Expanded Client Stories
They bought their house for cash through an online auction to create a place for family to gather and to help take care of their grandchildren. A former illegal duplex rental property, the photos of the home online only showed the few remaining nice parts. They exhausted all their savings to purchase their new home but when they got the key and walked in, they walked right back out again, sat in the car in the driveway and cried. Henry said, “It was roach infested—they were walking back and forth to the garage like ants. We had to pull out all of the walls because of the nests. We had the exterminator out here 3 times. There was a big hole in the ceiling of the dining room from water damage. The tenants had a leak in the upstairs bathroom and just let the water run down the wall.”
Merrill Street, 14615
Henry and Cora are retired and live in NW Rochester. High school sweethearts who went their separate ways 46 years ago, they reconnected and married in 2012. They came back to Rochester in 2015 for health reasons.
For over a year they had no working furnace and cooked on a camp stove. They slept upstairs in a room heated with candles and one small space heater. When asked why they didn’t ask friends or family for help, Cora replied “We put everything we had into this house. We were starting from scratch and coming back home from bad situations. It was embarrassing.”
They heard about ABC’s weatherization program and qualified for a new furnace. That started the process of getting the home insulated. Now the home is cozy and has new windows through funding from the City of Rochester and RENEW. Henry said, “We truly thank God for connecting us to the right people.”
These improvements resulted in a 14% reduction in fuel usage and will keep 17.06 tons of GHG emissions out of our atmosphere.