Thursday, April 24, 2008

Habitat Project - almost there!

The Arthur Gary/Greater Portland Board of REALTORS® habitat house is nearly complete!


Some of you may recall, that the GPBR Habitat Committee formally convened in 2006. Their mission - to build an entire house for Habitat for Humanity of Greater Portland. A worthy and daunting goal, to be sure. Who would step forward to chair this committee? Why, none other than the energetic Rita Yarnold, of course.

The first challenge, to secure a building lot. Enter, our own Arthur Gary. Arthur had a building lot on Penn Avenue in Portland, which he kindly donated to the cause. After some negotiation with the City of Portland all systems were go and Habitat began the process. The lot had a garage on it which had to be removed and the work began in earnest last fall.

The board had many fundraisers to begin amassing the funds necessary to move our family into their new home. Each Habitat house starts with a zero balance, so we had our work cut out for us. Susan Hight of Wells Fargo organized volunteers days whereby Wells Fargo donated funds to the project for every day we staffed with REALTOR® and Wells Fargo volunteers.


Now the home is nearly completed and the family is waiting patiently to move in. Closing is tentatively scheduled for mid June.
Look for more details on the upcoming celebration.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

How many days of actual construction were there?

Greater Portland Board of REALTORS® said...

I'm not sure of the actual days of construction, but we broke ground Sept 1st of 2007. The exterior was finished by mid-October, and the house was put on hold while Habitat worked on other projects and we raised more funds. Work began again on the home in early spring and we hope to be completed in May.