VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) — It has been a tough few years for the Bowstring family, and 2020 hasn’t been much easier.

Stacy Bowstring says back in March, her husband was already on deployment on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, so she and her girls decided to stay in Florida with her parents.

In June, she came back to get her home ready for her husband’s arrival. She was shocked when she opened the door.

“There wasn’t an inch of my house I could walk in that wasn’t covered in rat feces,” said Bowstring.

Everything from her carpet, to clothing, and even furniture, was ruined. Bowstring says the cost to get rid of the rats was thousands of dollars. She reached out to military charities, but COVID-19 had left many unable to help. So, Bowstring’s friend Katie reached out to the show “Moving with the Military.”

“An Air Force spouse reached out to us and said ‘This is bigger than what you do, I don’t know if you have that budget, I don’t know if there’s any way you can help, but can you because everyone has said no,'” said Maria Reed, founder of Moving with the Military.

Reed says with the help of Caliber Home Loans, within two and a half weeks, they fixed the issues caused by the rats and even gave them a full home makeover.

“We didn’t want her husband to come home from the Eisenhower — they were deployed I believe, it’s the longest no port-of-call in Navy history — and to come home and see the house in the condition as it was, that wasn’t right,” said Reed.

“They came in and they just — they did. And they replaced everything and they did everything we didn’t even need them to do,” said Bowstring.

Bowstring says she’s forever grateful and happy her home is now a safe place to live.

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