What do you do the day after your house burns down with everything you own inside?

“You go to Wal-Mart in your pajamas,” said Mark Mooney.

It’s been a year since the Mooney family – Mark and his wife Judy along with their twins, Zechariah and Mikayla, and Judy’s mother, Gale Costa – lost their home due to a faulty chimney. But they’re a resilient bunch.

“You have to look back and count your blessings. That’s what Mark and I have done a lot,” said Judy, Marion’s finance director.

The family’s home on Crystal Spring Road, originally built by Judy’s grandparents, caught fire shortly after power returned to the area following the February 2013 blizzard.

“Is smoke supposed to be coming out from behind the TV like that?” asked Zechariah.

Mark jumped up and found a glowing orange bead of fire ascending the wall by the stairs. When a few buckets of water did nothing to stop it, Mark ordered everyone out of the house and ran upstairs to grab the family’s hard drive of photos.

Once outside, the family watched as firefighters tried to put out the flames.

“It was surreal. Gee whiz, your whole life is getting torched,” said Mark, an engineer with Liberty Mutual.

When all was said and done, the home was mostly ashes. But the words you’ll hear out of the Mooney’s mouths aren’t those of a family who has lost everything.

Their thankfulness goes so far as to be appreciative of an 86-page spreadsheet of their lost possessions and a shout out to their insurance company, Liberty Mutual.

“You realize that it’s just stuff,” said Mark.

Still, the family is very thankful for some things that, beyond reason, survived the flames.

Judy was particularly saddened by the loss of two diaries she had written to her children when they were premature infants. Now 14 and students at Old Rochester Regional Junior High, they weighed 1 pound, 13 ounces as birth and were in the hospital for three months.

“I thought about it and was crying my eyes out,” said Judy.

Sifting through the rubble, where Mark had already found Judy’s diamond ring, he uncovered the books.

“It was literally two scoops of ash, and I found them! You can’t help but go, man, God was watching over us. Not a word was burned,” Mark said.

For Mark, the loss of family videos was most devastating.

“I was thinking about a video clip of the kids, and then it hit me. The tapes are gone, and it was devastating,” said Mark.

The area where the videos were stored was a “molten mess” that had formed a lid of sorts. Oh ya, you know what was underneath them.

“There’s a whole roll of tapes that are preserved,” said Mark. “They’re all in the timeframe that I was thinking of.”

The Mooneys also recovered a beloved teddy bear and a few other keepsakes.

Over the next 12 months, the community came to their rescue.

After the fire, family friends Anne and Jeff Carreiro took the Mooneys into their home for a month. Teachers and parents organized an open mic night at Old Hammondtown School and other community members held a spaghetti supper fundraiser. Local churches, the Boy Scouts and countless others helped with fundraisers and donations.

“It was very hard for Mark and I,” said Judy. “You just have to learn to accept it. It’s very humbling.”

The family saw it all as God’s work, and looking back, they can even see ways that God prepared them for the fire.

During the family’s nightly Bible study about week before the fire, they were finishing up the Old Testament book of Job, about a man who lost everything but still followed God.

“Zech says to me, ‘God wouldn’t take away all our stuff would he?’” related Mark “The lesson that we brought from it was that what God gives us, He can take away. It’s God’s stuff on loan to us.”

The lesson hit home for Zechariah and Mikayla.

“The kids were like, I guess it was time to take it away,” Mark said. “It was a real faith builder.”

The fire wasn’t the only bad news the family received. The same week, Judy’s father passed away, and her mother’s health has been up and down.

“It’s been quite the whirlwind of the year,” Judy said.

In the midst of it all, the couple marked their 25th year of marriage, which they plan to celebrate later this year and broke ground on a new house on the same site.

The pair had always wanted to build a home in New Hampshire.

But, they thought, “Why don’t we just build our dream house here?” said Mark.

Started last summer (“It looked smaller on paper,” said Mark), the family hopes to move in by early summer.

Reflecting on the past year, from the firefighters who rescued cherished photos and signed Patriots memorabilia from the burning home to the community’s support, the Mooneys continue to be overwhelmed by and grateful for the blessings they’ve received.

“How do you express the thanks?’ Mark said “It’s bigger than what we can do.”