New houses are a popular component of Bangor Fall Home Show

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Visitors to the Bangor Fall Home and Better Living Show will find a little bit of everything in terms of home-improvement projects, from vinyl siding and solariums to pool tables and log homes. Each exhibitor will bring something different to the show, of course — and each exhibitor anticipates the chance to talk to consumers about their individual home-improvement needs.

Northern Log Homes, located at the Bomarc Industrial Park in Bangor, was established by Mike Hartt on Oct. 2, 1995. The company manufactures precut log homes; “we have package plans available, or we will custom design any house a customer desires,” he said.

Northern Log Homes offers its products in three Maine tree species, white pine, red pine, and cedar, and also offers western red cedar. Floor plans vary from small hunting camps to large executive-type homes.

Business has been good during the past year, according to Hartt. “We have sold some packages in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York, and we have some potential sales for this year into Pennsylvania,” he said.

“We’re using a dealer network. The dealers promote the buildings in their area. It’s been a good system,” he said. “People see their local dealer and tour their model, which may or may not be the home they live in. They develop ideas as to what the dealer has done, and then it sparks an interest in log building.”

Northern Log Homes will have a booth at the fall home show and will display “all of the structural parts of a log building,” Hartt said. “We want people to see the various parts. We have set up the electrical system so people can see how you can run the wiring inside the logs. We will have all our brochures and our flyers there, and we will have personnel there who can answer any and all questions.”

Hartt’s company also had a booth in the spring home show. “We had a lot of people who were interested,” Hartt recalled. “Many were looking. Home shows are where you may not see a sale that particular year. A home is a big item for most people, so they want to make sure they’re buying the right thing and that they will be happy with it. They spend a lot of time thinking about it.

“There are some people who know they want a log home and know exactly what they want. Those people are fun to talk to. You don’t have to sell them on log- as opposed to stick-built construction,” he said.

Diane Caffyn of New Dimension Homes Inc. expects good results from the fall home show. After all, she and her husband, Tom, have “been doing Al’s shows since the ’70s. We do see much customer activity from the home shows. We’re a firm believer in that face-to-face contact. We get that at the Bangor shows.”

New Dimension Homes, located on Route 201 in Skowhegan, sells post-and-beam homes and sunrooms. Working with several manufacturers, the Caffyns offer their customers either standard floorplans or the ability to customize a new house.

“We sit down with our customers and take their ideas, whether it’s a photo from a magazine or a floorplan, and put it onto paper,” Diane said. “They may be looking at two or three floorplans, at different ways of organizing a house.

“A home is most people’s single largest investment of a lifetime,” Diane said. “We try to get their house exactly the way they want it. The (house) lot and the budget determine some of the design.

“We’ve been doing it for 21 years, so we have seen many ideas and plans. We design their own home with them, then we put together a package,” she said. “Our customers then will either hire a contractor or build it themselves. If they don’t have a contractor, we have a list of contractors who’ve worked with us. We also provide on-site technical assistance for contractors or whoever’s building the house.”

New Dimension Homes uses laminated beams precut to match the roof pitch. A wall panel comes with 2-by-6-inch studding and precut window frames. A typical project will see the panels and beams erected “in two days on average,” Diane said. “We recently did one in Vassalboro with a contractor and his cre” and two New Dimension employees “and put the panels and beams up in 3 1/2 hours: a new record for us.”

Business has been so good for New Dimension Homes, the Caffyns are moving their company to a 9-acre site off Exit 37 (Clinton) of Interstate 95. “We’re building a new model home there, along with a warehouse,” Diane said. “We’re moving over there in the next couple of months.

“We will have more room. We have about 1 1/2 acres here (in Skowhegan), and we just outgrew it too fast. Our new site will have easy access: You roll off the interstate and into our yard, and you roll right out again,” she said.

The Caffyns will bring photographs, brochures, plan books, and information on customized homes to their booth at the Bangor Fall Home and Better Living Show. The goal is to inform potential customers that “they can design their own homes, drawing on information from different sources,” Diane said.

Whether visitors to the Bangor Fall Home and Better Living Show are seeking information on new construction or major renovations, John Dionne of Building Systems & Maintenance and Duraform Homes will have an answer for them.

Dionne founded Duraform Homes in January 1987 to sell prefabricated homes built in Quebec. Business has been good; “we’ve built 75-plus houses in the past nine years,” Dionne said.

“We put out an upper-end product in terms of quality,” he stressed. “We are quality-driven. Our product is different in that it is not prefinished at the manufacturing plant. We take advantage of the economies, the efficiencies, the quality controls of building the shell in a climate-controlled environment, but I like to do the finish work on-site. We give an added-value product on that basis.”

Duraform Homes has placed houses in such subdivisions as Emerald Woods in Milford and Stillwater Gardens in Bangor. The company is developing the infrastructure of another subdivision, Terre Haute, off the Wing Road in Hermon. That subdivision will be ready for housing construction next spring.

Building Systems & Maintenance was established “a few years ago to take the cycles out of the labor concerns in construction,” Dionne said. “It is marketed 12 months a year.”

THe company provides renovations and construction services for commercial and residential accounts. “We work with property managers to take care of their non-routine maintenance and renovation work,” Dionne said.

