“Adopt A Room” is Here!!!

We’ve been talking about the “Adopt A Room” opportunity for several months now. I have presented “Adopt A Room” as a way for you to partner with us to help cover the cost of renovating a room. That meant different things to different people. Some wanted to help get the building ready and safe for living, some wanted to help furnish the room and make it comfortable, and some wanted to help decorate the home with those final touches! The good news is – we need to do all of that! And there is something for everyone!

Our advisory committee has designed 3 phases for turning our building into a home for our women:

Phase I – Adopt A Room – Getting the building ready – Starts Now!! Your donations through this program will help cover building renovation expenses including but not limited to fire sprinkler & alarm repair and reconfiguration, electrical, lighting, spray foam insulation for exterior walls, plumbing, building materials & cabinetry, flooring, and contractor labor. More details on building renovation and partnering with us in Phase I later in this article.

Phase II – Adopt a Bed, Appliance, or Piece of Furniture - Once we have secured our building renovation funding and are a little closer to the end of that project, we will open up this phase. It will give an opportunity for everyone to help with the fun stuff – turning the building into a home!

Phase III – Home Shower – You’re all familiar with the wedding shower/registry – we want to have a Home Shower! When we get to the final stages of preparing the home, we plan to create an on-line registry where you can buy wall décor, pots and pans, throw pillows, and all those things that make a building more like a home! You can either have them delivered to us or you can bring them in person to our “Home Shower” where you will be able to get a sneak preview of the home in its final stages before our official “Grand Opening Celebration” and share some fun fellowship with our staff, board, and volunteer family!

Building Renovations - We have been blessed with a structurally solid building with a fairly new metal roof, windows, and doors! But, it’s an older building that has been vacant for 3 years and it has not been heated the last 2 winters. Because of frozen/broken water lines and the cold temperatures in the building, all the plumbing needs to be rerun, and there is damage to sheetrock, fire sprinkler lines, and flooring. The heating/cooling system in the building is no longer usable. The building is also in desperate need of better insulation to keep utility bills down. But we knew most of this when we bought the building, and these are things to be expected when a building has set vacant. It’s still a blessing! It will be expensive to complete renovations but when we get the building done, we will not only have a nice women’s residential home and office, but also have 2 good sources of income to support our women’s residential home right there in our building with our Thrift Store income in the east wing and rent from 5 to 6 apartments in the north wing! And with other smaller income sources already in the works, we are in hopes of being 50-60% self-sufficient once all the building renovations are completed. That is a really big deal for a residential facility like ours! And we intend to keep looking for additional sources to increase our self-sufficiency as we move forward. We just need a lot of extra help getting us through the building renovations. If we had bought a house big enough for all our residents and staff including necessary renovations for our specific needs, we would probably have spent just as much or more money than we will be spending to complete renovations for the women’s residential home and office area and we would not have had the extra building space for our 2 sources of income.

Renovations of the east wing for the Thrift Store are also under way to start generating additional income as soon as possible. The final phase of renovating the north wing for apartments will take place at a later time when additional funding is available.

Adopt A Room - Phase I Details

On the “Room List - Amounts/Progress” button under the “Adopt A Room” tab, you will find a listing of the rooms for the women’s residential home and office area (central part of building and south wing). It lists the approximate square footage of the room and the “Adopt A Room” amount needed. Our advisory committee has been working on this for a while. Most of the building renovations expenses are not room specific, they affect the entire area. Our contractors have given us estimates based on this entire renovation area. We decided it made the most sense to prorate the estimated expenses by the square footage in each room. Dividing the total of the estimates by the total square footage equaled $53.62 per square foot.

We realize that the dollar amounts for some rooms are high, but several churches, businesses, organizations, and/or individuals can donate a portion of those rooms and together reach the total amount. For the 2 Resident bedrooms, since they each sleep 6 women, one option would be to divide those rooms by 6 and adopt one women’s sleeping area.

We will be very appreciative of whatever amounts you determine in your hearts to give towards this project. Rooms will be adopted out in the order that you contact us with your room choice and amount you would like to give towards that room. Updates of amounts received and room availability will be posted on the “Room List - Amounts/Progress” button under the “Adopt A Room” tab on a regular basis.

When you invest in this project you are investing in lives! And we can’t thank you enough for your help getting our building ready to be a home to offer our women freedom, a fresh start, and a future in Jesus! Please don’t wait! We have women who desperately need this home, so let’s keep it moving forward. We really need your partnership to get this done. Thank you so much! Call us at 641-414-2999 or email us at circleoffreedomiowa@gmail.com to “Adopt a Room” today!

Any overages in donations to final construction costs will go towards the annual operating budget and/or the next phase of building renovation.