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Stagers furnish Habitat for Humanity home in Bay Shore
Photo credit: Photo by Joseph D. Sullivan
Dietary aide Georgia Barnes and the youngest of her three children, Barachel, 13, helped build their Habitat for Humanity house in Bay Shore, but what they didn't know when they moved in Friday was that stagers and various businesses, from feng shui experts to a sod supplier, had donated all their services and goods to complete the home.
Usually, a Habitat house is bare when families move in, but this one was decked up, the idea of Val Allocco, founder of Staged 2 Sell NY in Northport.
During the summer, she had visited a Habitat fundraiser in New Jersey, where each room in a McMansion was set up by different stagers. She decided to copy the idea on Long Island, but after weeks of Allocco getting turned down by builders, brokers and owners of ritzy homes with “lots of rooms,” Les Scheinfeld, the associate director of Habitat’s Suffolk affiliate, suggested staging one of his clients’ new homes. Allocco and the new, central Long Island chapter of the American Society of Home Stagers and Redesigners weighed the pros and cons of doing up a show home versus a Habitat home; the nonprofit won easily. “This would be unique, but I said we can’t approach it the same way,” Allocco said. “We can’t put rental furniture in there and then pull it out. That’s mean. How do you do that when the house is going to be given to someone and they come in and see it all decorated and then they go in and everything’s all stripped out of there?” For months, Allocco’s friends in the industry and several stagers tapped their contacts and visited businesses to ask for donations. In lieu of sod for the yard, Pam Holland of Holland Environmental Design in Northport got grass seed and big bags of fertilizer, which stank up her SUV for three weeks before the Bay Shore house was ready for yard work. Carmela Abella, a Selden-based stager, got donations and convinced the Girl Scouts to fill Barnes’ home with spices, cookware and all the necessities of life, even as her father grew sick and came to live with her. At one point, with companies unwilling or slow to donate, Allocco was going to use her nephew's memorial fund, started by New York City police, to pay for bath towels and other needs. Eventually, businesses came through, from Cort Furniture Rental to Lowe’s and Wal-Mart. In a sense, Allocco and the other stagers of the trade group’s central Long Island chapter, who never knew each other before, found they were a family also. “We feel so fortunate to have met each other,” Allocco said. “I feel that by working together, it really strengthens the bonds. You really get to know people. It’s just an amazing thing, that you have home stagers that are not in competition but are working together.”
Photo by Joseph D. Sullivan
Tags: Bay Shore , help for homeowners , staging
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