Two wounded soldiers, one Florida street, and thank-you notes sealed inside the walls

In Riverview, Florida, two wounded Army veterans, Ryan Heard and Carson Shaw, were each given a mortgage-free home. The two houses stand side by side. Before the drywall went up, builders and neighbours wrote messages of thanks on the frames, and those messages are now sealed inside the walls.

At half past two in the afternoon, Army Spc. Ryan Heard arrived on Sunlight Meadow Drive to see the house built for him. An hour later Army Sgt. Carson Shaw arrived at the house next door. The builder called the handover a Notes of Love ceremony, after the messages hidden inside the walls.

Heard enlisted in 2007. He served two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. In July 2013, during a mission to clear roadside bombs in Logar Province, an IED exploded. He survived with a traumatic brain injury and later received the Purple Heart. Until now, he, his partner Danielle and their children had been staying with relatives while they looked for a permanent home.

“The fact that we’re going to go from a single bedroom to our own home means so much to me,” he told Spectrum News. On the day itself, he called the community’s part in building the house “overwhelming and unbelievable.”

Shaw served six years with the 1st Ranger Battalion and was deployed to Iraq, Syria and Africa. In October 2024 he was in a vehicle crash while on duty, and it left him paralysed from the waist down. He and his partner Annalisa are now looking ahead. He is studying finance and economics, and he plans to start a nonprofit that offers water-based recreation for people with disabilities. He said the day would stay with his family as one of the most special in their lives.

The houses were built by the West Florida Division of PulteGroup through its Built to Honor programme. The programme is run with the nonprofit Building Homes for Heroes and also gives homes to Gold Star families. This was the first time the division honoured two veterans at once. Work in the Spencer Glen community began in June. The two houses share a single street address.

Building Homes for Heroes began with one man. Andy Pujol volunteered in the rescue work at the World Trade Center after the attacks of September 2001. Five years later he founded the organisation, and he still runs it without pay. In 2024 it gave its 400th home, and it has set a goal of 500.

Tony Campano, PulteGroup’s vice president of procurement for the division, walked the veterans through rooms whose walls hold handwritten notes behind the plaster.

The houses are due to be finished in November. Heard and Shaw expect to move in with their families by Thanksgiving.