Newlyweds' Hope For Home Ownership Through Habitat For Humanity

EAST QUOGUE, NY — With the cry for affordable housing across the East End reaching crisis pitch and young people finding themselves forced to leave their hometowns due to a dearth of residential opportunities, there's a young couple who will soon find themselves a shining ray of hope as they begin to refurbish a home of their very own in East Quogue.

Newlyweds Kyle and Melissa Lohr have been afforded the chance to renovate and put their personal touches on the house, thanks to Habitat for Humanity of Suffolk.

A ribbon cutting and house start ceremony will take place on Wednesday, at the home located on Ocean Avenue in East Quogue.

And it will be a joyful beginning for the young couple, who are currently living with Melissa's family in Hampton Bays, along with a house full of relatives, and all their collective pets.

Kyle, 24, who works at Peconic Bay Medical Center as a dietary aide, and Melissa, almost 21, who is an environmental services aide at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, wanted desperately to stay on the East End but watched as a steady stream of their friends and former classmates were forced to leave in search of affordable housing.

But once they heard about Habitat and were accepted into Habitat for Humanity's homeownership program, the doors to a bright new future opened wide.

On Wednesday, volunteers and Habitat staff will begin work on the home, alongside volunteers from Riverhead Building Supply, whose owner, Edgar Goodale, donated a full house sponsorship worth $100,000 so he and his employees can help with building a HabitatSuffolk home, an organization that they have supported for almost 30 years.

Telling their story, Melissa's voice brims with excitement.

"We were in the middle of planning for our wedding, and also trying to move out. We're living in my childhood bedroom right now," she said.

But while the couple was searching for homes and were approved for a $100,000 mortgage, the only properties in that price range they could find were in the Mastic area, far from their families and jobs.

"We'd been looking for months," she said.

Then, just a few weeks away from their wedding, Melissa's dad, whose friend lives in a Habitat home, saw that the not-for-profit organization was accepting applications. Despite the flurry of plans for their March wedding, which was held in her family's backyard, the pair excitedly began the process of applying, even faxing paperwork on their honeymoon.

"A couple of months later we were called and told we had been accepted for an interview," Melissa said. "It was overwhelming. I was so excited, I was crying. We're over the moon, so excited."

Living in East Quogue, she said, will mean everything.

"The goal was to live here, where we grew up. Our family is here, our roots are here. There was a very real possibility we were going to have to move out of state and we didn't want to do that."

The house, which is not a new build but an already existing abandoned structure, will need work, she said. So far the structure was gutted completely, and the foundation re-poured.

"It was abandoned," Melissa said. "There were still pots and pans in the kitchen and stuff in the fridge. We'd drive by and see a dresser, or the fridge, in the dumpster."

Right now, the home, which sits on a small lot, has a mixture of brick and stucco on the walls, with the exterior walls thick with heavy layers that previous owners kept adding to, she said.

"It's a little barn house, but it's really cute and it's going to look so nice by the time we're done," she said.

The couple's vision includes transforming the home into a cozy cottage with lots of exterior greenery, shrubbery and flowers.

What's perhaps most exciting for them both is achieving the goal of home ownership when they're both still starting out.

"We're so young," Melissa said. "We're ahead of the game."

The couple, who met through friends — she was homeschooled and he attended Riverhead High School — met in 2014, Kyle said.

When they reflect on what the idea of "home" means, Kyle said it involves "independence, being ourselves, not having to worry about other people."

Kyle went from living alone with his mom to a house with 9 people, so the idea of privacy is a big plus.

"It really will just be good for our relationship to be able to sit and have dinner together. We haven't been able to be a married couple. We got married, went on our honeymoon, and came back to my family. Being alone is going to be huge for us. We won't know what to do with ourselves," Melissa laughed.

She added that coming from a family of 5, with one older sister who's moved away, plus 3 younger siblings, there are still kids in her parents' house.

"We still feel like we're kids," she said. "But we're not. We have bills to pay. We have our own fridge! That day we got a fridge was so huge."

Melissa added, "The day we move into our house is going to be so exciting."

Both agreed owning their own home will be a good thing, since they love animals. Right now, they have 3 rabbits, a cat, and a dog. "And that's just our animals, not counting the others in the house," Melissa said. "We want lots of fluffy animals. And someday, kids."

Their voices bright with excitement, Melissa and Kyle talk about their dreams for their new home.

"We're so excited to decorate for Christmas," Melissa said. "I want to put a little Christmas decoration outside while we're working there. The thing I envision most though, is cooking my first meal in the kitchen — the first real meal where we have Thanksgiving or Christmas, all together, at our own table."

The Habitat for Humanity experience

Both Kyle and Melissa credit Habitat for the entire home ownership process, which includes 200 hours each of "sweat equity labor," volunteer work, and classes in both finance management and home maintenance, where they will learn how to sheet rock and lay floors.

"We have a whole lot of homework," Melissa said. "Including a budgeting program — so we will be able to keep the home we live in, the home we worked so hard to get. If we to have just bought a house, we wouldn't know how to sheet rock or do any repairs."

For their volunteer work, the couple worked at Ecological Culture Initiative in Hampton Bays, manning the farmers' market and engaged in manual labor setting up the garden; next up, they'll be volunteering at the Long Island Aquarium & Exhibition Center in Riverhead.

Les Scheinfeld, director of development at Habitat for Humanity of Suffolk, said the home is the first Habitat project in East Quogue, and the first time Riverhead Building Supply has been a full house sponsor, after 30 years of partnership with Habitat. The Greater Hamptons Interfaith Council has also been a longtime supporter, he said.

The Lohrs, Scheinfeld said, "are a young couple, just getting started in their lives together." And it's the same whether the home will belong to newlyweds, a family with four kids, or an older family that's had to move from apartment to apartment, to keep their kids in their school districts, for consistency, and so their children can have roots.

It doesn't matter if it's Wyandanch or Westhampton, Scheinfeld said. "These families would never have had the opportunity to own their own homes without Habitat for Humanity."

Typically, work on a home takes 8 to 10 months, Scheinfeld added.

Because the organization is a not for profit, regardless of the cost to build or refurbish the home, the homeowner will never pay more than 30 percent of their income monthly to pay for the house; assistance grants and subsidies are utilized, he said.

With the couple giving back through sweat equity and taking classes, as well as in a savings plan, by the time it's time for the down payment, they will have some financial stake in the closing, he said. A matching gift from the bank will provide the homeowner with a savings account, he explained.

"We're trying to really create a successful home ownership opportunity for our families," Scheinfeld said.

And for Melissa and Kyle, that opportunity is one they say has forever enriched their lives. When they drive up to the gutted building that will one day be their first home, the place where their lifetime of memories will be made, Melissa said, "I think, 'This is going to be mine. This is going to be ours."