Update on our house conversion project

[jmowreader]

We've changed our plans quite a bit. I think this is gonna be better.

As you may recall, my store was going to buy a 4-bedroom/2-bath ranch and make me turn it into a rehab training house for damaged war veterans. I thought it was a great idea and so did all of you.

For the last couple of days, a manager, a kitchen designer and I have been touring empty homes in the Fayetteville area. We finally picked one we liked a lot--nice looking, good roof and mechanicals, close to post, just everything you could ask for.

We decided to show the house to the chiefs of rehabilitative medicine at Womack, the VA hospital and the civilian hospital to see what they thought. I'm standing there describing all of the things we want to do to these doctors when the Womack rep piped up "why don't you change plans a little? Instead of buying one house and setting it up for temporary use, we can give you a list of disabled soldiers who own homes in the area and you can pick out as many as you can afford to do and modify them to meet the individual soldiers' needs?"

This sounds even better than the first plan--this way, we know what the person needs. We decided we wanted to start with ten homes. We have a $250,000 budget for right now; Atlanta says they want to see how we do before they really drop some cash on this but we'll be okay for now. (Supplies that cost us $250,000 would cost you $400,000 if you bought them from us.) I have enough people who want to help on this that I can break the crowd into five groups--if it takes a month for a group to do one home, we can get all ten done in two months and not stress the help out so much they drop the project--or worse, find another job. As lead, I'll be traveling from house to house but that's okay by me.

Anyway, we gave a few qualifications: homeowners, North Carolina residents and within 40 miles of Fayetteville. Rank is immaterial here--no one in the Army has enough money to convert a house for disabilities. I'm supposed to have a list of 20 candidates on Monday. Then comes the hard part: who gets to be first?