Martin Johnson and his fiancé, Celeigh Chapman, had spent several years restoring and renovating their home in Altadena by hand. It took only hours to lose the home and everything in it last week.

“We didn’t have a kitchen for a year and a half. We had just cooked the first dinner in the house just after Christmas,” said Johnson, who co-owns LA Woodshop, which provides woodworking spaces and lessons for people who want to do it themselves or build furniture professionally.

“We spent many nights hand-sanding doors and window frames,” Chapman said.

“The floors took 18 months to finish,” Johnson said. “We were weeks away from being done making the house into a piece of art, and now it’s gone.”

If dealing with that financial and emotional loss isn’t enough, they’re faced with what was already a difficult and expensive housing market in Southern California.