Tressalina Wiggins and her two daughters used to share a bedroom in her parents’ three-bedroom home. But on Sunday, the family cut the ribbon on a renovated home that will give each a room of her own.

“We made a deal,” Wiggins said, while standing on her new porch with her 16-year-old daughter Galactica. “She’d get the bigger room, if I get the bigger closet.”

The home at 1035 Baltic Street, just south of downtown near Fountain Creek and the railroad tracks, is the first that Wiggins has ever owned. But when the Pikes Peak chapter of Habitat for Humanity chose the family as its beneficiaries in a home restoration program, the home on Baltic Street was far from showing the freshly-painted facade it presented on Sunday.

“We didn’t replace the drywall, but we replaced everything else,” said Gary Blake, a construction supervisor for Habitat.

Blake listed everything that had been ripped out and redone – flooring, carpets, counters, cabinets, stove and fridge. Before all the work, the home looked pretty bad, he said.

But even when faced with the grim facts of home repair, Wiggins found something she immediately loved: “I fell in love with the porch,” she said. The Habitat construction crew could do anything to the home, as long as Wiggins could keep the porch, she added.

The previous homeowner had walked away from the home and handed the keys to Habitat, but the non-profit didn’t pass the renovated home on to Wiggins without some work.

As with all recipients of Habitat’s restored homes, the Wiggins family had to put in volunteer hours – Galactica and Wiggins helped on the roof – as well as a $1,000 down payment. Wiggins pays a mortgage that will pay back the construction costs, which average $150,000 on projects like this, said Andy Petersen, the development director for Habitat. Thousands of volunteer hours were spent restoring the house.

There was one thing from the home that the construction crew decide to keep – a hammer they found inside the wall, said Blake. It had been left there when the home was first built, and construction supervisor Joe Allman gave it to Wiggins to use during the restoration work.

On Sunday, Allman held the hammer in one hand and a bible in the other as he welcomed Wiggins and her daughters to their new home.

“Now it’s not mine, it’s yours,” he said of the home. “Wow.”

FILE – In this Feb. 7, 2016 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton holds the hand of Flint Mayor Karen Weaver during a meeting with officials at the House Of Prayer Missionary Baptist Church in Flint, Mich. Flint, a majority-black impoverished community in a state run by Republicans, has become a dominant issue for the Democratic candidates before TuesdayÂ’s primary in Michigan, so much so that they will return to the city for the seventh Democratic debate on Sunday. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)

Paul Sancya