Face-to-Face at the Des Moines Home & Garden Show

All right! It’s the Home & Garden Show. It appeals to the dreamer in me, and I always have fun. It’s still going on tonight, tomorrow and Sunday at the Iowa Events Center. They tell us there are more than 500 exhibitors. You can’t even imagine all the types of exhibitors. Let’s see now. If I spend 2 minutes with each, I can visit them all, and it will take me less than 17 hours.

At Des Moines’ version of The Home & Garden Show as opposed to Chicago’s you have a chance to meet and talk directly with people who might be doing work for you. That is the best part for me. I have a better chance of measuring a person’s character when I talk to them directly than when I see an ad in the yellow pages. A couple of years ago when I was getting ready to replace the windows in my 65 year old house, I met quite a number of people at a trade show. One of them was Kirk Dickey of Windows and Doors of Iowa. That company is exhibiting this weekend at the Home & Garden Show. I particularly liked Kirk, and I would not have picked his company out of the many possibilities if I hadn’t met him in person. We had a nice conversation at the show and a great one when we met at my house and talked about possibilities. He got the bid, and I have great new windows and doors plus a slider into the back yard. It was an Iowa encounter, face-to-face.

At the same time I knew that I would need to replace my furnace. I had a couple of clues about that: pretty high energy costs in spite of good insulation; furnace never went off in the coldest weather; a plume of hot air coming from my chimney in the winter. I met people from several heating and cooling companies at that same trade show. As you know, sometimes people listen to what you want to buy rather than telling you what they want to sell, and I met the owner of a company that listened to what I wanted when I met Brian Leech of A. Leechman Heating and Cooling. Sorry, they won’t be at the Home and Garden Show this year. I was quite certain when I met Brian that he was who I wanted to work with. Good decision! When his people came out to talk about possibilities, we put together my ideas with their engineering skill. The result: I live in a 67 year old, all-electric house with an electric heat pump whose furnace doesn’t even connect to the chimney let alone let any heat out. It was another good Iowa encounter, face-to-face.

Bob Lenc Landscaping & Lawn Care will be at the Home Show this year. The Purple Wren and I have gotten two trees in the last two years, one to shade our new electric heat pump in the summer and one to replace our ash that fell victim to the Eastern ash bark borer. Don’t worry; that’s not the emerald ash bark beetle. At Bob Lenc we got great help from Angela in selecting the perfect tree each time. Thanks, Angela, for another face-to-face Iowa encounter.

So head down to the Home and Garden Show, have some fun, and find some of the people representing those companies and services that will make 2008 a better year for you. You will meet real Iowans - such great Iowans that even our senior U.S. Senator would like ‘em.

Guest Writer: James G. Lindberg (Jim) is the Purple Wren’s sweetie and is a visiting chemistry professor at Grinnell College and retired from Drake University.

[tags] Iowa, Des Moines, Central Iowa News, Home & Garden Show [/tags]

Sandy Renshaw is Sandy Renshaw is a self-employed communications consultant. You will also find her blogging at Purple Wren.
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