Full house
Mar. 7—MOSES LAKE — It was only about an hour into the first day of the Columbia Basin Home and Garden Show Friday morning, and already the place was packed.
"I'm very happy with the way it's started," said Joe Eaton, behind tables laden with hot sauces and jerky. "You know, I've been vending for 28 years. And when someone says it's a first-time event, I always get a little nervous."
The show occupied the Commercial Building at the Grant County Fairgrounds, and it wasn't just customers who filled the venue. The show's organizers, the team at Seed Cupboard Nursery, had originally planned for 50 vendors, but ended up having closer to 70. Originally, the organizers had asked a different organization to put the show together, Seed Cupboard owner Lisa Villegas said, but couldn't get anyone interested, so they ended up organizing it themselves.
The products on offer made up an eclectic catalog: countertops, windows, cleaning products, gardening supplies, kitchenware, furniture. There were representatives from real estate and mortgage agencies and internet providers as well. Anything that could enhance a home or a garden, it seemed, was close to hand.
"We're giving away $10,000 worth of windows and patio doors. It's free to enter," said Stacy Delveaux, representing Renewal by Andersen. "We use a product called Fibrex. This is a wood polymer composite. It has the strength and insulation that wood offers, as well as the maintenance free component from the polymer. So that means this never warps, rots or chips. Also, it never has to be painted."
Delveaux said this show is just the start of the circuit for Renewal by Andersen.
"We're going to the Yakima Home show next weekend, and then the same weekend we're going to Wenatchee, so our team is split up," she said. "I'm not sure if there's any other home shows; we do a lot of other events, though. Whatever will let us in."
John Joseph Heston, owner of 4 Seasons Farm Service in Ephrata, was gaining experience with the home show environment. The previous owner had terminal cancer, Heston said, and Heston came on to help him run the place, and ended up taking it over a few years ago.
"2019 is when he sold it to us because he was going downhill, because the Lord was calling him home," Heston said. "It's been an incredible blessing to reach into a whole new area of life I didn't know was there. I worked construction and truck driving my whole life. So there's a little bit of a new turn here."
Heston's display centered around garden supplies and equipment.
"We have a little bit of everything from conventional weed and pest sprays to organic stuff, fertilizers. We have a very special lawn seed mix that Bernie (the previous owner) himself designed to thrive in the Columbia Basin. We sell a lot of it, about 2,000 pounds a year."
A short way away, Anya Pashkovsky was showing potential customers the countertop options from Moses Lake Granite. One square after another lay on the table, each with a price per square foot.
"Because some places you go and they make you buy a whole slab of it, but here we sell it by square footage," Pashkovsky said. "We polish it and we install it for you. You just pick a color you like and let us know and we work with you and get you a dream kitchen that you love."
In one of the back corners of the building, Brian and Kellie Hesse, owners of B&K Barrel Creations in Moses Lake, had their display centered around tables and chairs made out of old wine barrels. They make the furniture and other decor in their garage, Kellie said, using barrels procured from wineries in Prosser and Walla Walla. It would seem, in a region as wine-heavy as the Basin, that wine barrels would be easy to come by, but they're not.
"It's actually pretty tough," Brian said. "They like to keep reusing them, because they are so expensive."
"We've, just over the last couple of years, added a couple of items here and there," Kellie said. "Whatever we can think of. We have people bring us ideas and we try and put it together and here we are."
"You know, either people like the wine barrel stuff or they don't," Brian said. "It's one of those."
"We're trying to support local vendors here in the Columbia Basin," said Valerie Parrott, who runs Seed Cupboard's satellite location in Moses Lake. "We're just wanting to showcase their businesses, especially people that may have not been out since COVID."
Joel Martin can be reached via email at jmartin@columbiabasinherald.com.
