SPRINGFIELD, Maine — Pastor Bruce Swan and other members of Springfield Community Chapel were renovating a house on Park Street a few months ago when a stranger walked up.
“How much do you want for the house?” the man asked.
“It’s not for sale. We’re going to give the house away,” Swan said.
“No, tell me. How much do you want for the house?” the man said.
Swan repeated himself, more slowly and earnestly.
“Seriously,” the man persisted. “How much do you want for it?”
He stomped off in disgust when the answer didn’t change. To this day, Swan doesn’t know if the man believed him.
“I never even found out what his name was,” Swan recalled with a laugh earlier this week. “I hadn’t seen him before, and I haven’t seen him since.”
Yet Swan wasn’t kidding. The three-bedroom home at 299 Park St. is almost entirely renovated and awaits a family to be selected by a chapel advisory board this weekend to take ownership of the home at Christmas, he said.
Volunteers were finishing installing flooring to a kitchen and mudroom area on Saturday and doing final cleanup as they prepared the small but cozy home for its next owner. New carpets, appliances, siding, a new boiler and extensively repainted walls, including new sections of Sheetrock, trim and plumbing, are among the many improvements parishioners have made.
The nondenominational church acquired the quarter-acre property when Wells Fargo bankers contacted Swan in January to pitch the idea of renovating the house for charity. The bank gave it to the church after acquiring it in a foreclosure, Swan said. Work began last summer.
“It was in pretty rough shape,” David Pasquariello of Springfield, one of the advisory board members who on Saturday was installing trim, said. “Now it’s pretty well put together.”
“It’s going great,” Debra Swan, the pastor’s wife, said. “We have a good team effort going here.”
The hardest part of the job, she said, has been making the Christmas deadline.
As part of ownership, the incoming family must live in the home for at least five years. Less than that and the church would resume ownership of the property, Bruce Swan said. The applicants need a valid source of income and to demonstrate enough home-maintenance skills and responsibility to maintain the home, which has an assessed value of $40,400.
It’s the congregation’s first such project. The work has been graced by God’s touch nearly from the outset, Swan said. Several times work almost bogged down for lack of qualified hands or donated items only to see someone step forward and offer to help or make a donation.
“It has been really gratifying to see how God has worked all that out so that we can come to this finished product,” Swan said.
Board members will finish interviewing the heads of six local families this week before announcing to their 65-member congregation the winner of the mortgage-free home on Sunday, Swan said.