The Silva family has settled in at their new home on Yucatan Drive in Warwick. Left to right: Matthew, 12, Ken, Kenny, 14, Doreen, Sammy, 3, Jayedin, 8 and Isaiah, 7.

The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy

WARWICK –– They were all crowded around the Christmas tree that had been squeezed into the living room of the Silva family’s tiny ranch-style house on Yucatan Drive.

Fire officials. Police. Public works supervisors. The owner of a construction company. An architect. An executive from National Grid. City Hall employees. The mayor.

They were there to answer one key question from the producers of the popular, feel-good television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. The question: Could they guarantee that in less than one week they could create a new home for Doreen and Ken Silva, their five kids and an ever-changing brood of foster children?

One by one they answered yes, Mayor Scott Avedisian recalled last week. And then they heard the words they’d been hoping for from one of the television show’s executive producers.

“He said, ‘Let’s build this family a house,’ and people started to cry,” Avedisian said. “It was very, very emotional.

“My answer was that the city was going to do whatever it could to make this happen because when else do we get to be involved in a project that changes people’s lives in such a dramatic way?”

People will get to see the story tonight on ABC when the Extreme Makeover show chronicles the work of an army of volunteers who worked around the clock (and through one snowstorm) to replace the Silvas’ overcrowded, lead-contaminated house with a new 3,000-square-foot house with ample space, sunlight and bathrooms.

The details of the interior of the gracious-looking home with tiered front lawn and pergola covering the backyard patio are a secret until tonight’s broadcast. The rest of the tale has been very public since February, when Extreme Makeover took over the small neighborhood near Hoxsie Four Corners.

After the Silvas were whisked away on a mandatory trip to Disney World, hundreds of spectators lined up day and night to watch the family’s old house be demolished and the new one feverishly constructed and topped off with finishing touches that included a backyard playhouse and early spring flowers.

Before Ty Pennington, the tousled star and lead interior designer of Extreme Makeover, rousted the family from their home on the morning of Feb. 18, the Silvas lived far from the spotlight.

Ken, 35, drives a recycling collection truck for the city’s Department of Public Works, and Doreen spends her days caring for and home-schooling the couple’s five boys, who range in age from 3 to 14. The two oldest are their biological children; the younger ones were adopted after first living with the family as foster children.

All of the children have special needs, but the family focuses on celebrating each other’s accomplishments as they share their passion for NASCAR racing, pro sports and just being together. Committed to helping as many children in need as they can, Ken and Doreen have cared for more than 16 foster children over the past six years, and they added two more since the house was completed.

They both said they rely a lot on their faith and their extended family at the Warwick Assembly of God church. It was their fellow congregants that Ken and Doreen first turned to when they realized that it would take an extreme miracle to solve the problem of their cramped, contaminated house that was threatening the health of their children and their eligibility to continue foster parenting.

“They knew that they needed to be nominated, and we were all so enthusiastic about it,” said Donna DeSantis, wife of church Pastor Stephen DeSantis and one of Doreen’s best friends. “We had so many people who wrote letters of support once we put the word out,” she said. “Kenny and Doreen are the kind of people who are always willing to help anytime something needs to be done for others.”

According to the show’s Web site, it is committed to improving the living situations of deserving families. It invites anyone to apply and fields countless requests, a process that entails poring over the “before” videos that are requested.

Although the show’s producers picked them in December, all the Silvas knew until the February knock on the door was that they were finalists along with some other Rhode Island families. They believed that the pre-Christmas visit, which required them to leave the house for a couple of hours, was just part of the application process.

Eric Johnson, owner of Oldport Homes, in Portsmouth, had never heard of the Silvas or watched Extreme Makeover: Home Edition when he a got a phone call last fall asking him whether he could build a custom house in a week — for free. He was a little skeptical, to say the least, but it didn’t take long for him to wholeheartedly get on board.

