A year after the California fires, I speak to a neighbor who had to sell and another neighbor who's partly rebuilt.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. Let's start with a number from UCLA, $27 billion.

That's the value of all the homes wiped out by the California wildfires a year ago.

That's the typical cost of those homes before the fires multiplied by the more than 12,000 homes gone. Now, this week here, I'm taking

those big numbers and bringing them down to street level, a street in the community of Altadena,

20 minutes northwest of downtown Los Angeles. On a single block, 15 houses were total losses.

And one of those 15 was my house, but I wanted to hear from my neighbors.

Yeah, so we were a total loss, a grounder, as they call it.

Louis lived on my side of the street, South Corner.

We had a couple of oak trees that survived in the back,

but other than that, it was totally just burnt to ashes. When the initial shock of escaping

flying embers morphed into talk of what's next, Louis and his wife were all in, gung-ho.

My wife and I decided that we were committed to rebuilding,

and we went pretty full throttle and just dove into this unknown world for us,

you know, architecture and design and building.

The planning department would let you go 200 square foot bigger.

We found an amazing architect who happened to be a good friend.

Three months later, a new surprise, one both delightful and daunting.

We found out that my wife was pregnant with our second child, and that was sort of the U-turn on everything.

Some neighbors asked for first names only for this so they could speak more freely with insurance

and other financial matters in flux. Louis does marketing for one of the cable and streaming TV

channels, a man who could see he had a plot twist on his hands.

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