Fergus Falls Area Habitat for Humanity Affiliate, Inc.

The Executive Director's, or ED's,blog

August 2008

Home Depot calls frequently for gifts in kind donations. Sometimes we have only a couple of days, or less, to pick up the material. The photo of my truck down below was actually taken half-way through the load. Working with Aram Whitcomb we were able to load another 25 carpets on top of the pile you see. It made for an interesting drive to Battle Lake.

We were also lucky to have volunteers help remove some aluminum siding from a house on Blanch Lake. This siding will be used on the house in Vining. We also picked up a bunch of Marvin Windows that were only three years old. Once again Pastor Kennedy, Andy, Jerry, Bob M. and the rest of the Vining crew came through. We also picked up a propane water heater and furnace.

The cabinets we had in storage were dropped off at the house in Battle Lake. We also received 450 square feet of flooring from the Re-Store in Moorhead. A double sink marble countertop was dropped off by a donor and we might be able to use it in the Catholic Daughters house.
Robert, Bobby, Shawn, and Allen Nordick of Nordick Construction, along with Gary Jennen and future home owner Eric Brown, and I poured the floor at the Thrivent Builds Homes Site. Tom Cordner stepped in and set in some bracing and the back-fill was underway. Bruce Lothson did the through the slab plumbing and we are now ready for the move. The house that was built in the shed at Jennens farm will be moved Monday, August 25, 2008. What a momentous day that will be. It proves to be quite a site. Once it has landed on the site we will complete the final details necessary for the certificate of occupancy from the city. That in hand we qualify for the final third of the $50,000 Thrivent grant.

We participated in the Vining Watermelon Days street fair with our hammering contest. It was great to be able to stand right in front of the foundation for the future house. That house is going to be moved in the next week too. Once it is in place we will finish the new addition. Some of that addition will be built with materials donated earlier, and with materials harvested from the old addition. Jerry Eckhoff has done a great job getting that site ready. Honestly, the biggest need we have right now is for around $10,000 to complete the house and pay for the move. Now is the time for us to really shake the bushes for donations.

We received a $3,000 grant from the Home Depot Foundation, plus we received word that Thrivent will match the funds from the South Pleasant Church breakfast fund raiser. We also received a nice $2,000 individual gift towards the Vining house.

The walls are up on the garage at the Miller house in Wahpeton. We could really use some volunteers to complete this last step. We have the sheathing, siding, and shingles from our warehouse, plus we had the wood for the forms from a donor. The wood from the forms at the Thrivent site was reused to build a deck over in Battle Lake. That is why we bought the green treated in the first place.

After thinking and measuring for about a month it was clear to the Site and Building Committee that the Catholic Daughters house will require the demolition of the existing shed. We are going to salvage what we can from the demolition, not the least of which is the hole where the basement of the shed is now. The new home will be able sit in the old shed's hole for the most part. We have been offered some tree trimming help by students at Hillcrest to clean up the site. Some of the fill left over from the site will be spread to build up the alley way. Chris Jennen is coming along on the new shed. The plan is to build a concrete block foundation for the Catholic Daughters house. Luckily, the man we had in mind to help us was working right across the road from the siding harvest site on Blanch. How was your month?

July 2008

It seems that the days are blasting by with a vengeance. Thanks as always to the world's greatest volunteers we are now finishing the basements at 310 Adolphus and in Vining. Along the way I have been picking up in-kind donations. I picked up enough 2X10s to not just build the foundation footing forms at both locations but just about enough for the floor joists in Vining too. They came from a nice pile in the Ottertail Lake area.

We also picked up, and I mean "picked" up, about 150 yards of carpet from Home Depot. Home Depot is now participating with Gifts in Kind International. What this means for us is a formal system for donations. They come with stipulations. We can not sell them through Re-Store or any other avenue. We can give them away or use them ourselves. The other stipulation is that we have to pick them up almost immediately when notified. We picked up a truck load of kitchen and bathroom cabinets, and a mess of bathroom fixtures -- towel rods, faucets, etc. We can pass on things that have little or no utility to us our Partner families. What we pass on gets crushed.

We have also been looking for land in the Richland / Wilkin County area. Our first preference is for free land. Free with covenants, or with special assessments is not free in this definition. One of the reasons that this affiliate has used "infill" lots almost exclusively is because of protective covenants. Virtually all of the green field lots in newly plated subdivisions come with covenants and performance criteria that we can not meet and stay within the safe, decent, affordable standards of Habitat for Humanity.

