No Place Like Home, but This Will Do Just Fine

TUSTIN — The minute Faith Kim saw the house, she felt its good vibes.

The address on Singing Wood Lane appeals to her romanticism. She loves the spacious, airy feel. The panorama of rooftops and green hills from every room is spectacular. Best of all, the house is only “an arm’s length away” from her real home, which was one of 10 homes destroyed in the Lemon Heights fires in October.

The new house can’t take the place of the one where Kim, a Baptist pastor and seminary professor, and her husband, David, raised their three daughters, said Kim, 55. “But it will do until the rebuilding is complete,” she added.

So, the family leased the two-story, five-bedroom house, and Wednesday, David and Faith Kim and their three daughters, Daniella, Andrea and Sandra, moved into it to begin yet another transition in a series of changes brought about by the fire.

Since the Oct. 21 fires, the Kims have been living in a three-bedroom apartmentin Brea, sleeping on futon mattresses, which were laid on the floors, and maneuvering their way through stacks of boxes of pictures, books and dishes they managed to salvage from the fire.

“I was looking forward to moving here because I was getting tired of sifting through boxes every day looking for clothes, for socks, for things,” Kim said as she and Daniella supervised two movers around the house. “My state of mind was ready for some drawers, ready for some lamps, ready for some furniture.”

All 92 pieces of them. “Only two of us and 92 pieces,” one mover muttered as he took a good look around the large house and its daunting stairsteps. “Is there an elevator?”

No, but there is a dumbwaiter, which goes down to the garage. Eleven rooms. A swimming pool. Cathedral ceiling with dark wood beams. All of it, and the rented furniture, is paid for by their homeowner’s insurance.

“This is the way our house was, with the open beams and warm colors,” said Daniella Kim, 25, who also likes the house for its many similarities to her old home. “I have a good feeling about it because it’s close to our house. That’s where we grew up. That’s where we feel solid.”

While Daniella Kim guided the movers, her mother looked through photographs that chronicled their years at their old house, photographs that still smell of the burning. “When I look at these pictures, it really helps me process the pain,” she said. “They preserve the memories of the things I once had, the happiness I shared with my husband and daughters.”

An unabashed optimist, Kim doesn’t like to dwell on the loss of her property, preferring instead to discuss the lessons the destruction taught her. Lessons such as, the minister said, how transitional and temporary everything in life is and how material goods are just, well, material.

“I don’t like to give into self-pity,” Kim said. “This is why I’m not miserable.”

That is not to say everything has been rosy for her family since the fires uprooted their lives, she said. Always easygoing during their 25 years of marriage, she and David Kim have found themselves at times easily irritated with each other.

And, a couple of months ago, she received a hate letter from someone who saw her on television after the fires.

“He said, ‘I’ve never seen or heard such a stupid person in my life. . . . a most idiot person, that’s what you are. Go back to Korea,’ ” Kim recalled.

She continued, “My initial reaction was, ‘Oh, God. How could they?’ ” But then, figuring the writer was responding to her optimistic outlook after losing the house, she decided to view the letter as validating her positive views.

But the down times have been fleeting compared with the strength family members have found in each other, she said. They, like this move into her temporary new home, have all been part of the transition.