Minnesota Team Transforms Exterior of Widow’s Home

Chip and Joanna Gaines might not have been there but Ehlers’ Minnesota Team, led by Senior Public Finance Analyst Silvia Johnson, made possible a “Fixer-Upper” day for a widow in St. Paul in June 2021.

Who

Hearts & Hammers / Fixer-Upper Day / St. Paul, MN

When

June 24, 2021

Event Highlights

Chip and Joanna Gaines might not have been there but Ehlers’ Minnesota Team, led by Senior Public Finance Analyst Silvia Johnson, experienced its own “Fixer Upper” day in June 2021. Working through the non-profit Hearts & Hammers, the team transformed the exterior and yard of a home for a retired nurse and widow in her 80s.

We chose to partner with Hearts & Hammers because it is a locally run, boots-on-the-ground organization that could provide a project suitable in scope to our team’s size and skill level. The Twin Cities division of the organization provides exterior home improvement assistance to low-income seniors, individuals with disabilities and military veterans or their surviving spouses to enable the homeowners to continue living safely and independently in their own home.

Hearts & Hammers identified a potential home for our team in St. Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood. Due to COVID-related staff layoffs, the organization could not provide the full support it previously did. Silvia stepped up with her adept project management skills and big heart to bring everything together.

She and the homeowner’s adult son, who lives elsewhere, met at the home to determine what outside projects could make the home safer and give it more curb appeal. Projects needed to be limited to what could be done in one day with team members’ varying fix-it skills. They came away with an extensive honey-do list that included:

• scraping, priming and painting the home
• replacing the dead shrubs with hardier, low-maintenance ones
• adding new river rock around the plantings
• replacing the broken mailbox
• installing new motion-detection lighting
• repairing the fence

In talking with the son, Silvia learned that the family used to have breakfast together in the backyard every Saturday. A dilapidated patio table with no chairs and a broken-down grill were reminders of those get-togethers. As the chairs began to break and the grill quit working, the breakfasts stopped. He asked if we could haul away the table and grill.

Silvia delegated a separate crew lead for the landscaping, painting and construction-focused tasks. Because Hearts & Hammers could only provide some of the paint and supplies needed for the project, Silvia put out a call to the Minnesota office. Our team members stepped up, offering to bring their own toolboxes, power tools, saws, ladders and yard tools. A few days before, Silvia and a small team went to the home and pressure washed the exterior, took measurements, created a shopping list and added a few last-minute projects to the to-do list. She then coordinated materials and ordered supplies to be picked up at the local The Home Depot.

Coming together for the first time since the COVID shutdown in March 2020, our Minnesota Team was energized and eager to work together. The painting crew worked its way around the house in waves – first the scrapers, then the primers, then the painters. Meanwhile, the landscape and construction crews checked tasks off their lists in rapid succession, working on top of other teams. While scoping out a previously planned railing project in the backyard, a few team members noticed the back steps were in poor condition. Making a split-second decision, they ran to the local home improvement store to purchase lumber and necessary materials and returned to rebuild the stairs into the yard. As an additional surprise for the homeowner, we also purchased and set up a new patio set and grill to hopefully restart the family get-togethers.

While all this was going on outside, the shy homeowner stayed inside, in part because she was feeling unnecessarily humbled by needing help to keep up her home. As the day wound down, her son convinced her to come outside to see what had been done. She was under the impression that we were just painting the home’s exterior.

“She was blown away,” Silvia said, likening the experience to the big reveal on “Fixer Upper.” “You could feel the gratitude pouring out of her. When she walked into the backyard, the waterworks really started. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.”

The impact of a single day’s work will stick with our team for a long time. Many felt this experience – directly helping a fellow community member in need – far outweighed any of their previous volunteer experiences.