It is increasingly important to differentiate a Habitat house from an extreme home make-over house or Habitat houses such as those donated by the Angel Network run by Oprah. Those houses far exceed our mandate. Unfortunately, the perception is growing in the public that those are Habitat houses. It used to be that our biggest problem was that people thought that Habitat was a government agency. Now, we have to deal with the idea that Oprah has given us all the money we need. It is very much like the local situation with the Salvation Army. The Joan and Roy Kroc Foundation (the people behind McDonalds) provided millions to Salvation Army. But that money can only be used for new construction of facilities. Thus for Fergus Falls and Henning those millions are not available.

We would like to thank the Richland / Wilkin United Way for a $5,000 grant. This grant will ensure that we will complete a house in that area between now and December 31, 2009. We also have $5,000 in matching funds from North Dakota Housing Finance Authority. Thus we can start the foundation this fall. Which brings us back to land. We are still looking for land in Richland County.

May 2008

I try to stay out of the way on the build sites. Most of the time nearly everyone on the site has far more experience than me in building. I find that if I keep on the details of the site like material receiving (which is the official Habitat way to say huffing and puffing heavy objects around) and clean-up I don't distract too much from the work being done. If its heavy, or dirty, or disgusting in some way that would be my job. All of this is because we have fabulous site supervisors and volunteers. They are the epitome of self-starters.



At some affiliates they have full-time site coordinators that do human resources management of the full-time and part-time site supervisors and volunteer site hosts. We are blessed in having volunteers that are so devoted to the craft of construction that much goes unsaid between the site supervisor and the key volunteers.



One day I was bringing lunch to the volunteers and I found out that unbeknownst to me the crew that was laying out the floor had actually added about six feet, or over 200 square feet, to the house. They thought long and hard about it, did not like the solution I had come up with, and with the consent of the homeowner -- their whole family was there too -- changed the dimensions of the house. After all, the material necessary had already been delivered, it would save money, make more room for an entry closet, make room for a pantry closet, and simplify the footing and foundation.



OK; except of course this new house was not the one that was in the official plans with which we were buying a building permit. Luckily, the city officials also thought the new plan was far superior and were perfectly helpful and professional as always.



Likewise, the original plan for the Catholic Daughters house was a newly constructed house in virtually the same floor plan as the new floor plan; a plan for which we now need new plans; of the Thrivent Builds home. We received a call from representatives of the Fergus Falls Medical Group that a house might be available. We receive requests to take homes as donations up to three times per week. That sounds staggering, but other Executive Directors in the Minnesota say their offers were even higher. Almost all are unsuitable. The vast majority because of what I call the Skill Set needed for their restoration. Extensive structural problems, sagging roofs, fire damage, water damage, mold, size, and wall integrity eliminate most of them. I look at every home and I try to do so within days of getting the offer. It so happened that this house was within blocks of the office so I viewed it immediately.



The house at 604 S. Mill is a beauty. First, it should be preserved by somebody as it is an excellent example of its kind. These are the houses of a very fine neighborhood that has grown up around the medical facilities. There are already some beautiful examples already on Adolphus. In fact, they are across the street from the proposed site. First, I did not know if we could switch the project to a restoration project from a new build. Second, I did not know if the house would even fit on the lot.



Therefore, I first contacted the Architectural Review Committee specified in the covenants on the Lydia Lane lots we own. They were not completely dead set against it, and thought that with many caveats and provisos we could just possibly squeak the house onto one of those lots. By that time, the partner family told me that they would like the house and would not wait for the next new house. Also by that time Shirley Seyfried of our Board had already spoken to Catholic Daughters, and that some of them had already passed by the house on their own. It transpired that not only would we be able to move the house to Adolphus, but it would also be the Catholic Daughters house. Thus the newly drawn plans based on the revised on the spot house, or the contingency lots on Lydia, did not need to be used anyway.



I would have never been so greedy to ask for a better outcome in prayer. I try to focus on very small needs in prayer, because I am already buried in blessings.



