Status: UNKNOWN
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition celebrity crossover episodes have gotten complicated with all the behind-the-scenes details flying around. As someone who’s cataloged every guest appearance and special episode the show ever produced, I learned everything there is to know about the Harris family and their record-breaking household. Today, I will share it all with you.
A Historic Family
The Harris family holds a distinction that goes beyond anything the show typically featured. They are the parents of the first ever set of surviving African-American sextuplets. Sextuplets. Six babies, born at the same time, all surviving — and this was a historic first for the African-American community. The odds of naturally conceiving sextuplets are somewhere around one in 4.7 billion, and the survival rate for all six is even more remarkable.
If you’ve ever been around one newborn and thought “this is exhausting,” try multiplying that by six. Same feeding schedules, same diaper changes, same sleepless nights — times six, all happening simultaneously. The Harris family wasn’t just dealing with parenthood. They were managing a logistical operation that most hospitals would struggle with, and they were doing it from a regular family home.
Hurricane Ivan
Probably should have led with this section, honestly, because the hurricane damage is what brought the show to the Harris family’s doorstep.
Hurricane Ivan tore through the Gulf Coast in September 2004, and the Harris family’s home took a hit. When you’re already housing a family with sextuplets — which requires more space, more storage, and more of literally everything than a typical household — hurricane damage isn’t just inconvenient. It’s catastrophic. Whatever organizational systems they’d built to manage six children the same age were thrown into chaos by storm damage, and fixing it on a family budget that’s already stretched impossibly thin by six kids wasn’t realistic.
The Muppets Show Up
That’s what makes the Harris family episode endearing to us fans who remember the show’s big moments — the production team didn’t just send in the regular construction crew. On March 6, 2005, the Muppets joined the rebuild. Yes, the actual Muppets. Kermit, Miss Piggy, the whole crew. It was one of those crossover moments that shouldn’t work on paper but absolutely delivered on screen.
I’ll be honest, when I first read that the Muppets appeared on Extreme Makeover, I thought it would feel gimmicky. But paired with the Harris family’s story — these history-making sextuplets, the hurricane damage, the enormous challenge of raising six kids the same age — it actually worked. The kids were the right age to go absolutely nuts over seeing Kermit the Frog in their new house, and that’s the kind of genuine, unscripted joy that made the best Extreme Makeover episodes special.
Building for Sextuplets
The construction challenge here was unlike anything the team had faced before. Building a home for sextuplets requires you to think about space and organization in a completely different way. You need six of everything that’s normally a one-per-kid item. Six beds. Six desks. Six sets of storage. Six spots at the dinner table. And because all six kids are the same age, they’re all going through the same developmental stages at the same time — so whatever design solution works today needs to still work in two years when all six of them are bigger, louder, and need more personal space.
Bathrooms alone become a military operation. Getting six same-age kids ready for school in the morning requires either a lot of bathrooms or a really detailed schedule, preferably both. The design team had to think through every daily routine the Harris family would face and engineer solutions that worked at scale. It’s not just a big house — it’s a house designed to handle the specific chaos of raising the first surviving African-American sextuplets.
Where Are They Now?
I haven’t been able to verify the current status of the Harris family home, and this is one where I’m especially curious. Those sextuplets would be young adults by now, which means the house has gone through every stage of child-rearing — toddlers, grade schoolers, teenagers, and eventually kids moving out. Whether the parents downsized once the kids started leaving, or whether they’ve kept the home as a family gathering place, I honestly don’t know.
What I do know is that the Harris family gave us one of the most unique and genuinely fun episodes in the show’s entire run. Not every Extreme Makeover story has to be gut-wrenching. Sometimes it’s a remarkable family, a hurricane, and the Muppets, and that’s more than enough to make great television.
Status pending verification – January 2026
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