Rachael Ray Reveals Newly Rebuilt Home 1 Year After Devastating Fire: 'Really Exciting'

Rachael Ray is giving a glimpse inside her newly rebuilt home over a year after it was destroyed in a massive fire.

The celebrity chef, 53, opened her doors on the season 16 premiere of the Rachael Ray Show to give fans a tour of the upstate New York home she shares with her husband, John Cusimano.

"This is our house. It is really exciting to have a house rebuilt in a little over a year," Ray said, showing viewers around the home, which she tried her best to recreate after the August 2020 fire. In the wake of the blaze, all that was left of the house was "just the hole in the ground," Ray said. A year later, she is "back to a fresh shell that is very much the same."

"It's as close to the original as we could [get]," she said. "A lot of this is just rebuilt things that look like a facsimile of what was here."

Still, there were some small tweaks with the renovations. "We took out the skylights in the bottom guest room because no one liked them. It woke them up too early," Ray said, while her husband added that they changed the roof from wood to tin.

The house may be newly built, but it maintains its homey, lived-in feel thanks to the largely wood-covered interior. As Ray explained, "The reason the house looks old even when it's new, or new again, is because all of this is fallen wood. It's reclaimed fallen barns and beam work which gave the house the warmth it had."

After the fire, Ray and her husband "lost most of our adult lives," she said. She later added that she's "grateful to have been able to rebuild their home so quickly.

"Everybody in life in the last couple of years has had to move on and pivot and rethink and reorganize their lives—and that's what we're trying to do," she added. "I am super grateful that we had the firefighters that saved our lives. And we ultimately became very grateful to have everyone share our lives with us through this tough time, because we were all going through the same tough time together."

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Ray previously opened up about escaping the fire on the season 15 premiere of her show last year, telling viewers she and her husband were about to enjoy dinner together when a man ran into their yard to tell them their roof was on fire.

Ray had run inside hoping to grab "medicine, my notebooks, my mother's high school ring, things that when your house is burning down, you don't want to leave," she said, "But when I ran to the top of the stairs, I could hear the fire in the wall. I could hear the electricity, I could hear danger."

Thankfully, nobody was injured in the blaze. In an editor's letter published in November 2020 in the Rachael Ray In Season holiday issue, Ray said she was appreciative of everything that came out of the experience.

"I'm grateful to the first responders who saved my life. I'm grateful for the opportunity to rebuild," she wrote. "I'm grateful I had a place to stay when my world caught fire, where I could take sanctuary, and that I learned, in a way I hadn't really understood before, the difference between a house and a home."