Likewise, I had secured the agreement of a contractor for the demolition of the house in Vining. Toured the site, came up with a time-table, cost estimate in writing, the whole paper trail. Of course, on a recent Thursday I went to Vining to meet the onsite septic designer. While we were laying things out with a tape the house was lifted on oneside with a huge front end bucket loader, while simultaneously an auto wrecker truck tugged on a cable strung through the second floor windows. It sort of hovered for a second right on its corner, then crashed onto its side into the middle of the street. Well, that's not something you see every day.Said the septic designer. By the time everyone had signed their waiver forms, filled out their injury notification forms, and been advised to stay safe the house had been dragged down the street half-a-block. This was all done by volunteers, which at $4 a gallon for diesel is quite a gift. Now the site is all cleaned up, cleared, and ready to stake. Once again a volunteer and Pastor Richard Kennedy (Board Member, key volunteer, Thrivent Team member, etc. etc. etc.) had everything staked, and had rhubarb pie before I knew it. On the way home I picked up some beautiful replacement windows that will just perfectly match the amount of inkind we need to close-out the first level of the match to Thrivent.





To top it all off, Nick Schmidt agreed to cram into his already back-breaking schedule an unplanned move of the house onto dollies and out of the Jennen's'shed prior to their daughter's graduation party. It actually did not look like it would fit. People love to give me heart attacks, they know that I do spend every moment worrying about what might go wrong, or what might cost money. Yes, I do pick up aluminum cans in the ditch when I am not in a hurry. And I have been known to pull copper tubing out of demolition pile. Gary Jennen, who had just scared me earlier that day by telling me that the township had fined me $50 for having the banner in the right-of-way (not true) handed his cell to Nick. Yeah, Craig, Nick Schmidt here, we are going to have to get a crane to lift the end of Gary's shop about two feet off the foundation. I suddenly felt kind of sick. All along people were constantly measuring the shop door height, the height of the house, the height of the support beams, each person on the site seemed to need to perform their own measurement that the house would indeed fit out the door. Luckily, everything was fine. I had already started to think who I knew that might have a crane and would be willing to donate their time.





The trees are cleared on Adolphus. The Sentence to Serve crew swooped in and cleared everything away. The walnut was already dead. Post-construction tree survival is always quite low. If 40% of the trees on a site survive the whole ordeal it is about average. I knew two years ago that the tree would not survive construction on that site. I hope we get a nice mantel out of it. We could use it in the Thrivent house as a shelf. Unless, of course, I can trade it for whatever else I don’t even know now that I will need later.

April 2008
April has moved along at high speed. Here it is now Board Meeting time and it seems we just started the month. We received our Audit from the auditors. There was a major change from June - July 2006 to June - July 2007, versus the same period the year before. The largest change was the drop from finishing three houses, to finishing two. The other change was the drop in "in kind" donations. When we received the donated homes from the Seidler family (now located in Fairmount) and from the Gutzmer family (now demolished and replaced with the Miller home) they are "booked" at their appraised value. This means that the Seidler home counted as a donation in excess of $50,000. The Gutmer home value was counted, even though we eventually demolished the whole house and shed. This past year we did not take any homes as donations. Thus the large drop is not nearly as much as it appears. On a cash basis we paid down debt principal, added mortgages to our portfolio, and reduced or held steady on virtually all expenses. Our administrative salaries were with 1% of their prior year figures.

As soon as it is uploaded on the Attorney General's website you can check out our financial reports for the past four years.

The big fund raising breakfast at Applebees could not have happened (I am writing this when it still has yet to happen) without the help of Lindsay our VISTA, Norv and especially Mary Matteson.

The house in the Jennen shed is nearly complete. The siding is finished, the roof is finished. Now we must finish the drywall. We decided against taping and mudding until after the move. We are very confident that Schmidt will do a perfect job, but we just wanted to avoid any possibility of having to redo the seams. Our focus now shifts to the removal of the old shed on the Adolphus site.

Weather permitting, the shed will be demolished in the next couple of weeks. Anderson Land Surveying will need to do a topological survey as the property has quite a bit of slope. Once that work is done it is time for excavation and construction of the basement.

New families have been selected. We have a new partner for our Battle Lake property. Tom Martelle and his crew have been putting in plenty of hours getting that house ready for a possible June 1 move-in date. Milt Paulson has helped move the Vining land acquisition along (once again our thanks to Robert Bigwood for his legal assistance). The appraisal on the house to be moved was completed and it states that the house is worth $49,000. Once the house is out of the shed and on its foundation, and once the new foundation for the Catholic Daughters house is also complete, we will be able to begin preparation of the Vining site for the house.

We received our Milestone II payments from the Thrivent Builds Homes grant. That is all we will get until we get a certificate of occupancy on the property. Its possible that could come in early July. We will then also submit our receipts for reimbursement from the Softwood Lumber Grant.

