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designed for you.
Wow! wOw! WOW!
What an amazing experience the AFR Gives Back Team had in Rockaway, New York this past weekend!
The news coverage has long since dissipated about Hurricane Sandy, but one thing remains the same – and that is that many people still need help and aren’t receiving it. We at AFR Furniture Rental have set our sights on a mission to help change that, and this trip was the first of more to come.
A group of forty AFR Team Members from Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey headed to the Rockaway Peninsula to help the Andre family return home after they were displaced by Hurricane Sandy on October 29, 2012.
Partnering with our friends at St. Bernard’s Project (who many of you are familiar with through our work with EPTA) and Friends of Rockaway, two fantastic recovery organizations, we set out on a mission to make a difference.
Meet Pat Andre and her son Gerard. They road out the storm in horrifying circumstances and escaped with their lives. Since October of 2012, they have been staying in a tiny apartment trying to rebuild their lives. Pat has been a resident of Rockaway for fifty years and all she wanted was to be able to go back to the place that she knew as home. We wanted to help.
Donating $20,000 from our Christmas Fund (thank you all for being so generous), we provided the funds to cover the gap for the bones of Pat’s home to be rebuilt. While that was happening, we worked with her to come up with a design scheme that she would love. Settling on a coastal style, we set out to compile everything (with the help of our generous sponsors) that we’d need to complete her home. With everything in place and ready to go, on May10th, we set out to deliver an early Mother’s Day Present for Pat, that couldn’t be matched.
While in Rockaway, we split into 4 groups. While one group worked at the Andre family home, the rest of the team spread out over 3 other homes, picked by Friends of Rockaway, all in various stages of reconstruction. We helped finish dry wall, install flooring, and primed and painted. We wanted to help as much as we could, wherever we could.
At Andre household, we were busy hanging blinds and doing a little exterior landscaping to brighten things up a bit. Once we were done with that, it was time to completely furnish the Andre’s home with new bedroom furnishings, dining room sets, living room sets, soft goods, accessories and more. The home was divided into two separate residences, which Pat shared with her adult son, Gerard. On one side a kitchen, dining room, living room, bedroom and bath. The other, a studio, included a bedroom, living room, eat-in kitchen and bath. We completed them both.
When it was finished, we were so excited and couldn’t wait to see if Pat loved it. We needn’t have worried. Her first words when she walked in were, “WOW! It looks like a beach cottage that you would see on tevevision. I hope I don’t wake up tomorrow to find this is all a dream!” To say our hearts melted would be an understatement. In that moment, lives were changed – both hers and ours.
As one of our AFR Gives Back Team shared with us afterward, “I just wanted to send a note to say "thank you". I thought a lot about the day as we drove back to Philly.
So often, we get wrapped up with things going on in our own lives. We all have personal or business things we deal with on a daily basis and it so easy to forget that there are many people struggling with their own difficulties.
So I truly "thank you" for the opportunity not only to help the Andre Family return to their home (which looked so beautiful and warm), but also for the chance to be a part of something bigger than myself and remember how lucky I am everyday to live the life that I am fortunate enough to live.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. It is in that spirit that AFR is so committed to giving back to the communities in which we work and live.
Our mission is not finished. We WILL be back.
For more information, please contact us at tschmitt@rentfurniture.com.
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