A shop on a mission

LIMERICK – For the past two years, Heather Labbe has made Labrador retrievers her life, running a rescue operation from her Limerick home and, she says, saving more than 600 animals from being euthanized at out-of-state shelters.

“I realized, ‘Oh, I can make a difference,’” she said.

Now, Labbe, 61, is looking to give the effort, called New England Lab Rescue, a more permanent home, and has taken an innovative approach to doing that. She has bought a 19th-century house in town that she converted into a new antiques shop, Custom House Antiques. Part of that building, Labbe said, will be used as office space for the nonprofit rescue, and a barn in the back will be converted to help house a small number of dogs waiting for adoption.

“To have an actual building (for the rescue) is a really big thing,” she said.

The building itself is huge, with three stories, including a ballroom on the top floor that Labbe hopes to rent out. Labbe said that the portion of the whole building dedicated to the rescue will be small, and the barn will be closed off from the rest of the building.

No animals will be allowed in with the antiques, and Labbe said even once the barn is fully renovated, she only imagines two to three animals staying there at any one time. The rest, she said, will live in foster homes run by volunteers, just as the rescue has always done.

“It’s a very, very short-term visit,” she said.

Meanwhile, the rest of the building will be dedicated to showing off antiques for sale. Kathy Braley, a volunteer who is helping Labbe find antiques sellers, said that in less than a month, Custom House has found about 12 vendors who are renting display space for their items, and the building could accommodate up to twice that many.

With those renters, Custom House already has a full first floor, and part of the second floor is also spoken for. There is everything from plates, candleholders and fireplace pokers to furniture such as couches, chairs, tables and cabinets. Braley said she ran an antiques shop in Limington for years, and knew how to help Labbe find sellers to rent space in the new shop.

“I have a lot of stuff, and a lot of friends with stuff,” Braley said with a laugh.
Labbe’s husband, Gary, said the building, located at the intersection of routes 5 and 11 in Limerick, dates back to 1803, and was known as a bed-and-breakfast until about 20 years ago. After that closed, he said, the building was home to an interior decorator’s shop, but the decorator moved out about three years ago. Since then, it’s been empty. The selling price, Heather Labbe said, dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars before the Labbes bought it a month ago for $112,000.

Heather Labbe said she and her husband came to Limerick in 1999, moving from Windham, where they had lived since coming from Cape Cod, Mass., in 1996. Gary Labbe noted that his wife already runs the Clipper Merchant Tea House, which is also in a refurbished 19th-century house, which went a long way with convincing the locals that the Labbes would be treating their newest acquisition right.

“They were thrilled to hear that we were now in this building,” he said. “They knew that it would be in good hands.”

Heather Labbe said she started the lab rescue informally about two years ago, when she learned via the Internet that a shelter in North Carolina was planning to euthanize a dog because no home could be found for it. Labbe bought the dog, and would have kept it had she not found someone right away who wanted to adopt it. Since then, she said, the effort has grown into an official nonprofit organization, with full licensing and vetting from the state.

As to why she wants to use an antiques shop to support it, Labbe said she has grown to love history and historic buildings, and it seemed a natural move for a building that has been a fixture in town for more than two centuries.

“We decided the town could use an antiques building,” she said. “The history is very rich here.”

The shop is open, but Labbe is planning a formal grand opening on July 1. She said the shop already is making enough money in rental income to sustain itself, and in time, she expects it will go a long way toward supporting the rescue, which has existed so far on grants and donations that can be hard to come by.

“It’s a way of supporting the rescue in the long run,” she said.

Source: www.Keepmecurrent.com