About Us: News and Newsletters

June 2007 - Message from the Board President
Spring is a time of new growth and renewed commitment. It is a time when God’s creation is at its showy best. If you’re a gardener, it is a time when that green thumb starts to itch and eyes are red, not from the pollen in the air, but from reading all the seed catalogs. If you are a Habitat volunteer, it is a time when those wrists and forearms can’t wait to start swinging a hammer.

With the acquisition of a building site in White Salmon, it looks like Mid-Columbia Habitat for Humanity may soon be in the construction business. Much work remains to be done prior to any construction. The City of White Salmon currently has a moratorium on new water connections, so that major issue must be resolved before construction can begin. But we now have an attractive home site on the Washington side of the Columbia.

This new home site would not have been possible without the generous support of Roger and Janet Holen. MCHFH purchased the property from Roger and Janet for a sum well below the current market price. The Holens made a very serious commitment to the issue of affordable housing in the Columbia River Gorge. A building site in Washington is an answer to the prayers of many people.

For those Habitat volunteers who cannot wait until we break ground in White Salmon, there is another nearby opportunity to serve the Lord through Habitat. The Dalles Habitat affiliate has a very challenging construction schedule this summer. They will soon begin construction on two Habitat homes. Typically The Dalles Habitat builds one home per year, but this year, thanks to a substantial grant from Thrivent Financial, they are building a second home. Any one interested in Habitat work in The Dalles in should contact Walt Notter at 541- 298-1353.

This is my last message as President of Mid- Columbia Habitat for Humanity. Next month Joyce and I will be moving to Buckley, WA. As relatively new grandparents, we found ourselves increasingly on the road to visit our sons and our grandchildren. After much deliberation, we decided to relocate to an area that was only minutes, rather than hours, away from family.

This was not an easy decision. I have spent most of my adult life in the Mid-Columbia area. We are severing connections with people and organizations that are very important to us, none more so than Habitat. The Habitat spirit is hard to leave behind and I found myself promising Stan Horack, our construction supervisor, that I would be back to lend a hand when we start building in White Salmon.

Hope to see you on the job site.

Blessings,
Rick Eggers

06-07-07 - Welcome New Board Members
MCHFH is very excited to introduce several new Board members. Serving on the Board of a nonprofit is a rewarding way to offer one’s expertise and commitment to enriching and improving the local community. There are many talents needed to build and maintain an organization — much like building and maintaining a home. Working together, the founding Board members laid the foundation to form the affiliate and generate initial community support and funding. Many of those founders are still on the Board or are serving the affiliate in other ways. New Board members are adding new skills, ideas and energy.

Denny Anderson was elected to the Board in April 2007. He and his wife Sue moved to Hood River with their four children 18 years ago after working as missionaries in Peru. During their four years in Peru, they had the opportunity to work closely with Aymara Indians in the Andes mountains, learning much about the face of poverty as they grew to love some of the poorest people in the most impoverished nation in South America. Upon returning to the States, Denny and Sue taught at Westside Elementary for 14 years. For the past four years, Denny has been the senior pastor at the Vineyard Church, a local fellowship which began in their home in 1997. Denny believes that one of our responsibilities as followers of Christ is to care about the issues that the poor are facing. He hopes to help facilitate the emerging church in finding tangible ways to serve the poor in our midst.

Debby Chenoweth was elected to the Board in February 2007. In January, she retired from as Chief of Operations for the Portland District of the US Army Corps of Engineers. She started with the Corps in Ohio as a Park Ranger in 1973 and was the manager of Bonneville Dam from 1996 - 2002. Debby and her husband Art have four grown children, one granddaughter in Florida and one on the way in Cincinnati. She has been interested in becoming active in Habitat for years, but her job and family responsibilities prevented it until now. Her sister is manager of the Habitat ReStore in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is extremely active in Habitat in her town of Wilmington, Ohio. Debby attends Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in Hood River and serves on the Oregon Synod Council. She has also recently become a board member of the History Museum. She has been on the board of Soul Cafe for three years and serves on the board of the Corps of Engineers Natural Resource Education Foundation. She will be doing some consulting work over the next year including teaching a leadership program in conjunction with Portland State University.

Judy Fink was elected to the Board in March 2007. She has participated on several committees in the past few years including helping with the Community Youth Sports Programs, serving as Church Secretary/Treasurer and a member of the Missionary Board and working as a Sunday School Teacher. She has worked for Sterling Savings Bank in White Salmon for the past 23 years in different positions and currently is a Personal Banker. She was searching for an organization whose goal is to work together to help people better themselves. She was approached by one of the HFH Board Members and as she read more about the organization, she became very excited about being involved with HFH.

Mike Fitzsimons Mike was elected to the Board this spring. He is an attorney in Hood River and has graciously agreed to share the Secretarial duties for the Board with his sister Ambler Fitzsimons.

