Christopher Hamor’s hope was that he and his family would celebrate Thanksgiving in the new house.

It had been his goal for the last year and a half. It was why he and his wife had worked so hard, why he had spent every dollar he had, why he had sold nearly everything of value he owned. All of it – the sweat, the sacrifice, the bartered services – had gone into building this house that faced the Penobscot River in Winterport, the house with the wrap-around porch and the upstairs bedroom with the dormer window that his 3-year-old daughter couldn’t stop talking about. Her very own bedroom.

And the dream house was just about complete. All Hamor had left to do was to put up the cabinets in the kitchen, hang the curtains in the windows, and hook up the appliances. Then it would be done, and the family – which is expected to grow by one any day now – could move out of their trailer up the road and into their new house near the river. On Sunday, having put another coating of polyurethane on the hardwood floors, Hamor went outside, sat on an overturned bucket in the afternoon sun and admired his work.

“This is going to be beautiful,” he told himself before heading back to the trailer to watch the Miami Dolphins game on TV.

Hamor’s father, who lives nearby, was the first to see the smoke. After checking to see if anyone was inside, he ran home and told his wife to call the fire department. Two hours later, Hamor’s house – the dream he’d built by hand from the foundation up – was a charred and smoldering ruin.

On Tuesday, Hamor sat in the office of the boat-storage business his family started a year ago and shook his head in utter disbelief. Because he built the house himself, without a contractor, Hamor had been unable to get insurance coverage while it was under construction. The electrician who did the wiring, which investigators suspect was the cause of the fire, had no insurance either. Hamor had about $50,000 of his own money tied up in that house, and the fire took every dime.

“I’m still in shock over it,” he said. “All that work and money and we’re right back where we started. I have nothing left to sell anymore. And we were so close.”

Hamor and his wife, Michelle, had been talking about building the house for years. Last spring, Hamor decided it was time to get started. At 33, having grown up in trailers, he wanted his daughter, Taylor, to have a permanent house. Because of credit problems in his past, however, he couldn’t get a bank loan. So he raised money by selling things – vehicles, a small lobster boat, a couple of jet skis.

He bought materials with the wages he earned as an excavator at his father’s contracting business. He swapped work with tradespeople, including a relative who helped him with the carpentry.

Over the winter, Hamor felled pine trees in a grove along the river and had the logs milled into boards. Since last spring, he spent every available minute building the house. Taylor had picked out her bedroom right away. It was upstairs, with a window that looked up the river.

“Every time she was at the house she’d run right up there,” Hamor said, covering his eyes and sobbing quietly. “She always wanted to show people her room. She was so excited about it. That’s what hurts the most. Even after we told her about the fire, and that we weren’t going to have a house for a long time, she wanted to go up and see her room.”

Standing in front of the burned-out house, staring at the melted siding, the charred porch, the blackened interior, Hamor drew a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

“I don’t know how, or when, but I will start over. I’ll build this house again,” he said. “Taylor will have her bedroom someday.”

Tom Weber’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.