What’s not to love about home tours? Get décor ideas, meet nice people and be nosy in a restrained but socially acceptable fashion.
The home tours of Lancaster Young Professionals and Harrisburg Young Professionals showcase urban living. Open the doors and garden gates of city homes for LYP’s and HYP’s 2017 springtime tours, and be amazed at the stylish lifestyles enjoyed in convenient locales.
Lancaster Young Professionals, 2017 Urban Living Tour, Saturday, May 20, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
LYP launched its first home tour in 2016. This year’s dozen homes occupy a walkable route in Lancaster’s west-end Chestnut Hill neighborhood. Munch on free refreshments and end the day by taking advantage of discounts at local restaurants, bars and shops.
Beyond showcasing urban living, LYP and its tour partners, including Lancaster Housing Opportunity and local realtors, are providing information on financing and home ownership opportunities.
“A lot of young people assume that home ownership is out of their reach,” says tour organizer Amber Strazzo. “My mortgage is probably half of what a lot of my friends are paying to rent similar-sized places.”
Strazzo opened her home, at the fringe of Lancaster’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood, for the 2016 tour. This 625-square-foot former beauty salon “forced me to always evaluate, so I’m not accumulating a lot of stuff,” she said.
Strazzo’s father, the former owner of a home improvement business, helped with the conversion. A kitchen was added. Laminate flooring was installed upstairs and wood-like vinyl downstairs. “I have a dog,” explains Strazzo. “If it gets wet, it’s easy to clean.”
The kitchen was fashioned from Ikea cabinets paired with countertops of black-veined white quartz, purchased from Lancaster-based Keystone Granite and Tile.
“I was very picky and waited until I found what I wanted,” Strazzo says.
In the east-side neighborhood of Musser Park, Janelle and Kendal Yoder, owner of K. Yoder Contracting, live in a circa-1850 home with their two children. Their kitchen remodel was so successful that it inspired their participation in the 2016 home tour.
The project reconfigured existing high-quality cabinets—originally repurposed from someone else’s custom kitchen remodel—to make better use of the small space. Walls were painted light gray to emphasize the room’s height and “give it that airy feel,” Yoder says.
Unintentionally, the kitchen remodel also created a favorite family spot—an open countertop with a couple of barstools. It’s now where the kids do homework while Yoder makes dinner, and where Yoder herself sits to go through the mail.
Instead of leaving the city when their children reached school age, the Yoders decided to enroll their kids in the School District of Lancaster. It’s a decision they applaud to this day, with their son in third grade and their daughter in first.
“The teachers are there because they have the vision to be there,” Yoder says. Plus, the kids’ friends represent a cross-section of cultures, including Burmese refugees who shared their experiences of refugee-camp life.
Lancaster resident Chase Hafer opened his Civil War-era home for the 2016 tour. He renovated every aspect, from the flooring to the industrial-chic kitchen. Many visitors were “surprised at how modern and up to date” tour homes were, says Hafer. “Everybody was so surprised we had this much space.”
Hafer’s friends live nearby, and “it’s very easy to get together with everybody” for dinners, drinks and events, he says. “There’s a sense of community.”
Strazzo finds that her tiny spot is the ideal home base for her wealth of community involvements. She volunteers at Central Market and for LYP. She attends Tellus360 events. She walks her Boston terrier, Doug, to the nearby dog park.
“I’m very close to everything. I’m close to market. I’m close to work,” she says. “It’s nice to be able to walk. Sometimes I don’t touch my car for two weeks.”
LYP 2017 Urban Living Tour, information and tickets: lyp.org/urban-living-tour/
Harrisburg Young Professionals 19th Annual Home Tour, Saturday, May 13, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. tour, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. after party
HYP is a home tour veteran, but even with 19 years under its belt, there are still new neighborhoods to explore. For the first time, the 2017 tour visits Bellevue Park, a historic and decidedly non-urban sanctuary of greenery and winding roads tucked within the city of Harrisburg.
The Bellevue Park tour of 15 to 18 unique, architect-designed homes (plus some gardens) myth-busts stereotypes of life in “consolidated and condensed” city neighborhoods, says tour co-chair Dominic DiFrancesco.
“Bellevue Park is the total opposite,” he says. “You do have space. You do have yards. Those options are available within the city.”
The Bellevue Park tour map will not be tightly walkable, but tourgoers will be compensated by peeks into “a little gem,” says co-chair Kelsey Ireland. “You feel like you stepped into another world. And you’re still so close to everything. It’s only 10 minutes to downtown—less depending on what lights you hit.”
The HYP tour proceeds help fund Home in the City, a program from HYP, Harrisburg 2020 and the Harrisburg Chamber & CREDC that offers $1,000 grants toward closing costs for qualified, HYP-member city homebuyers. The program has awarded $50,000 in grants over the years.
The home tour is a “community bonding” experience, for visitors and for owners who proudly open their homes to guests, says DiFrancesco. Longtime city resident Todd Vander Woude opened his home in Harrisburg’s historic Shipoke neighborhood for the 2016 HYP tour. He and his wife, Kathy, and their children have lived in two homes of the compact community since 2000.
Here, says Vander Woude, neighbors become longtime friends. The Capital Area Greenbelt beckons outside the front door, and riverfront views are stupendous. When the kids were little, they played in the nearby park or walked to the City Island baseball field, where Vander Woude was the Harrisburg Senators’ first general manager.
Today, Vander Woude is executive director of the Harrisburg Downtown Improvement District, still taking his foot-powered commute to work.
“We enjoy the walkability of things,” he says. “Downtown. City Island. The festivals along the river. We’re near everything a city has to offer.”
HYP 19th Annual Home Tour, tickets and info: hyp.org/event/19th-annual-home-tour/