Photos by Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Volunteers Becky Mutter and Scott Graham welcome Bryan Lawrence on Wednesday as he enters his remodeled house for the first time.

Volunteers Scott Graham and Missy Mutter work Wednesday to finish renovations to Bryan Lawrence's house only hours before he is due to move back home.

Bryan Lawrence and his wife, Brenda, pray Wednesday with Roanoke firefighters Scott Mutter (center) and Scott Graham after the Lawrences' arrival at their newly renovated home. They have been living in temporary housing while volunteers made their house wheelchair accessible.

Firefighter Robert Perdue works Wednesday to finish a wheelchair ramp so Bryan Lawrence can access his home. All the work was done by volunteers.

After they returned to Roanoke, Bryan Lawrence and his wife, Brenda, lived in an apartment at Friendship Manor while their house was being renovated.

Bryan Lawrence has been back in Roanoke for almost two months, but until Wednesday, the Roanoke police officer hadn't really felt like he was home.

Until Wednesday, he couldn't go home.

His wheelchair wouldn't have made it over the carpet or through the 30-inch-wide doorways at the house where he's lived for the past 13 years. He had no way to get to the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, all on the second floor. And he couldn't have easily maneuvered in and out of the shower.

On Wednesday, more than six months after he was paralyzed while making an arrest, and just in time for Thanksgiving, Lawrence and his wife, Brenda, finally moved back into their renovated home.

"We have a lot to be thankful for," he said.

The Lawrences have been staying in a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment at Friendship Manor since they returned from a rehabilitation center in Atlanta.

Over the past two months, firefighters and police officers have emptied, gutted and refurbished the couple's north Roanoke County split-level house, making it accessible for Lawrence.

Late Wednesday afternoon, he got his first look at the inside of the house.

Before he went in, he took the hand of one of the firefighters who had worked on the house and thanked him, his eyes reddening.

A wheelchair lift took Lawrence to the second floor, and he entered the house through the master bedroom.

"Oh, my goodness," he said, scanning the room, taking it in. "Wow."

He looked down at the wood floors. He and Brenda had always wanted wood floors. "The floors are just gorgeous," he said.

Total refit

The house doesn't look like the one that Lawrence left the evening of May 10, when his wife walked him out the door to see him off to his part-time security job.

That night, he saw two men that police were looking for in connection with an assault.

While he was arresting one of them, the other attacked him, breaking his neck, police have said. The men fled but were later arrested.

After months of rehabilitation at the Shepherd Center, a nonprofit hospital in Atlanta that specializes in spinal cord injuries, Lawrence can move his legs and arms and get around with the help of a walker.

The day before he left the Shepherd Center to come home, he walked 657 feet out the front door, the same door that he'd been carried through on a stretcher four months earlier.

But for now, he's still largely dependent on his wheelchair, so his house needed to be modified.

The Lawrences got several estimates from contractors, but the best offer came from a neighbor.

Scott Graham, a first lieutenant with the Roanoke Fire-EMS Department, lives two houses down from the Lawrences.

He and another Roanoke firefighter told the Lawrences that they'd do the job for free.

The other firefighter, Capt. Scott Mutter, owns Mutter Construction. He oversaw the project, and dozens of officers and firefighters volunteered to work in shifts. They've worked on their days off, and Graham took vacation days this week to make sure the house was finished in time for Thanksgiving.

Work began in early October. Recruits from the Roanoke Fire-EMS Department moved all the furniture into a portable storage unit.

Officers and firefighters ripped out carpeting and put down hardwood floors, tile and low-pile carpeting.

They gutted the bathroom, knocked down a wall to make it bigger and put in an open-air shower.

They built a second-floor deck on the back of the house, and a wheelchair ramp that wraps around from the driveway.

The donations from local businesses rolled in: paint, tile, siding, carpet. Coca-Cola delivered cases of vitamin water for the workers. Even the porta-potty in the front yard was free.

"Even with the economy, they are still giving," Mutter said.

It was a project that other contractors estimated would take six months and cost $141,000.

These volunteers finished it in less than two months, and with the donations they kept the cost to about $60,000, Lawrence said.

"It's just been awesome," he said.

He and his wife can't find words to express their gratitude, and Brenda can't talk about the outpouring of support without her eyes welling with tears.

"They went over and beyond," she said Tuesday at the house, where she was telling a group of police recruits how to arrange the furniture. "It's so heart touching, and so emotional for me, that someone would be that thoughtful," she said.

The support from the Roanoke Valley as a whole has been overwhelming for the Lawrences.

Lawrence estimates that about a dozen fundraisers, from a motorcycle ride to a cupcake auction, have raised more than $70,000. That money has helped the Lawrences buy a handicap-accessible van.

Becoming home

On Tuesday, Graham and Mutter were putting the finishing touches on the house.

Graham had washed and ironed the curtains. His mother was there with a dust rag, cleaning up after the men.

Police recruits were putting glass shelves back in the china cabinet and carrying headboards into bedrooms, careful not to scrape the freshly painted walls or the new floors.

Less than a mile away, at Friendship Manor, Lawrence was in his apartment surrounded by boxes, ready for the move.

The apartment was furnished with one stuffed chair, a tiny television sitting on a stack of boxes, a hospital bed for him and a single bed for Brenda.

Lawrence relished the thought of sleeping in his queen-sized bed, sitting in his favorite chair and lighting up the gas fireplace while watching football on his big-screen TV.

Wednesday night, he went to sleep in that queen-sized bed. And today, after eating Thanksgiving dinner with a few friends at Shoney's, he plans to light up that fireplace, settle into that plush chair and watch the Arizona Cardinals take on the Philadelphia Eagles on his big-screen TV.

That is what it feels like to be home.