Some two-thousand volunteers will be painting several dozen homes in Council Bluffs and Omaha today (Saturday) as part of a community-wide beautification and weatherization effort. Tom Pettigrew is executive director of the 24th annual Brush-Up Paint-A-Thon. He says it helps low-income elderly residents and people with disabilities to maintain their properties. Out of some 210 applications, about 75 houses will be painted. Nearly 75 companies, businesses and individuals donated all the materials that are being used for the project.

Pettigrew explained the qualifications for getting your home’s exterior freshened up with a new coat of paint: You need to be over 62 years old or be permanently disabled at any age, you must own the home, no rentals, and meet certain financial guidelines. Some volunteers started earlier in the week with scraping off the old, flaking paint and getting the houses coated with a primer.
They’ll prime any bare wood, put down a top coat of paint and then caulk, too, to weatherize the homes. In the past 24 years, more than 24-hundred homes in the metro area have been painted by volunteers through the program.