WATERBURY, Vt. — Lugene Pitman is still using paint scrapers for spatulas, but her kitchen cabinets are up and the refrigerator is coming soon.
The long road to recovery from Tropical Storm Irene continues throughout much of Vermont, but the local effort in Waterbury got a big boost on Monday.
The Stiller Family Foundation, created by the family that started Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, announced it will make a $250,000 matching grant to help continue making repairs to homes severely damaged when the storm triggered flooding in August.
The money will go to Rebuild Waterbury, an offshoot of a business development group called Revitalizing Waterbury, which has been spearheading recovery efforts. The donation brings the total raised to date to about $400,000, nearly half way to the goal of $918,000, said Theresa Wood, chairwoman of Rebuild Waterbury's steering committee.
On Monday, local leaders joined construction crews to tour properties — including Pitman's — where work continues. Pitman's home was flooded above the doorknobs on the first floor when the nearby Thatcher Brook overflowed its banks.
The new floors and brightly painted walls were a welcome change from the devastation Pitman, a 55-year-old former high school tutor, saw the night of Aug. 28. When she finally decided to leave her home, water filled her basement.
"It was coming up through the registers. Carpets were floating," she said. She grabbed what she could carry and stepped off her front porch. "We had to wade out of here. It was waste high."
More than 700 hours of volunteer labor later, and things are improving at Pitman's home. Walls ripped from their studs have been replaced and painted in bright colors — red in the living room, teal in the kitchen.
Pitman and dozens of her neighbors have been helped not just by local volunteers, but by crews from the ReTRAIN Youthbuild Program, based about 25 miles northwest in Burlington. Participants in their late teens and early 20s combine on-the-job training in carpentry skills with academic work designed to enable them to get the high school diplomas that have eluded them to date.
Smiling and posing for pictures, youth group members Kenny Tavares and Gabriel Holmes joined teacher Brian Hsiang in describing how, during a break a couple weeks earlier, they had enjoyed "toaster-oven brownies" baked by Pitman — her regular range was still to be replaced.
Before arriving at Pitman's home, Monday's tour stopped at another in which reconstruction work had yet to begin. Planks between joists acted as bridges across the chasm where the first floor was until the flood. Waterlogged wall board had been removed, exposing the studs.
Dave Kerr, construction manager with Rebuild Waterbury, said crews would lift the house up and give it a new foundation of a concrete slab over crushed stone before beginning work on the inside of the structure.
"We have 28 open construction cases, and we're actively working nine of them right now," Kerr said of Irene recovery projects. "It ranges from a total rebuild to a simple trim job."
More than 60 families have approached Rebuild Waterbury for help with repairs to their homes, and the work is expected to continue into the spring of 2013, officials said.