New Restore to Open in Fairfield

Find Cheap Building Materials & Fund Habitat for Humanity

Fairfield's new Restore will help fund the work of Habitat for Humanity volunteers like these.

Need to furnish your home on a budget? Looking for cheap building materials? Love a good bargain? You’re in luck! Fairfield will soon have it’s own Restore, a resale outfit sponsored by Habitat for Humanity where you can purchase new and gently used surplus building materials at 40 to 60 percent off retail prices. The Source spoke with Habitat board director John Loin to find out what the Restore does and how you can help.

You’ve been hosting a series of sales that are billed as pre-Restore events. Why the “pre”?
Basically, there’s a checklist that we have to complete before we’re officially recognized as a Restore, and having pre-Restore sales helps raise money for it. So we call it a pre-Restore. But we’re almost at the point where we’re going to be officially recognized.

Are the funds that our Restore raises going directly toward building homes in Fairfield through Habitat for Humanity?
Sure, that’s the whole reason I wanted to get this started. People have been very generous in making donations to the Fairfield Habitat for Humanity, but to really be successful at a nonprofit like this, you have to have other sources, other funds, instead of depending totally on the goodwill of the local people. That’s how we’ve gotten to this point and now we need funds for more projects that we’d like to do.

What housing needs do you see in Fairfield?
There’s always a need for better houses for people who can’t really afford them. That’s just a given. We know there are people out there, it’s just a matter of getting to them and having them become partner families with us.
The other thing that we want to do—and that we’re going to launch pretty soon—is a project called a Brush with Kindness. It’s for families or individuals that can’t really maintain their homes, and it takes on smaller projects. When it takes off, we’ll look to families that can’t afford to shell out, say, for example, $5,000 to $6,000 for a new roof, but with Brush with Kindness, we can help do their roof and they pay us back in small increments over time.

What happens when you partner with a family to build their home?
They have to put in sweat equity, a minimum of 200 hours per adult family member. And it’s really not just the physical time, but they also have to put in the emotional time. A change happens with people when they realize that they can do it for themselves. Habitat really is about an opportunity, and that’s all you can really give people. You see it in every house, you see the change people go through. They become more empowered. They realize, “I can do for myself.” Every single family that we’ve partnered with—and it’s now nine homes—is a first-time homeowner. In their past, no one—their mother, their grandfather—no one ever owned a home. This the first time in their family that they’ve been able to own a home.

That’s impressive.
It’s a very neat statistic.

What can people do to help?
Number one, there’s donating items to the store. Because we have a small market, we really have to reach out to other communities. So far we’ve talked with Mount Plesant and Washington, and we’re going to go to Keokuk and Ottumwa and make this a regional store. Once the word gets around, people will come out of the woodwork. Everybody’s looking for a bargain!

What kind of things might people have stored away in closets, basements, or garages that you could use?
Surplus building materials and home furnishings, whether it’s furniture or lamps or plumbing.
And you wouldn’t believe what people don’t want anymore. They’ve got all these things they don’t know what to do with. We’ve realized that people are very excited about the possibility of not putting things in the landfill. It’s a very basic economic thing. Every time the county has to open another cell at the landfill, it costs them millions of dollars.

So you’re saving that money as well.
Exactly. The city has backed off its annual twice a year trash pickup. Where is all that stuff going to go? Well, you know, you’ve seen how people drive around and pick up stuff, because it’s not all junk—a lot of it is good stuff. So the city is going to promote us that way. We can’t afford to do this city pickup anymore, but now you’ve got a place to take it.

What sort of items do you not want?
We don’t take clothes and bedding. We hope to partner with Goodwill, so things that we can’t use, we’ll take over there, and things they don’t want, we’ll take.

You’ve said that Habitat for Humanity is a project that really appeals to everybody, across party lines.
It’s because everybody realizes you’re giving people an opportunity to help themselves, and you’re not making them feel dependent. You’re encouraging them to really use their own resources. And a lot of people just need that opportunity.

The next pre-Restore sale in Fairfield is April 21-23, 2011, 10-5, at 909 W. Broadway. For more information, call 470-2711 or visit www.fairfieldhabitat.org.

Visit the Index for more articles about Fairfield, Iowa.

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites