helping hospice
Carroll County Times
August 7, 2006
The kitchen, with its fireplace, sitting area, dining area and adjoining sunroom, was easily the size of the entire downstairs of an average American home built circa 1950.
But before the kitchen came the living room, the dining room, the powder room, the study and the master bedroom, with its oversized bathroom, its closet the size of a bedroom and its French doors leading to a deck overlooking acres of fields.
That was just the first floor.
Carroll Hospice is using this $989,000 Southern Living home in Hampstead to raise funds for its new inpatient hospice facility, due to be completed in December but faced with soaring construction costs, said Robin Ford.
The $5-per-person home tour was the idea of Ford, the builder, and his wife, Shirlyn Evans-Ford, who are members of the hospice's board of trustees.
Ford, the only builder certified in Carroll County to use Southern Living's floor plans, said this 4,000-square-foot home was built as a tour house for hospice.
"They came to us and said 'this is what we want to do,' " said Karen Opper, a spokeswoman for Carroll Hospice, which is affiliated with Carroll Hospital Center. She said she hopes the tour raises $12,000 to $15,000. One hundred forty-six people visited the home on Saturday.
Norm and Anne Gale of Eldersburg came to see the house because they had considered buying the 7.8 acre lot it sits on and wanted to see what the builder had done.
"We've only been to one other Southern Living community," Anne Gale said. Southern Living keeps close tabs on their builders, Ford said, and insists that they closely follow its plans, which include many traditional details.
Gale praised the attention to quality in the home.
Visitors strolling through the house admired the high ceilings, wide staircases and built-in bookcases. They studied the molding, the wall colors and the recessed lighting in the granite-countered kitchen.
The sink in the powder room, which looked like a large ceramic mixing bowl, generated many bemused comments from people who'd never seen a sink like it before.
Upstairs, one bedroom had a private bath and a walk-in closet while the second two bedrooms shared a bath. An entertainment room with a vaulted ceiling ran front to back across the upstairs.
Sitting behind a table in the study, hospice nurse Sherry Sipes collected money from visitors and talked about her work.
As a hospice nurse, she provides in-home care of patients who have exhausted treatments. She also cares for their families.
Patients in hospice care can live as long as six months, she said, but the average is two weeks.
"We're not getting them soon enough," she said.
Once patients get into hospice care, they can qualify for a range of services, including access to a social worker to help with the emotional and financial aspects of dying.
"We as a society like to think we are immortal but we all have to die," she said.
Hospice can make death a peaceful experience, she said.
The new hospice facility, which will open with eight beds, is not meant to offer residential care, Sipes said.
It will be a place dying people can come for pain management and to allow family members a short period of respite from caretaking.
Carroll Hospice now uses Carroll Hospital Center to provide these services, but sometimes the hospital is short of beds, Sipes said.
Carroll Hospice needs to do a lot of fund raising, she said, because it accepts people regardless of their ability to pay.
Will a dream house encourage people to spend their money on home improvements rather than community causes?
Sipes said people spend their money how they want to, but noted that in the past the community has generously supported Carroll Hospice.
Update
Last fall, Carroll Hospital Center began construction of its $5.5 million inpatient hospice facility on the corner of Stoner Avenue and Washington Road in Westminster. The facility is expected to be completed by late December, said Kathy Stewart, coordinator for the Carroll Hospice Foundation. It will initially house eight patients for short-term stays and will ultimately have 16 beds. It will be the first inpatient hospice facility in Carroll County.
