Kent: Shoppers are used to getting bargains at secondhand stores. What they’re not used to getting is guarantees.
At the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Kent, they do.
The store has repair personnel who fix up major appliances, bikes and items with small engines to make sure those things are in good working order before they hit the sales floor. The store even offers warranties on some of the items — 30 days on major appliances and 10 days on lawn mowers and other equipment with small engines.
The store sells mostly salvaged building materials and other used home goods that have been donated to Habitat for Humanity of Portage County, and it puts a premium on standing behind the things it sells, manager Jan Bennett said. Generally its policy is not to offer refunds, “but our policy is also not to need to do that at all,” she said.
Walk into the ReStore, and you might find a scrupulously clean range or a refrigerator that looks like it came right out of an appliance store. That’s the handiwork of Al Turcotte, a ReStore employee with a proud streak as long as his appliance-repair experience.
Turcotte is in charge of inspecting and repairing major appliances, and he’s not about to put a dingy appliance onto the ReStore’s sales floor. He takes pride in detailing his work, so even well-used appliances look like new.
But appearances aren’t his only concern. Turcotte scrutinizes the appliances the ReStore sells to make sure they’re safe, and he makes repairs to ensure they operate flawlessly.
“I don’t cut corners. It has to be right,” he said.
Not every appliance makes the cut. Turcotte evaluates each appliance to determine whether repairs are cost-effective. If they’re not, the appliance is cannibalized for working parts, or it’s set aside to wait until another, unsalvageable appliance comes in that can provide the needed pieces. Some vintage appliances are sold without reconditioning, but they’re marked as such.
The shelves in Turcotte’s shop are jumbled with dryer drums, timers, racks and other miscellaneous parts.
How can he remember what he has?
“Because I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” he said. “I know every part in here. I can name every part I’ve got in this place.”
Turcotte started his career in a shop that reconditioned appliances and spent years doing in-home appliance repairs. Over that time, he’s worked on pretty much every brand out there.
He’s even jury-rigged some hybrid appliances, but he won’t divulge details. “I don’t kiss and tell,” he said.
Like Turcotte, Kim Jones works in a shop populated by salvaged pieces and parts, which allow him to rehabilitate donated bikes as well as lawn mowers, chain saws and other equipment with small engines. A mechanical engineer, he still works part time in the field and volunteers one day a week at the Kent ReStore.
The gig feeds his love of tinkering and figuring out the sometimes complicated mechanics. “We had the little one-speeds when I grew up,” he said as he put the finishing touches on a multispeed Magna bicycle he was reconditioning.
Often Jones can be seen biking through the parking lot in front of the store, testing his latest project. And the buyers seem to appreciate his attention to detail. Bikes tend to get snapped up almost immediately, he said.
Jones said he enjoys the challenge of applying his engineering skills to the puzzle of repairing something he’s never worked on before, as well as the gratification of bringing new life to what might otherwise have become junk.
“You take something broken, and now it’s working,” he said.
He paws through drawers filled with salvaged brake parts, pedals and gear shifts. He knows exactly what those drawers contain, even though he conceded with a smile, “It looks like junk to anybody else.”
Whatever Jones and Turcotte can’t reuse is sold as scrap. The store brings in more than $1,000 a month from the sale of scrap metal, Bennet said.
“So we’re still making money off it. Either way, the mission gets done,” she said, referring to Habitat for Humanity’s mission of providing decent housing for people in need. The ReStore’s proceeds help to fund that mission.
The store also has a volunteer who repairs and refinishes some of the furniture that comes in — mostly antiques, or pieces that have some value, Bennett said.
The idea of reconditioning items was Bennett’s, who sees it as a way of serving a community that’s largely made up of landlords and college students.
“We want people to feel confident shopping here,” she said.
The ReStore is at 1510 S. Water St. It’s open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MBBreckABJ, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.