We just received word that we have received a $5,000 grant from the North Dakota Housing Finance agency to build a home in Richland County. The Site and Building Committee plan is to complete the foundation this fall, with completion of the house over the winter and spring. Will we be in the shed again for this build?

That will help us meet the ever higher requirements of future funding from the Thrivent program. If we are to go for funding in 2009 we will need to go from three houses to four. That is a tall order. The only way it could possibly work is to get one house underway this fall.

Lindsay wrote a successful Google promotional grant that has dramatically improved the traffic on our website. It has increased about 600%.

Duane has been putting in unbelievable hours on the Thrivent house. Sometimes he has been almost buried in volunteers. We even had a couple of hours of volunteering at the Foxhome warehouse. The plan is to get everything we know we are not going to use shipped up to the Lake Agassiz ReStore.

We also received word that we have been approved for another VISTA grant for 2008-2009. We have already started recruiting. We have been so blessed the past two years with outstanding people that we are happy to be in the program for another year. The VISTA does represent our only full-time staff member.

The graphics card in our "locally-cobbled together by a defunct company" computer finally quit. We can still pull data off but all pictures look like black squares. We even tried switching in and out three different monitors. The $5 state surplus monitors were failing as well. We picked up a monitor at the Salvation Army and that one was incompatible. Making things worse the graphics card shorts and causes the computer to restart. With a repair estimated to cost $350 (assuming we could find compatible parts online and someone willing to install them in a one-of-a-kind machine) Betty and I went to Wal-Mart. We looked at e-machines, Dells, and HPs. We started looking at what it would cost to replace the monitor, graphics card, and memory, and opted to just buy a cheap Dell desktop for about what it would have cost to fix the old one.

March 2008
March has been a blur of activity. We started the month with extensive work to prepare for more construction inside. Our good friends at UBC got us set up with a delivery schedule, plus helped us complete a grant application to their parent company Pro-Build / Lanoga. We have received up to $5,000 in materials per year from this program. They called and asked if we were sure that we would use the funds (apparently there are some affiliates that don't actually use their grant -- how is that possible?). I told them that there was no way that we would not use every penny.

We also received word that we are going to have a VISTA worker for the year beginning August 10. Now would be a good time to forward to us any names of people that might be interested in this great opportunity. Our last two VISTA's have been outstanding. Michael is working down in Lafayette, LA, with a Habitat ReStore, and I am sure that Lindsay will have a world of opportunities when she completes her service this summer.

We closed out all of the remaining accounts on the Wahpeton house. Brandi and Joshua even stopped by the Jennen farm to check on volunteering. That is an important part of the partner family experience, working on the next house down the line. We will have plenty of exterior yard work to do at their place this spring.

We have been meeting with the surveyors at Anderson Land Surveying to do the preliminary work on the foundations for the two new houses on Adolphus. The slope of that land is pretty aggressive so its going to require a lot of earth moving. We might actually be able to cut and fill from one site to another.

Family selection is under way at this time. We wanted to provide at least 30 days of advertising to the round, plus try to have the Catholic Daughters house family selected by the scheduled ground breaking ceremony, which will be April 19th. That ground breaking will be at the Adolphus site.

The fabulous newsletter makes it quarterly appearance. Look for great articles on our progress, the calendar of events, and lots of photos. Lindsay pretty much handled this one by herself. Betty arranged to have extra help come in from Experience Works, so my thanks to both of them for coming through.

Our present Thrivent match total stands at just under $5,000. We need at least $10,000 to make our targets for this house. The costs so far are running about 15% higher than my estimates from August. I am told that the tornado in Atlanta is using a lot of material. Much of this material is eligible for reimbursement from the Canadian Softwood Lumber project.

Our in-kind professional labor and supplies this month came from Brian Wilson of Watt One, Cory Pederson of Lakes Area Inspection, Ferguson Inc. of Fargo, DOW Chemical, Square D, Anderson Surveying,and Whirlpool.

Big thanks also go to Tom Martelle and his crew from Battle Lake for the clean-up on our Battle Lake house. It was a job that had to be done, and they stepped up. Is it possible that the house will be done by May? It still is at least possible, a lot will depend on just how much we will need to do. When the snow melts we will get a better idea just how many more dumpsters we will need to fill with debris.

The plan is to begin exterior work on the Adolphus property starting May 1. Both foundations will be built at the same time. If the weather cooperates, and if we get the help we need, the home will be moved from the warehouse at Jennen's to the site the last week of May. At that time we shift our loyal Nidaros/Vining/Battle Lake/Amor/Clitherall/Folden crew to the Vining site.