“Then we also target corporate accounts. We’ve done work for Irving Oil. We are renovating a new site for Monograms Plus in the Bangor Mall; that’s a relocation for them,” he said. “We just renovated the new office space for Community Health and Counseling (on Broadway in Bangor). We repainted the exterior of Maliseet Gardens last fall.

“We do total renovation, retail or commercial, and we do a lot of new construction as well. We do residential renovation, small and large,” he said.

Dionne and his staff plan to discuss building systems at the Bangor Fall Home and Better Living Show. “We’re contractors; we don’t sell products,” he explained. “We sell systems that take care of people’s real estate concerns.

“The systems are designed to work against the trends of high cost, high anxiety, the short building season. We’re always looking for the proper system for the job at hand. I will be there with some other people who will be able to discuss these systems with customers,” Dionne said.

He views the home show as a wise use of advertising dollars. “In terms of return on investment, the Applemans and their operation have by far exceeded anything I’ve ever done, marketingwise,” Dionne said.

“The people they draw in there are totally focused; they’re all there for housing needs. When you’re talking to people, they’re generally very serious. When you have great numbers of highly motivated people, you can’t help but expect results as long as you’re doing your job,” he stated.

The Acadia Sunroom Co., located at 4 Main St., Cherryfield, will bring the sun indoors for the Bangor Fall Home and Better Living Show.

Owned by Dan and Marcia Ladrigan, Acadia Sunroom manufactures sunrooms and solariums. They install traditional sunrooms with curved or straight laminated beams and recently unveiled an English conservatory, a sunroom that blends well with Victorian and colonial architecture.

The sunrooms built by Acadia Sunroom feature:

R-17 to R-26 insulated gable walls and roof panels;

Double-sealed, tempered, insulated glass windows;

Various glass options, including low-E, argon-filled, clear bronze, or gray tint;

A 10-year warranty against any seal failure;

A “dry seal” glazing system that lets the sunroom contract and expand without causing leaks;

Rustproofed stainless steel gasket fasteners;

Selected wood species, including fir, redwood, and yellow pine;

Various options, such as vent windows, sky vents, sunscreens, sunshades, miniblinds, and atrium-style doors.

Sunrooms can be manufactured in whatever size the customer needs, Marcia Ladrigan said. Acadia Sunroom has installed sunrooms all over Down East Maine and into the state’s interior.

The Ladrigans have found the Bangor home shows an excellent way to advertise their company — and the Bangor Auditorium an excellent place to do so.

“In the past, we’ve done the spring shows, including the Bangor Garden Show,” Marcia said. “This is our first time doing a fall show in Bangor. The flower show is an excellent way, a great way to showcase ourselves. The spring home show is very good, too. We’ve had good responses from both…quite a lot of business.

“We will have an 8-by-16 booth at the show,” Marcia said, explaining the booth would actually by a curved-beam sunroom. The Ladrigans will also display a sun porch.

Although the season for swimming has passed, autumn is a great time to buy a pool or a spa, said Larry Plaisted of Kamda’s Pool Shed in Hampden.

Located at 608 Main Road North, Kamda’s opened a new store this year to a public “anxious to buy pools,” Plaisted said. “We sell pools, spas, saunas, all pool and spa chemicals, and supplies and equipment. We install everything that we sell.

“We also sell all the accessories, from the diving boards and slides to heaters, pumps, and filters,” he said. “We have the largest retail pool-and-spa store north of Portland.”

Kamda’s carries various pools, spas, and saunas — and plans to display some at the Bangor Fall Home and Better Living Show. Plaisted plans to set up a Baja spa, which he calls “our top-of-the-line spa. Baja is the oldest and largest manufacturer of acrylic spas. The Baja is virtually maintenance-free. That is why we love to sell it; we never have to go out and work on it.”

Plaisted will also bring an economy line of portable, lightweight spas to the show; the styles include a solid spa with a wood skirt and an inflatable spa. He will also display a Soft-Heat sauna, which “uses infrared heat, costs only pennies a day to operate, and is totally safe,” he said.

Space limitation will not permit Kamda’s to display a full-size pool, but “we will have mockup samples of our pool lines, including the in-ground, on-ground, and aboveground lines we carry,” Plaisted said.

“We represent Crestwood on-ground pools, which is our top-of-the-line, and Cornelius pools, which is a metal aboveground pool. We represent Swim-N-Play, which is also a metal aboveground pool, 52 inches in height. The others are 48 inches high,” he said. Kamda’s carries Stirling and Cardinal in-ground pools.

Kamda’s Pool has participated in the All Seasons Promotions’ home shows in Bangor for 22 years, according to Plaisted. “We used to do the old sportsmen’s show until they decided pools didn’t belong there, and we found out when they asked us to leave it was the greatest thing that could happen to us,” he said. “We had more time to concentrate on the home show.

“We’ve had excellent results (there),” Plaisted said. “The home show always represents several thousand dollars’ worth of business. Usually a four-day home show will represent nearly a hundred positive leads. This is only a two-day show, but it’s the better part of a Saturday and a Sunday, and our expectations are high.

“For five or six years, we participated in the WLBZ Ultimate Warehouse Show in the fall. That would take place for six hours on a Sunday, and it was highly effective,” he said. “I figure if that was effective, and the fall home show is the same time slot, it will be very good. I expect the fall show will be good enough that next year the Applemans will want to extend it to four days.”