BLACKSBURG -- Carol Crawford Smith's seven-day journey from a small house on Ardmore Street to California and back to a new, much larger Blacksburg home ended Sunday as it began -- to the sounds of a cheering crowd and in front of television cameras.

A Roanoke building firm, Virginia Tech faculty and students, and hundreds of other local and national companies donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in materials and labor. They fought snow, sleet and subfreezing temperatures to finish on time.

But the cast of ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" unveiled the new home Sunday to Smith and her sons, Garland and Hunter.

During the taping, Smith, who has multiple sclerosis and uses a cane to walk, was overcome with emotion and had to be carried to the threshold of her new three-bedroom home by Preston Sharp, one of the show's stars.

Cameras are familiar to Smith, who during her career as a world-class ballerina danced principal roles on CBS and PBS and on stages across the world.

Smith, who has lost the ability to dance but still teaches ballet with help from assistants, was chosen by the show's producers this fall from thousands of applicants to receive a new handicapped-accessible house.

In her new three-bedroom, 2.5-bath house Smith will no longer have to fight her way down a flight of stairs to the washing machine in the basement or struggle to mount the steps to her front door.

The new house also was designed to work for her in case she ever has to use a wheelchair.

MS afflicts thousands of Virginians, many of whom find it increasingly difficult to live in homes that weren't built to accommodate a disability, said Fay Painter, director of the Blue Ridge chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Painter and the society hope Smith's story will move others to get involved and to donate money to programs that pay to make the homes of MS patients much better places in which to live.

Debbie Travis and others from Asbury United Methodist Church in Christiansburg, where Smith is a member, were there Sunday for the homecoming.

The new home "will mean the world to her and just make her life so much easier," Travis said.

The project was a feat of mobilization including hundreds of skilled tradesmen who donated time and materials that probably total more than $1 million, according to Virginia Tech architecture professor Joe Wheeler.

Wheeler and his colleague Robert Dunay helped Amanda McCreary of Building Specialists of Roanoke design the house.

Tech's industrial safety department also has given countless hours to the project.

Snow, sleet and subfreezing temperatures set the project back several times. But the work went on 24 hours a day.

It "was like a controlled skid. We bumped into many things over the week but managed to stay focused even though we were exhausted," Dunay wrote in an e-mail Sunday.

Sunday was the first time all the show's stars had been seen on the site since a week ago when the crew filmed Smith being whisked away to La Jolla, Calif., for a vacation. She was not allowed to speak with the media during that time.

Crews also spent the week at Smith's Draper Road dance studio, where they installed automatic doors and a wheelchair lift and did other work.

Smith was scheduled to tour the refurbished studio Sunday evening, where the show's producers planned a surprise.

Smith and her sons won't actually move into the house until later this week because some filming will continue, producers said.

Even then, curious neighbors and friends won't get to look inside until the episode featuring her story airs sometime in the next several weeks.