Habitat helps family settle with new home

STAUNTON — April Clark, her two children and her mother surveyed their nearly completed four-bedroom Augusta County home near Staunton on Sunday.

The home is a Staunton-Augusta-Waynesboro Habitat for Humanity interest-free one.

The house also marks the local chapter’s first one built under the Thrivent Builds program.

Thrivent Builds is a new partnership between Habitat for Humanity International and Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. Thrivent Financial is a Lutheran-based organization that is providing 65 percent of the financing for the $110,000 project for the Clark family.

April Clark said her new home “has been a long time coming” for her daughters, Brittany, 16, and Ali, 9, and her mother, Beverley.

She and her family have moved from house to house in Rockbridge County and Augusta County, leaving one Crimora home because renovation was too costly.

“This home is a labor of love,” said Clark, who has spent many hours on the Breezewood Drive construction site since work began in late June.

Clark said having a basement will mean a lot, as will having a house that is structurally sound.

Dean Stenzel, the Thrivent Builds coordinator for the house, said there had been 337 volunteer visits to work on the house and said those visits added up to more than 2,300 hours. The vast majority of those volunteer hours were performed by area Lutherans, Stenzel said.

Rhonda Howdyshell, executive director of the Staunton-Augusta-Waynesboro Habitat for Humanity, said the mortgage on the new property will be paid back over a period ranging from 20 to 30 years. Howdyshell remarked that there are inspiring stories among the 45 Habitat homes that have been built in the area.

She said one 57-year-old grandmother involved in a Habitat house had returned to school to obtain her GED.

Habitat has built more than 300,000 houses worldwide for needy families since its founding in 1976.

As for Clark, her daughters and her mother, the move to the new house can’t come soon enough.

They hope to be in their new home before Dec. 1.