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BUFFALO: Makeover goes to the extreme
TV show comes to Buffalo to build a house; ends up refurbishing a neighborhood
It started off with just one house, but eventually an entire Buffalo neighborhood has gotten an extreme makeover.
The popular television show, “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” visited the West Side to build a new home at 228 Massachusetts Ave. for Delores Powell and her four children. Led by David Homes, the building firm in charge of the project, thousands of volunteers have come to the project site. The work was completed Friday for Saturday’s “reveal” or as fans of the show know it, the “move that bus” moment when the lucky family sees their completed home for the first time.
Richard Hoose of Lockport was among thousands of volunteers at the job site. He said there were so many volunteers present, “Extreme Makeover” decided to do some work on the rest of the neighborhood. In addition to building a new home for the Powells, the volunteers also painted, cleaned up vacant lots, fixed roofs, installed siding and planted trees and shrubs. A few volunteers worked on a community garden. Despite the amount of work and people, things still flowed pretty well.
“What impressed me is how everything worked together,” Hoose said. “It was like a ballet.”
Hoose worked on the Powell home Tuesday, doing all kinds of tasks.
He was there when the foundation was assembled Tuesday morning and the first wall was up. Hoose was also around when “Extreme Makeover” host Ty Pennington shot a segment for the episode.
Some of the walls of the house were prefabricated, meaning sections were put together off-site and brought to Massachusetts Avenue. The flooring, a special kind of tongue-in-groove material, came in on pallets. Hoose said one of the crew members explained that the show aims to take about four and a half days, or 106 hours, to build a new house. The crew and the volunteers also deconstructed the house that was there in order to salvage the parts they could.
“They’ll save some of it for other projects,” Hoose said.
Students and staff from the Niagara County Community College Horticulture Program participated in the work Thursday and Friday on the Powell home. Program coordinator Carolyn Stanko said the students did the landscaping for the house. Student Melanie Anderson of Corfu said the group did a little bit of everything, including mulching, laying down sod and planting trees and shrubs.
“It’s looking great, it’s really coming along,” she said Friday. “It’s great to see the community actually coming together to help this family. It’s a great experience for us, it’s just amazing.”
Hoose, who is a regular viewer of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” used the same word, “amazing,” to describe his time as a volunteer. He didn’t know the show would be coming to Buffalo, but saw it on Facebook and signed up to volunteer on the David Homes Web site. He received an e-mail with work shifts shortly thereafter.
“I’m a a faithful viewer. Once I told my wife it would be so awesome to work on it,” Hoose said.
The “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” Buffalo episode is expected to air in early 2010.
Contact reporter Joe Olenick
at 439-9222, ext. 6241.
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