‘If You Pray, Pray’: Homeowner in Path of L.A. Fires Fears for Her 138-Year-Old Victorian Filled With Antiques

Courtney and Matthew Weil were extremely excited to start moving into their 138-year-old Italianate Victorian house whose fun rehab reels have gone viral on TikTok.

But the timing couldn’t have been worse.

The historic house they’ve been lovingly and expensively fixing up since buying it in 2022 is “exceptionally close” to one of the largest fires raging in Los Angeles.

Currently, more than 153,000 residents are under evacuation orders in Los Angeles County and thousands of buildings have been destroyed.

Courtney is hoping her home won’t be one of them.

“It is flat-out apocalyptic,” Courtney tells Realtor.com®. “It smells like a wildfire, like somebody is doing a campfire in my front yard. The burning smell is so strong. There is ash raining down from the sky. There’s ash falling on me.”

Their house is just a mile and a half from a mandatory evacuation zone, she says, noting that she is “glued to” the news and fire maps, waiting to see if the order comes to evacuate.

The couple and their 4-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son are staying in a nearby house. They haven’t seen their beloved historic home since they started moving their belongings in two days ago, just before the first fires broke out.

Though her contractor asked her to stop by, she is reluctant to do so, not wanting to be “part of the problem” by venturing into the streets where people are trying to evacuate.

The next day, she did stop by the house. It is still standing, but has ash all over the porch and front yard.

“This is terrifying,” she says in her TikTok video, picking up a large piece of ash that had dropped onto the porch.

“I grew up in Oklahoma where tornadoes destroyed things on the regular, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” she tells Realtor.com.

For security reasons, Courtney asked that the exact location of their house not be revealed.

“Police have made some arrests as people are seeing these empty homes and looting,” she says. In December, someone broke into their garage but was scared off by an alarm.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has deployed hundreds of members of the National Guard and enacted a curfew to discourage looting.

“To those who would seek to take advantage of evacuated communities, let me be clear: Looting will not be tolerated,” he said at a press conference.

Courtney says they currently have an East Lake china cabinet chained to the columns of their front porch so no one makes off with it.

Many of the antiques are too heavy to be removed for safekeeping elsewhere. It’s also unclear where the items could be moved to escape the fast-moving fires.

Timeless treasure

The couple bought their dream house in 2022 from a historic preservation society, and it came filled with antiques. While Courtney doesn’t think they’re worth much financially, they are priceless in sentimentality.

The couple started TikTok and Instagram accounts to share their interesting finds. One video recently went viral with 2 million views. It showed the unearthing of a large “coffin-sized” antique music box found in an upstairs closet. It played “The Bridal March.”

“People think it’s creepy because that’s how horror movies start,” she says with a laugh.

The Weils love the music box too much to sell it. But if they wanted to, it would get only about $500 at auction due to having too much damage, says the Expert Institute‘s music box expert Nancy Fratti, of Nancy Fratti Music Boxes.

Fratti says the box was made in Switzerland, circa 1880–1910. One in excellent condition might fetch about $2,500 to $3,500.

Still, Fratti is impressed by the Weils’ music box.

“It’s fortunate that the gear train seems to have survived intact, as the box is still playing,” she says.

Other vintage finds included a complete World War I Army Corps uniform and a collection of photographs and memorabilia of the comedy magic duo Milo & Roger, who made many TV appearances in the 1950s and ’60s.

The entertainers were personal friends of the home’s last owner, Roger Madison, who died in the late 1980s.

“The cemetery [Madison] is buried in is now gone,” Courtney says, referring to the fires ravaging a nearby burial ground.

As a lover of historic homes who also grew up in a home built in 1918, Courtney was devastated to learn that “almost all the historic homes” in nearby Altadena had been burned to the ground.

Like many Californians, Courtney and Matthew had trouble getting home insurance. State Farm dropped their policy in February 2023 as historic homes are considered “high risk.”

Though they currently have insurance, Courtney says, the policy is “not great.”

“It would be catastrophic in a million ways” if the home burned, she adds. “The financial loss would be huge.”

Still, she is hoping for the best.

“There’s nothing we can do right now,” she says. “This is devastating for the community we’ve moved into.”

As she put it in a TikTok video: “If you pray, pray. If you send good vibes, send good vibes. Do a rain dance if that’s your thing, because we need it desperately right now.”