Suzanne Rehak/For the Chronicle
From left, Harold Clemons, Shirley Adams and Luis Colon prime plywood for a new backyard deck.
By RICK WEBER
Lindajean Giraudin sat in the living room of her Nottingham Country home, wiping away tears as workers swarmed busily and methodically inside and out.
"Many of my neighbors are original settlers," she said. "This is my home. We’ve been through raising kids together. It’s a tight-knit neighborhood. I never want to leave. So to have this house livable and safe is just incredible."
Giraudin, 58, was divorced 20 years ago and left in the house as a single mother with four children, including an 11-week-old baby. Over the years, multiple sclerosis ravaged her body. She now has progressive relapsing multiple sclerosis — a steady progression of clinical neurological damage with superimposed relapses and remissions. It means that she has good days and bad days, but the good days are never as good as they used to be. She walks with a cane, and one day will need a wheelchair or a motorized scooter to get around.
She lives on a limited income through Social Security and long-term disability she earned by working just long enough at Southwestern Bell. She has Medicare, but says the medical co-pays and drugs "just eat my lunch."
She hasn’t had the money or the physical strength to perform all the necessary upkeep on a 29-year-old house, so it fell into disrepair.
Enter the Katy Home Savers Association.
The mission statement on its Web site says that the group exists "to aid and assist disadvantaged senior citizens in the tri-county area (Fort Bend, Harris and Waller) and disabled Katy residents in maintaining a safe home environment; to develop charitable programs to enhance the quality of life of disadvantaged Katy senior citizens and disabled residents through home improvement; and to develop and share education information on maintaining a safer home environment."
Hope restored
But KHSA doesn’t just save homes. It restores hope.
In a phone call earlier this year, KHSA co-founder Pat Baker jokingly told Giraudin, "Hi, this is your worst nightmare." To which Giraudin replied, "Honey, you’re my biggest angel."
That’s because she knew that after KHSA was finished with her home, no longer would she have to go outside in her pajamas and a raincoat with the first accumulation of rainfall, and hoe a trench in front of her house so water didn’t pour in. No longer would she go outside and slip and fall on her dilapidated, raised-wood deck that had been severely damaged by Hurricane Ike. No longer would she have soggy carpet because the back wall was caving in. No longer would a section of her backyard fence be held up by a PVC pipe.
On a recent Friday morning, Giraudin watched in amazement as a half-dozen volunteers arrived at her doorstep. Minutes later, two buses pulled up in her cul-de-sac, and 50 volunteers poured off — all wearing yellow BP shirts.
They trimmed three feet off the tops of her overgrown shrubs and shaped them, removed dead branches from her Bradford pear tree, solved her drainage problem, removed her collapsed deck, cleared the yard of old fencing and junk, and her interior of unwanted furniture and equipment. The next day, they put new appliances in her kitchen, rebuilt her back wall and built a new cover, painting the exterior. They built wheelchair ramps at the front and rear of her house.
For years, Baker and her husband, Richard, along with some Katy-area oil-industry engineers, took part in Rebuilding Together Houston, a nonprofit working to preserve affordable homeownership and revitalize neighborhoods by providing home repair and renovation free to those in need.
But they longed to serve Katy residents in need. So along with Rick MacDonald, Ron Scheet and Bill Keeler — who were involved with BP’s home-exterior repair program — they formed a group six years ago that officially became KHSA in 2005, taking on nonprofit status.
That allowed them to accept donations. And the contributions have poured in from churches, the local AARP chapter, BP, Conoco Phillips and Exxon, among others. Occasionally, KHSA will receive personal donations.
Dedicated volunteers
The founders admit the group works only because of the efforts of a dedicated core of volunteers. People like BP employee Bill Wright, who rides from Magnolia to Katy on his Honda Valkyrie.
"He’s only person I’ve ever seen who can carry all his tools on a motorcycle," Pat Baker said with a laugh. "Everybody loves Mr. Bill. We’ve been doing it in Katy area for six years, and Bill’s been in almost every one."
"We’ll take anybody and everybody," Richard Baker said. "We train on the job. People will donate to United Way and other charities. That’s fine. But when they come out here and donate time, they’re able to stand back at the end of the day and say, ‘I did this.’ They’re amazed at things they can do when they don’t realize what they can do.
"There is simple stuff like painting. But we’ve done projects where there was almost total reconstruction — like the house we did off Avenue D in Katy. We’ve had anywhere from a five-person crew on a wheelchair ramp to 80 on a site.
"We have our own projects that are waiting at our houses, but we do this because it’s more important."
They take the work part of the project seriously. But they always take the time to truly get to know the homeowners, understand their stories, make them feel special and loved.
"The really cool thing is that even once we finish a house, we’re never really finished, because we’ve made a friend," Pat Baker said.