Greg Herman returns to the Board this June having served previously from Fall 2004 until Summer 2006. Greg is a realtor here in the Gorge, a 12 year resident of Hood River and member of Riverside Community Church. He previously served on the Site Selection committee with Karl Kment, was active in material procurement during the Tamarack Drive (Odell) Habitat home construction, and he helped organize a work party from Don Nunamaker Realtors that did all the interior painting for the home. Greg also is an organizer for the Mid- Columbia Association of Realtors fundraiser for Habitat for Humanity. His professional history includes a two year stint in the residential construction trades.

“I have been drawn to Habitat because it seems to be ‘tangible Christianity’. It puts theology into action and changes the lives of the working poor,” says Greg. “I think the need in the Gorge is enormous and we need to be actively pursuing creative solutions to the challenge of limited affordable property.”

Roger Holen was elected to the MCHFH board in February 2007. He served as Mayor of White Salmon for a total of nine years and he and his wife Janet owned and operated the Inn of the White Salmon for seventeen years. Prior to coming to White Salmon in 1990, he was employed in the computer industry for 30 years most recently in international marketing at Intel. While serving as Mayor, the need for affordable housing became a constantly recurring theme with no solution in sight. MCHFH is the best hope for the future.

Holen says, “I look forward to years of service and great success providing affordable housing to low income families.”

The affiliate is fortunate to have continued service on the Board by Brian Baynes, Ambler Fitzsimons, Dottie Gilbertson, Stan Horack, Michael Solbach, Fern Spaeth and Anne Sutton. Thanks to their dedicated and continued service in addition to the newly-elected members, Mid-Columbia Habitat will continue to work to reduce poverty housing in the Gorge. Ambler and her brother Mike accepted the responsibility of serving as co-Secretaries. Rick Eggers’ and Karl Kment’s replacements as President and Vice-President, respectively, will be announced in the next newsletter.

06-07-07 - Farewell to Three Board Members
We offer heartfelt thanks to Rick Eggers, Karl Kment, and Christine Lange, all of whom have actively served MCHFH. While they move on to new locations and new challenges in their lives, we know they remain supportive of Habitat for Humanity.

Rick Eggers stepped up to the challenge as Board President after serving as Stan Horack’s righthand- man on the construction of the affiliate’s first home. Rick led the Board in a strategic planning effort that culminated in, among other things, recruitment of several new Board members. We will miss Rick’s energetic and committed leadership and will hold him to his promise to help build the next home in White Salmon.

Karl Kment, a founding member of MCHFH, led the effort to find building sites. As part of his consistent effort to generate community support for affordable housing, he spoke to the Hood River County Commissioners to ask that they consider the need for affordable housing as part of their land use planning. Multi-talented, he also provided a delightful accordion performance at a spring benefit for MCHFH. He and his wife Phyllis recently moved to Redmond, Oregon, to be nearer to their family. We’ll miss Karl’s cheerful demeanor and the connection he provided to the real estate and business community in the Gorge.

Christine Lange is staying in the area, but will no longer serve as a Board member. We are confident that she and her husband Herb will continue to support MCHFH as time allows. They will focus their energies on other community activities this next year and on several new grandchildren. Serving as interpreters, mentors and friends, they helped the Evangelistas navigate the often-difficult path to homeownership. They helped the family through the building and purchasing process for their new home, and have continued to meet with the family to help in any way needed and to celebrate the family’s success as new home owners. Thanks to Christine and Herb for getting our first family off to such a strong start!

6-27-06 - Completion of First Home (Submitted by Stan Horack, Construction Committee Chair) In early 2005, the Mid-Columbia Habitat for Humanity was ready to begin their first house project. Like all new Habitat organizations, we had developed a house design criteria for our houses. Although this was a start, getting this basic criteria incorporated into an application to the county building department was still a challenge. Taking into account the volunteer labor, free and discounted material to develop the most economical house we could build was different than what a normal contractor has to consider. Because of volunteer labor, we could consider tasks requiring labor that would be uneconomical for a regular contractor. Offers of free material and labor were still coming in after submitting our application for a permit, and at the same time some prior offers were uncertain. None of the people on the construction committee had any experience building houses with volunteer labor and material.

After the building permit was issued, the unusually dry winter started changing to rain. Because of the clay soils at the house site and uncertainty concerning volunteers working in mud, the excavation was delayed for a month. Although excavation was accomplished in April, rain delayed the construction of footers and stem walls until May. The excavation was donated by Darrold Ward and the stem wall forms were donated by Eco Block. The forms from Eco Block were integrated concrete forms (ICF’s). ICF’s are forms made of foam held together with plastic or steel clips which have provisions on them to hold the stem walls’ rebar in place during concrete pouring. The foam on the ICF’s is left as insulation for the wall. Another advantage of the ICF’s is that we didn’t need to rent, buy, or store concrete forms.

The county corrections department furnished labor to waterproof the foundation and install the foundation drainage system. They also helped haul donated lumber to the site. They were so productive that they completed all the day’s planned work early. After installing the house sub-floor, the floor was used as a platform to build roof trusses on. We built the garage roof trusses with donated rough-sawn lumber. This was accomplished by gluing and nailing the gussets and plates on the trusses while the trusses were held in place by a jig nailed on the subfloor. Although Habitat for Humanity normally doesn’t build garages or carports with their houses, a garage was build with this house because it was required by land covenants.

