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Having your house burn down isn’t something anyone wants to face, whether in real life or on TV. And when that house has been around as long as Days of Our Lives’ Horton home, it’s especially devastating. But, out of the ashes you can find new life — and the good news is, it seems like that’s what the show is planning to do with Doug and Julie’s beloved home.

But it almost wasn’t.

When Susan Seaforth Hayes spoke with Michael Fairman recently, revealing that the Horton house was almost destroyed for good. And with it, perhaps, the family itself.

“Many years ago,” she shares, “another regime had planned on trashing the set and getting rid of the set because nobody cared about the Hortons anymore. It was stopped by one person, and I was eternally grateful for that.”

Hayes didn’t share who that one person was, but we, too, are thankful for their intervention! Still, when Seaforth Hayes learned of this fire, you can understand why her first thought was that this time, it really did herald the end of the Hortons. While the family has grown to massive proportions over the years, there are, frustratingly, few who have actually stuck around Salem.

Julie’s portrayer recalls thinking, “‘Oh, my goodness! I guess I’ll be meeting people for a cup of coffee at the Horton Square. No home, no roots, no reason to be called in,’ and thinking that’s the end of Julie. That’s the end of Doug and Julie.”

But that’s not what happened at all. Instead, the writers started to build a story around it, though not even Seaforth Hayes had an idea of how big it would get.

“I enjoyed the aftermath,” she shares, “because in the aftermath, and a little bit before the fire, if you saw the show, I get to talk a bit about the history of the household and the people in it.”

It’s not tearing down history, but honoring it. As for why the Horton house had to go, it wasn’t to wipe history clear. That would have been a particularly grievous sin with the show’s 60th anniversary coming up. Instead, as these things usually do, it came down to practicality. “They’ve done everything to make quicker set changes,” Seaforth Hayes explains to Fairman, “which is remarkable and very efficient right now.”

The good thing is, the set designer asked for her input and she happily gave it. While the actress acknowledges that not everyone cares about the past on Day of Our Lives so much as keeping the action flowing fast and furious, “that’s not just what the show can do. What the show can do so well is character. There’s a lot of people over 70 who are still on the show now. I’m the oldest one, but I’m not the only one.”

The present is all well and good, but Days of Our Lives wouldn’t be the show it is without its past. Losing touch with that would be just about unforgivable. Plus, losing a family as sprawling, wild and integral to Salem’s existence as the Hortons would be incredibly detrimental to the show.

There may not be many Hortons onscreen right now, but there are so many out there with ties to other characters and storylines. So long as the family sticks around and there’s a reason to keep bringing them back, the possibilities for creating more of that drama that everyone craves are practically endless. And their decades-long ties to the show can also inject plenty of character development and exploration in to give these stories that much more emotional weight.

On Wednesday’s episode (you can read the recap here), Stephanie and Chad talked about rebuilding the house for future Hortons — Chad’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren even. Alice’s chair survived and the ornaments survived. So as Julie rebuilds the house, we’re going to keep hoping that the show takes this opportunity to not just make sure the Hortons survive, but thrive for many years to come.