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Kessinger
At about 2 am the night of a heavy storm, Joseph Kessinger awoke to a loud cracking noise. A large black cherry tree down in a valley below his house had fallen, hitting a portion of his roof. Kessinger’s roof was already aged, and the added tree damage left him “very much concerned” about the state of the roof. Due to the condition of his roof, insurance would only cover a portion of the costs. And unfortunately for Kessinger, the timing couldn’t have been worse. He had just undergone rotator cuff surgery on his right shoulder, and his medical expenses, plus the necessary time off from work for his recovery, left him short on funds. “The tree just fell at the exact wrong time,” he explains.
After noticing water dripping, Kessinger and a neighbor initially used a tarp to cover the area of the roof with tree damage. “I couldn’t do anything with my right arm, and it was not a smart thing to do [climbing up on the roof], but the water leaking motivated me to put the tarp on with one arm,” Kessinger remembers. At the time, he had hoped the tarp would “give him a little breathing room” while he recovered from his surgery, both physically and financially.
However, it was a “huge area that needed to be covered” to prevent water damage, and Kessinger knew the tarp would only last so long with the recent strong winds in the area this spring. “I didn’t want to ask for help, but with just having surgery I had to reach out to some brothers in the church,” he recalls. The church Kessinger attends has a set of individuals that are in charge of small groups of other members, and Kessinger reached out to one of them to see if he might be willing to help Kessinger patch the roof. Little did he know that General Manager Assistant Brenan Thompson was the ideal person to ask. Thompson says Kessinger is “someone I check in on” at church, and that Kessinger asked him for help with the labor needed to patch the roof because of his shoulder injury. “I didn’t want to get back on the roof with one arm,” Kessinger explains, “but I didn’t have a clue that he worked for Cenvar” he remembers. “I was at the right place at the right time and the right moment,” Kessinger says, and he just so happened to ask the right person.
When Thompson went out to look at the roof, he noted two large holes from the tree that had fallen, one around eight inches in width, and the other about a foot wide. After examining the damage from the tree and the age of the roof, Thompson quickly decided a whole roof replacement was needed. Luckily, some other members of the church were able to help Kessinger with the initial damage from the tree, and then “Cenvar came in and took care of the rest.”
Once the roofing materials arrived, Kessinger said the job was done in one day. “I came back from work that day,” Kessinger remembers, “and I was so excited [to see the roof] I was almost not driving on my side of the road. It has been a long time since I’ve seen the roof in a reasonable condition, and to see it in an immaculate condition was indescribable.”
Kessinger works two jobs to try and make ends meet, and when the tree fell, he had been worried about the condition of his home. “I was very much concerned about the remainder of the house,” he say, “and if you don’t have a good roof on, there’s no point in working on the rest of the house.” With the new roof on, Kessinger is optimistic about “building back up” both his physical condition following his shoulder surgery, and the overall condition of his home. “They helped pull me out of a bad spot,” he says, “and we can actually accomplish things now.”