The trades worked on the house throughout the construction. The plumbing installation was donated by Pronto Plumbing, the wiring installation was donated by Merlin Electric and the heating installation was donated by Iron Mike Heating.

Our partners, Gilberto and Maria Evangelista and their friends helped throughout the project. Even the Evangelista children helped with such tasks as cleaning out the crawl space prior to covering it. Although it is a Habitat requirement to have the family buying the house provide at least 500 hours of labor building houses, the Evangelistas, were excellent at helping. I can’t even imagine having built the house without them. The house was framed with lumber purchased from Tum-a-Lum Lumber Company from Hood River, Oregon, except for the garage and interior panels in the house. These were framed with rough sawn lumber donated to Habitat by Paul Mansur, Hood River. The siding was planned to be plywood siding, but at the time of installation a cost comparison showed that lap siding was slightly lower cost. Since labor was free, lap siding was chosen even though it required considerably more labor to install. One of our board members, Dotty Gilbertson, had replaced the windows on her house and liked the windows so well she recommended them to other friends. She then called the window company and asked them to donate the windows for this house. The window company, Statewide Windows, agreed and not only furnished the windows, but also installed them. The quality of their windows is considerably better than would normally be installed on a Habitat house.

The outside painting, roofing, insulation and dry walling were all done with volunteers. The inside painting was accomplished by a group of employees of Nunamaker Realty organized by Nunamaker salesperson Tom Jenkins, who used to be a painting contractor. The flatwork (concrete) installation was donated by Schuebach Builders. Shock Welding donated the wrought iron railings on the house. The interior house trim and the utility room cupboards were constructed by volunteers from the donated rough sawn lumber.

For the first house built by the Mid-Columbia Habitat, this project went very well. God was with us throughout the project. We owe a lot to the many people who donated material and labor. I want to especially thank those organizations, businesses and people.

A GREAT BIG THANK YOU to these companies and individuals for free services or material:
Bethel Congregational Church - donated paint
Brian Aaron - legal counsel and translation
Amerititle - professional services/house closing
Bob Anderson - free use of tractor for preparing for flat work
Darrold Ward - free excavation and donation of construction furnace
Dave McClure - free finish carpentry
ECO-Block, LLC-George Volker - free integrated concrete forms
Hunter Douglas - free window blinds in the bedrooms
Iron Mike - free mechanical installation
Merlin Electric - free electrical installation
Mike Udelius - free trenching
Northwest Natural Gas - free furnace and water heater
Nunamaker, Tom Jenkins - free painting
Paul Mansur - free rough sawn lumber
Our Redeemer Lutheran Church women - donated light fixtures
Deborah Phillips - legal counsel
Pronto Plumbing - free plumbing installation
Schock Welding - free wrought iron railings installed
Schuepbach Custom Buildings - free installation of concrete flatwork
Stateside Windows - free windows with installation
Square D - donated main electrical panel and circuit breakers
Tony Klein & Associates - free surveying
TPI - free lumber grading
Whirlpool - free refrigerator and range
Paul Worthen - free house design and drawing
Yale Locks - free door latch sets

Another GREAT BIG THANK YOU to these companies and individuals for discounted material or services:
Cabinet Factories Outlet
Gorge Sanitation - porta potty rental
Hanel lumber - storage space
Hometown Paint - donated brushes
Home Depot - miscellaneous material
Hood River Sand and Gravel - concrete
Meadows Outdoor Advertising - billboard thanking donators
Mike Schultz - concrete pumping
Mt. Adams Lumber Co. - prioritized sawing of lumber
Sprint - wired house for telephone
Swell City Carpets - carpet and vinyl
Tum-A-Lum Lumber - Majority of the house's material and provided on-site material expediting and ordering

Thanks to the many volunteers who helped construct the house:
Hank Adams, Bob Anderson, Walter Bauman, Brian Baynes, June Baynes, Jim Denton, Les Dewey, Dee Dewey, Rick Eggers, Rene Evangelista, Royal Ewing, Len Gilbert, Dotty Gilberston, Clel Harr, Larry Harr, Sam Horack, John Ihle, Tom Jenkins, Denaida Gutierrez, Rene Gutierrez, Bob Kramer, Madison Kyger, Andy Lang, Norm Luther, Dave McClure, Ian Meyer, Dick O’Bannion, Gary Obermire, Whitney Osborn, Tom Pencheon, Jonathan Perry, Lindsay Perry, Ted Perry, Dave Radley, Betty Shalhope, Don Shalhope, Kit Shypertt, Mike Solbach, Anne Sutton, Mike Udelius, Darrold Ward, the Stargazers Girl Scout Troop (Becky Morus, Inga Hansen, Whitney Fox, Molly McCulloch and parents,Victoria Kelsey, Sandi Hansen, Joe and Linda Fox)