When he first agreed to participate, the Silvas were still just finalists contending with other worthy Rhode Island families that needed a helping hand. Johnson said he was struck by his staff’s enthusiasm for the show. And he was intrigued by the professional challenge.

He said he knew that participation in a prime-time series would result in national publicity, but the bigger attraction was to use his 29 years of building experience to help someone deserving. “My father was a missionary,” Johnson said, recalling childhood years in Texas. “We used to go to Mexico to help build churches, and I hadn’t done anything like that in a while and thought it would feel good.”

Early on, he got Blount Bennett Architects Ltd., of East Providence, to contribute their skills, but that was only the beginning. In order to complete the challenge, Johnson would end up soliciting supplies and skills from hundreds of people. Cabinets, lumber, windows, roof shingles and every nail were donated. And the same was true for the labor — from the crane operators to the trim carpenters.

The builder and his team also had to figure out the best use of the thousands of people who showed up during the frenzied days in Warwick to offer their labor. “They say it’s a week, but it’s really less than that,” Johnson said.

After the Silvas’ joyous Monday morning wake-up call, Tuesday and Wednesday were devoted to moving out their belongings and razing the old house.

Actual construction began mid-day Wednesday, and the house was mostly completed by Saturday although painting, other interior finishing work and the building of some custom furnishings continued up until the minute the Silvas walked to the front door on Monday, Feb.25, while thousands of people cheered.

Most of the actual construction was done in about 98 hours, Johnson said, describing how coffee-fueled crews worked through the nights under the blaze of spotlights, communicating with each other through wireless radios. Since this is not the norm for house building, Johnson said he took the show’s advice and did his homework ahead of time by taking a reconnaissance trip to Nevada to watch another Extreme Makeover production.

“Once I saw that, I knew we could do it,” said Johnson. “It all came down to scheduling.” Scheduling with military precision, that is.

He credits Oldport vice president Jon Seibold with mapping out the minute-by-minute plan that started a couple of weeks ahead with the arrival of the raw materials. The builder said they were fortunate to find a cavernous warehouse that had once been indoor tennis courts nearby on Commerce Drive.

Lumber, windows, cabinet parts and more were stored there, he said. And they were able to frame the walls and flooring there so they could then be trucked to Yucatan Drive once the project kicked off. Johnson’s low-key manner makes it all sound deceptively easy, but he says there was no margin for error.

If any of the materials did not arrive exactly as ordered, they would have been toast, he said, and through it all he slept only about three hours a night — bunking in a trailer parked down the street from the Silvas’ home.

Johnson rates the experience as one of the best of his life. And he said he’s not alone.

“It felt like a party, even when we were working in the middle of the night,” he said. “You get to meet all kinds of new people and many became new friends.

“Every day we had more people showing up to volunteer than we could actually use. And they were all so happy if they got a chance to help.

“What says it all is that every time I went to thank someone, they ended up trying to thank us for letting them take part.”

One thing TV viewers won’t see is just how difficult it was for everyone to keep the planned makeover a secret from the Silvas for nearly two months. The element of surprise is crucial to the show, and Avedisian said that the producers were very clear that any slip could jeopardize the whole project.

“That day around the Christmas tree right after they said they would build the house, I had to say, ‘Listen it’s only December and this isn’t going to happen till February and we can’t ruin this for these people,’ ” Avedisian recalled. “I asked everyone to swear to me as mayor that they wouldn’t tell anyone –– not even their spouses.

“It was pretty difficult and pretty dramatic,” he said, describing how some employees started avoiding Silva because they didn’t want to say anything by accident. “Kenny must have thought we were all getting pretty rude,” Avedisian said.

“I remember the day the Silvas pulled up to their new house. There were all these people standing around wiping their eyes and saying it must be allergies even though it was February,” Avedisian said. “What this project did for our city is not only show us how we can come together to do something good for someone. It also helped us believe in ourselves as a community.”

bpoliche@projo.com