"Habitat is a lifesaver" Homeowner Claims [back]
“Once you get in with Habitat, the door is opened to a world you didn’t even know existed,” Dorothy (Dee) Shupp Pfeiffer said in an interview recently. “I kept thinking the other shoe was going to drop, but it didn’t,” she remembers as she celebrates paying off her Habitat mortgage last December 10th, a full five years before it was due.
Dorothy remembers the people involved with building her house, especially Fred Cialli and Doug Thomas, two founders of this affiliate, both of whom have passed away. “I didn’t think people like this existed,” she said. But they did. Her house became the second Habitat home in Washington County, completed and dedicated April 12, 1996. The date was inscribed on a wooden plaque signed by all 62 workers on the house. It still hangs right beside the door of the house. Dorothy’s first husband passed away some years ago, and she has remarried. Now that her house is paid off, she is passing it on to her daughter, who worked on the house and grew up in it, so that she and her husband will have a safe place in which to raise their children. Her children are close to the same age Dorothy’s children were when they moved in.
“I will always feel indebted to Habitat,” Dorothy says. “It was an act of God” that she, her husband Bill, and the two children went out on a terribly rainy night to a meeting for potential homeowners that she learned about from a form sent home in her four-year-old’s school bag. “It was meant to be. With the house things started to work out for us,” she relates. She tells how she learned to garden and complete small redecorating projects, budget and save money. “You’re so used to making do,” she said; “you don’t realize how good it could be. I had never paid such low utilities before because of the good insulation.”
The children had always wanted a pet, but that wasn’t allowed in their rented places. “I still have the same dog, Krissy, 15 years later,” she said. They got their pet shortly after they moved in.
“I still have irises that Shirl Cialli (Fred’s wife) gave me from her garden. Every year when I see them, I think of Fred. He was the embodiment of Habitat,” she remembers. “Fifteen years later my house is in the same condition Habitat gave it to me. I have all the same appliances,” she said. “They all work. I was always proud of my house.”
Remembering the terrible time when her first husband passed away unexpectedly, Dorothy related how Sherry Brown Cooper and other Habitat volunteers came to her house and offered their aid. “I wasn’t afraid…it changes how you think about things,” Dorothy said. “It was the worst point of my life, and you were there.”
“I hope every person on that plaque realizes I appreciate it,” she says. “I had a good life.” To Dorothy, Habitat is not just a house but a whole lifestyle change. It’s “a chance for a better life. To have that chance, when you know you weren’t ever going to have it,” she said. Habitat made it happen for her and her family. “It’s a dream come true. Where else are you going to labor for a few hours or open your wallet and donate a few dollars and you’re going to be able to see the fruits of that forever?”
