Mandy Moore Reveals Contents of Her Almost-Finished Altadena Home ‘Are a Near Total Loss’ After Eaton Fire

Mandy Moore detailed how her Altadena, Calif. home was impacted by January’s Eaton Fire. 

On Tuesday, Feb. 11, the This Is Us star, 40, posted an Instagram photo of her home, sharing that “the contents of our home are a near total loss” due to its proximity to the fires and other burning structures. Moore previously said on Jan. 9 that “miraculously” the “main part” of the house was “still standing.”

“Pretty much everything will have to be disposed of…maybe even the walls too,” she wrote Tuesday. “We won’t be there for a very long time as it and the neighborhood itself get sorted out and cleaned and the rebuilding starts.”

Moore chronicled the day she and her husband, Taylor Goldsmith, and their three children, August “Gus,” 3, and Oscar “Ozzie,” 2, and Louise “Lou” Everett, 4 months, decided to evacuate ahead of the weeks-long Eaton Fire. “That day, Tuesday, January 7th, is seared in my brain,” Moore wrote, noting that her eldest child’s school was canceled due to the winds.

Moore was nursing her daughter when her brother-in-law, Griffin Goldsmith, called her at 6:45 p.m. to tell her that he, his wife, their daughter, and her in-laws were evacuating and advised her to do the same. 

“I calmly walked downstairs and relayed this to my husband and without skipping a beat, we promptly packed up the kids (in their pjs), our dog, and scrambled to find our 3 cats as the power went out,” she wrote. 

“I’ll never forget Taylor trying to figure out how to manually open our two little garage doors (they’d just finished construction around Thanksgiving and we’d just started using them—) in the harrowing 60 mph winds, as the sky glowed a dark red and ash started to fall all around us.” 

They “raced across town amidst fallen trees on the freeway” and then reached the safety of their friend’s home. As the night continued, she was “impulsively refreshing the watch duty app over and over” and monitored “the evacuation zone narrow in on our little 8-block radius.” Then, by 4 a.m., her home was in the danger zone. 

“All the while, tossing and turning with a stomach-churning anxiety I’ve never experienced before, both boys passed out between us in bed. Lou slept on the floor in a travel crib, and the dog curled up protectively by the door.”

“By the next morning, we’d had 2 neighbors confirm that our house was indeed gone. We held each other, processed the unimaginable,” she continued. Then, she and Taylor, 39, shopped for clothing “because we actually took nothing with us, fully expecting to come back the next morning.” 

“It wasn’t for another few hours that we would find out that much of our property had burned down, but our home itself was miraculously still standing,” she wrote, but their “entire community was gone.”

Moore asked in her comment section for “help and guidance on how to process this trauma because my brain and heart are so deeply broken.”

“I say all of this because i’m struggling. Yes we are exceedingly lucky to technically still have the structure of a home. But also… do we still have a home? I think my definition is in flux. The physical space? No,” she wrote, adding that home is wherever her family of five is, “but having a sanctuary and safe space to feel settled really goes a long way too.”

The actress explained that she and Taylor weren’t looking to move when they discovered the Altadena home in the summer of 2020, but they “instinctively knew that it would be where we raised our kids,” and two weeks later, she learned she was pregnant with her first child. 

“It took us 4 years to slowly and painstakingly restore, remodel, and make it our own. I joke that we bought the place without kids and we moved in with 2 (and one on the way),” she revealed. “We were weeks away from finally being done with everything when the fires hit.”

“I’m not saying all of this because I’m asking you to feel more sorry for us than someone else. Like I said, I am grateful. We’re so lucky,” Moore wrote, adding that her family has found a safe place to stay.

“Real human beings across this town, regardless of their jobs or socioeconomic status, lost the life they’d come to know and count on in an instant,” she concluded. “My whole heart is with them. Every one of them. This place, our home and the town itself, was our dream and I hope in time it will feel like that again… just a slightly different one.”

Click here to learn more about how to help the victims of the L.A. fires.