Habichat, February 2010

A Long Time Coming!

If you have been a regular reader of our newsletter, you know that we have been working toward opening a ReStore for a very long time. Well, after a year (or more) of researching, planning, negotiating, praying, recruiting, discussing, and a few false starts, I am proud to announce that we are the proud owners of 533 Foundry Road in the West Norriton Industrial Park, just off Germantown Road. This 19,000+ square foot facility will be the future of Habitat, housing our ReStore, warehouse and offices.

The ReStore is a retail operation that sells donated used and surplus building materials, appliances, kitchen cabinets, etc., to the public for a fraction of their worth. For Habitat affiliates, ReStores are creative vehicles in sustaining our own administration and increasing our capacity, eventually building as many as three to five addtional homes per year.

For the community, they can single-handedly reduce the amount of materials going into landfills by several hundred tons each year. In fact, for every dollar sold at the ReStore, one pound of materials is diverted from the waste stream. For a county where we throw away 660,000 tons of municipal waste and 85,000 tons of construction waste each year, reducing this number is critical if we want to maintain our quality of life and beautiful surroundings.

ReStores also provide a solution by helping homeowners maintain and repair old housing stock. In some areas where we work, like Pottstown and Norristown, as many as 75% of housing units were built before 1959, so giving homeowners options for repair without the high price tag is yet another way that the ReStore benefits us all.

Right now, we are making the necessary repairs and renovations to open the store as quickly as possible. Later this year, we will move our entire operation to the facility. The beauty of being a construction company with many dedicated volunteers committed to our mission is that we can perform the bulk of the work ourselves, saving money and time in the process. It is our hope to move in by the spring with a grand opening sometime in May or June.

For those of you who have been supporting this process since the beginning, I would like to say a profound thank you. We truly could not have done it without the expertise and enthusiasm of many individuals including Pat Peddie, Christie Benedict, Beth Helfrich, Harry Tweedie, Brendan Boivard, Rob Ripley, Carl Friedman and the entire Board of Directors, Community Lenders and so many others that I cannot begin to name them all.

If you would like to learn more about our ReStore, support its renovation or grand opening, or donate items to it, please contact habitat@habitatmontco.org.

Sincerely,

Brenda Egolf-Fox

Executive Director