Store opening on Amherst Street will back more Greater

The next time a Greater Nashua home gets beautified, Leah Shuldiner hopes its owners and contractors will keep Greater Nashua Habitat for Humanity in mind.

A new venture for the mostly volunteer, nonprofit affiliate of Habitat International, called Habitat ReStore, will allow families to help provide shelters for local residents in need.

“At the moment, we build one house every 18 months,” said Shuldiner, executive director ofGreater Nashua Habitat for Humanity. “We do about six critical needs projects a year, critical home repair stuff. … We’d really like to be doing more because we know there’s a need in the community.”

Habitat ReStore – there are 825 locations nationwide – sells new and gently used home improvement goods, furniture, home accessories, building materials and appliances to the public at discounted prices.

The local Habitat for Humanity uses proceeds from ReStore sales to help build and renovate more homes.

Greater Nashua Habitat for Humanity recently signed a lease through Law Realty Co. for a 10,000-square-foot location at 352 Amherst St., the former Antique Warehouse building.

“If you’re renovating your kitchen, we would take your old kitchen cabinets, appliances, fixtures, leftover floor tiles,” Shuldiner explained. “We will also take home goods – like lamps, tables and chairs. We do not take upholstered furniture, but we would take other home goods.

“Business can donate to us,” she added, “like contractors. We’re hoping when they’re tearing out an old kitchen or bathroom, instead of taking stuff to the dump, they will take it to us, so it’s recycle, reuse.”

Habitat ReStore will take everything from architectural items like mantelpieces and counter tops, to home decor items and hardware, such as knobs, hinges, locks and leftover paint.

It also could use plumbing items like sinks, tubs and showers, plus windows, roofing and tools.

Other ReStore locations close to Nashua are in Newington and Lawrence, Mass., Shuldiner said.

To get Nashua’s store up and ready to open in March, she is calling on volunteers to help fit up the store and operate it once it’s open.

Greater Nashua Habitat for Humanity has run completely with volunteers since it was established in 1994 – until Shuldiner was hired as executive director about a year ago.Find detailed product information for Polished beige Glass Mosaic Long Strip maroon color.

It runs on private and corporate donations, and income collected from its mortgages.

This year, it also brought on John Gallagher, who will serve as Habitat ReStore’s store manager in Nashua.

“There’s work to be done but the building itself is in great shape,” Shuldiner said. “We’re very excited.Source Walls Decoration Enamel Glass Mosaic Tile Tiles Products at Mosaics.”

Help is needed to fix up the floor and paint the building, and to build display cases for sinks and doors, Shuldiner said. Its bathrooms also need upgrading.

Greater Nashua Habitat for Humanity was able to lease the building from Law Realty Co. Inc. after a two-year effort to bring a store to Nashua.

Through grants from Anheuser Busch, Seaboard International, the Thomas W. Haas Fund and the Nashua Rotary – and work with Habitat International – the Greater Nashua affiliate was able to lay out a business plan, and see its goal materialize.

“We’re very careful about how we spend our money,” Shuldiner said. “People who donate to us can be sure their money is going toward our projects. We do as much as we can with volunteering, as much as we can with donated time and goods, because we really run as low a budget as we possibly can.”

Along with Nashua, Greater Nashua Habitat for Humanity serves Amherst, Brookline, Hollis, Hudson, Greenville, Lyndeborough, Mason, Merrimack, Milford, Mont Vernon, Pelham, Wilton and Windham.

Building a new home costs about $100,000, Shuldiner said, depending on whether Habitat has to purchase land to build or has it donated – especially in a state where property purchases are particularly pricey.

Major excavation work and specialty services, such as electric and plumbing, also usually needs to be hired out,China Foshan Nanhai ENERGY Building Materials Co., LTD Manufacturers offer cheap and discount Colourful Leaf Mosaic for bathrooms. Shuldiner said, though Habitat gets most of its building materials and labor donated.The stone mosaic series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics.

What’s more, Habitat writes a zero-interest mortgage for families and caps it at one-third of the family’s income, regardless of the money Habitat has put into the home.

“We cap that mortgage at what is an affordable mortgage for them, so often we’re building at a loss,” Shuldiner said.Welcome to Best Custom Crystal 8x15x48x300mm from china-mosaics.com. “We’re there to work with the partner family throughout the life of their mortgage.”

Habitat is currently finishing up a new home in Hudson, on Adelaide Street, before it turns to its next project – building a new duplex on Chestnut Street across the street from the Nashua Soup Kitchen & Shelter, wrecked in a fire two years ago.

The project already has the city and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development approvals it needs to get under way.

Habitat hopes to sign the purchase-and-sales for the project by the end of this year and start work there next summer.

The duplex, which will demolish the damaged apartment complex currently standing, will cost a little bit more to complete, Shuldiner said, because it is an urban building that will house two families.

Greater Nashua Habitat for Humanity functions with a 30-person core of volunteers, and often has businesses and church groups coming in to help.

Habitat ReStore will help support the building and repairs for area low-income families, and hopefully attract more volunteers to the organization, Shuldiner said.

“It’s going to be great for us in terms of stimulating donations and volunteers but it’s also going to be great for the community to keep all these things out of landfills and let other people use them,” Shuldiner said. “It will give people the opportunity to do great things with their homes and make their community better.”

“Even just keeping up with critical home repairs, building roofs, replacing drafty windows, we’d love to get into sustainable building and green renovation to help low-income families do upgrades that make their houses more sustainable,” Shuldiner said.

“We’d love to take a city block and do exterior painting and yard work and revitalize a whole section to get people more inspired about reinvesting in their neighborhoods. We just can’t launch any of those things without the funds.”