“I look at this place and think, ‘what would Tim think of this place?’” Arlene Nickless said of her Holt home, which was bulldozed and rebuilt as part of ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” last October. “He would be in total awe.”

Tim Nickless never saw the house that has changed his family’s lives, the one covered with remembrances of his life and loves. He died Jan. 19, 2008, after a seven-year fight with Hepatitis C, which he contracted while working as a critical care nurse at Ingham Regional Medical Center.

Nickless was 48. He left behind three young children, his wife of 18 years and a nearly 150-year-old farmhouse that had fallen on hard times during his illness.

Nine months later, the family received a knock on the door from Ty Pennington and ABC’s makeover team, which revolutionizes houses for families in need.

Within a week, hundreds of construction workers and volunteers had erected a beautiful, sprawling four-bedroom home for the Nickless family.

But while the family still can’t believe their good fortune today, six months after the construction, they are finding it harder than expected to make their new house feel like home.

The great

Arlene Nickless classifies the past 20 years in three categories — the great, the tragic and the extreme.

The “great” starts with a love story.

She was a small-town factory worker in Warsaw, Ind., a city of about 12,500 people in northern Indiana, raising two children as a single mother.

He was a single father with two daughters in Michigan, working part-time medical jobs while studying to become a cardiovascular surgeon.

Tim and Arlene Nickless met in August 1990 at Muskegon’s Pleasure Island Water Theme Park, where their kids started playing together in a lazy river. They talked the entire day, and a romance blossomed.

Soon, Tim was picking up Arlene’s children from school, doing chores around the house and leaving love notes in the wrappers of muffins Arlene would grab for breakfast as she ran out the door.

“If I had stayed down in Indiana, I would have been a small-town girl going nowhere,” Arlene said. “He would expose us to the world, to nature, to God’s creation. It was just nonstop. He was always on the go.”

They married in December of the same year and moved to Lansing from Grand Rapids in 1995.

The tragic

Tim Nickless continued to work at Ingham Regional Medical Center, raised three more children with Arlene — Andrew, Noah and Aaron — and decided to put off his plans to become a surgeon.

While at work in 2001, Tim was poked with a needle. Two years later, complaining of upper respiratory problems and extreme itchiness on his leg, Tim saw a doctor and was diagnosed with Hepatitis C, a virus transferred through contaminated blood that causes liver inflammation.

He underwent a liver transplant in 2005, and within hours his skin, which had started to turn black, returned to a healthy hue.

Two months later, Tim’s symptoms returned. As his health deteriorated and Arlene struggled to raise the three children, care for her husband and tend to a full-time job, the house fell apart.

The upstairs bedroom lost heat, faucets couldn’t be used for drinking water and family members slept near a recalled furnace at night.

“I had to share (a bedroom) with my mom and dad because my bedroom had black mold in it and their bedroom was warmer anyway,” said Andrew Nickless, 8, the youngest son.

While waiting for a transplant, Tim endured countless days in the hospital while trying to take advantage of his “good” days with the kids.

But in early 2008, about seven years after contracting the virus, the adventurous handyman and devoted father figure died.

“There was nothing he didn’t know how to do — except get well,” Arlene said.

The extreme

Before Tim’s death, Arlene started writing letters to ABC about receiving an extreme home makeover, but never finished or sent them. After Tim’s death, a TV commercial following a local news telecast said ABC producers were looking for families worthy of a new home.

By October 2008, the Nickless family was selected and whisked away for a week at Disney World while their house was torn down and rebuilt by hundreds of community volunteers into a fully furnished 3,300-square-foot home.

“I was captivated by the whole build,” said Ed Pierce, a neighbor who watched the construction that week.

The abode featured bedrooms for the boys themed after airplanes and engineering, a play structure, new kitchen and upgrades. The children also were given two-year scholarships from MSU and Lansing Community College.

But when the unveiling was complete and the cameras left Holt, the Nickless’ were surprised by the makeover’s effects.

Gone were the tree house Tim built for the kids and a light-strewn tree that Arlene used to illuminate on the 19th of every month in honor of Tim. When the Nickless’ house was demolished, so were the kids’ memories of their father, which mostly were contained in the home and hospital. Lost in the shuffle of moving all the family’s belongings were family treasures, such as a framed memorial to Tim.

Andrew, the youngest of the children, wanted ABC to come back and reconstruct the family’s old house.

The family also has had to dispute rumors they are losing the house. The community raised about $60,000 to pay the original $140,000 mortgage, but property taxes are expected to triple.

“The hardest thing in all of this are the things that I didn’t expect,” Arlene said. “It rushed the grieving process faster than I was ready for.”

At the same time, the family is grateful for the support shown by community members who helped build the house and cheered the family’s return. They remain astounded by the simple things, such as being able to put away a loaf of bread without having to worry about ants or rodents.

After the one-year anniversary of the makeover, Arlene plans to get a slab of marble engraved and placed in the yard, thanking volunteers and those that have supported her, Andrew, Noah, 9, and Aaron, 12.

“The realization that this actually did happen is still going,” Arlene said. “I couldn’t understand why something so precious was taken away from us, but I know there’s something better down the road.”