A few months ago, Anne Allen was facing a very cold winter. Her furnace had broken and it was January. Although she recalled it wasn't that cold, the snowstorms of February were on their way, although she did not know that. After almost 10 days without heat, Allen, a Fairfax retiree, called the county's Home Repair for the Elderly program.
"I got a response the very day that I called," she said. "And someone came out and looked at it and sent a furnace repair man that they deal with come out and look at it."
Soon, her furnace was fixed, courtesy of Fairfax County. Without the program, Allen would have had to face late winter's icy blasts without a furnace.
"I'm elderly, I'm living on a fixed income and if it wasn't for a fix program I would have been using an electric heater and my oven," she said.
THE HOME REPAIR for the Elderly Program helps seniors who meet certain income criteria with home repair projects that they may otherwise not be able to afford. It is run through the county's Department of Housing and Community Development and has been around for 23 years serving about 100 households a year, said Tom Overocker, chief of housing rehabilitation who oversees the program.
"We do a lot of painting, light fixture replacements, faucets," he said. "You take a typical elderly widow in this county whose husband always did the repair, it's great for her."
The program is available to people 62 years old or older. A single person with an annual income of less than $38,100 is eligible. So is a two-person household with a maximum income of $43,500 and a three person household with a maximum income of $48,950.
Parts for the repairs have to cost less than $500, which rules out some major projects such as completely rewiring a house. Nevertheless, said Overocker, "you'd be amazed what we can accomplish with $500."
After assessing a project, Overocker will dispatch his four-person crew to spruce up a house at no cost to the elderly resident inside.
"We get just tremendously good feedback," he said. "It's a really good program for everybody involved in it."
Lavennia Spucks is one such person.
"It is a great idea," she said.
"I had a sink that was broken and they replaced it and they did some caulking, some work in the bathroom to keep the water from going down and ruining the wall," recalled Spucks, a Reston resident. Without the program, she said, "I wouldn't have been able to fix it. I wouldn't have been able to use the shower."
The only concern Allen and Spucks had about the program was that it may not be very widely known. Both heard about it in a local newsletter for seniors but not everybody reads those newsletters, they said.
"It's a wonderful program, I just wish that some people that are still needy knew about it," said Allen. "If you don't get the newsletters or whatever then they don't know about it. It's a shame."
Spucks said she did not know of anybody else who had participated in the program. But asked whether she thought there were other elderly county residents who could benefit from it but who hadn't heard about the program, she said: "I'm sure there are."