if someone requests.
“This home will be raffled off and it’s not for sale,” Brester said.
The Dream Home Program
The first St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway took place in Shreveport, LA. It was organized by Dr. Donald Mack, a pediatric physician from Shreveport. Mack had relied on St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to treat young patients with catastrophic diseases and was the first doctor to send an out-of-state patient to St. Jude.
The Shreveport Giveaway and raised $160,000 for the hospital; since then, the Dream Home Giveaway in Shreveport has become an annual fund-raiser, raising more than $23 million for the hospital.
Today, the St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway is one of the largest single-event fundraisers for St. Jude nationwide and has raised more than $300 million.
This year, the program will include more than 30 St. Jude Dream Home Giveaways.
The support helps raise money for St. Jude where no family ever receives a bill from St. Jude for their child’s care.
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital founder Danny Thomas believed that “no child should die in the dawn of life.” Families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food.
St. Jude freely shares any medical breakthroughs, and every child saved at St. Jude means doctors and scientists worldwide can use that knowledge to save more children. Treatments invented at St. Jude have helped push the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20 percent to more than 80 percent since it opened 50 years ago.
The hospital is where doctors often send their toughest cases because St. Jude has strong survival rates for some of the most aggressive childhood cancers. It is also the first and only pediatric cancer center to be designated as a Comprehensive Cancer Center by the National Cancer Institute.
In 2010, St. Jude embarked on an unprecedented effort to sequence the pediatric cancer genome. The sequencing of the complete cancerous and healthy genomes of 700 childhood cancer patients resulted in groundbreaking discoveries in a number of aggressive childhood cancers, prompting Time magazine to recognize the Pediatric Cancer Genome Project as one of the top 100 new scientific discoveries in 2013.
Donations are used in a variety of ways, but mostly to support the goal of working to drive the overall survival rate for childhood cancer to 90 percent in the next decade.
It costs $2 million a day to operate St. Jude, which is primarily covered by individual contributions.
This story also appears on pages 6 and 7 of the April 2017 edition of the Hamburg Journal.
