National Clothesline

When the popular television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition recently visited Chicago for a renovation project, drycleaner Eric Severson had a front row seat for the action.

The Emmy-award winning reality program follows a group of designers, contractors and several hundred workers who have just one week to completely rebuild an entire house (including interior design and exterior landscaping) for a family in need of a helping hand.

Severson also chipped in some assistance for the show that aired on ABC on Sunday, January 14, offering the free services of Geneva Cleaners, which he co-owns with his brother, Scot.

The plant provided free cleaning for the featured family’s textiles — about 600 items that included their clothing, draperies and stuffed animals, among other things.

In that particular episode, host Ty Pennington and the Extreme Makeover crew assisted the eight-member Noyola clan who had purchased a historical brownstone house in Chicago ’s Southwest side.

Unfortunately for them, a combination of rats, bad plumbing and rotting timber made it uninhabitable.

The Noyola parents, Geno and Melinda, are no strangers to giving themselves. They work with children whose parents are in prison, coach baseball and football, and regularly send care packages to children in Third World countries.

However, circumstances had forced the couple to live with their six children (ages 5 to 13) in a two-bedroom attic apartment at Geno ’s grandmother’s house.

Their fortunes changed at the end of last October when the Extreme Makeover crew stepped into their lives.

Before the week-long renovation project began, representatives from the show contacted Eric Severson, who is a member of the Certified Restoration Drycleaning Network.

The Extreme Makeover team had recently finished work on their first rebuild of a house that had been on fire, and we ’re looking for a specialty cleaner who could assist them.

“I think it was the first time the Makeover team had to take a look and say, ‘How can we get this stuff restored to them? That would be part of the miracle that we do ’,” Severson said. “At the end of the day, people want their fuzzy slippers and their favorite jeans back. I think that ’s the trigger that lead them to finding, not only me, but our CRDN network.”

As part of the show’s requests, Severson was asked to clean the family’s bedding the old-fashioned way.

“Some of the designers actually had us hand-finish and press all of the bed sheets, ” he recalled. “They wanted it to be just a certain way. They wanted it to be absolutely picture perfect for when the family moved in. ”

When the project initially began, the picture was more like a nightmare. In fact, Severson was pretty sure the crew wasn ’t going to complete the house within its one-week deadline.

“The day I took the clothes, I was looking at the skeleton of the house,” he noted. “They told me I’d be bringing the clothes back there in less than a week and I thought, ‘There’s no way.’ There were no walls on the house. There was no ceiling. I didn’t think it was going to be possible.”

Not only was the crew capable of completing the project on time, but they went above and beyond the line of duty. The volunteers rebuilt the 1,700-square-foot two-flat into a 3,400-square-foot four bedroom single family home.

“They added a floor and pushed the house back out, as well, so all three floors got an extension, ” Severson laughed. “They doubled the size of it. It was crazy, just totally crazy to watch.”

The Extreme Makeover crew weren’t the only ones to go the extra mile. Severson decided to offer free cleaning to all of the show ’s cast and crew, as well.

Geneva Cleaners arrived at the build site every day, picked up the cast and crew’s clothing in individual bar-coded Express Bags, and returned them the following day pristine and clean.

The simple gesture made Severson a star among the show’s stars.

“This sounds like a fairly mundane service that you can get at any hotel across the country, ” he said. “It was received as the most exciting thing that some of these people have ever had, and it gained us access to every part of the build, any part of the construction site, and access to all of the talent, all of the actors and all of the scenes. ”

Severson confessed that he is not usually the recipient of such VIP treatment from others; normally he is on the giving end. After all, his family has been in the drycleaning industry for three generations.

The most recent two generations of the family have run the State Street plant in northern Illinois for 50 straight years.

“Being in the business for three generations, there’s not a lot that can make drycleaning exciting,” Severson admitted. “But, I virtually lived there [on the build site] for a week. I would show up and celebrities would come out of their trailers to give me their cleaning and thank us for our help. Backstage, they were making sure I was fed and had hot coffee. It was really something, and all because we volunteered to help them — not just the family, but them, personally.”

Severson’s experience peaked at the end of the week on the day the Noyola family returned from a Walt Disney World vacation to see their renovated house for the first time.

A production coordinator asked him if he had planned to bring his six- and eight-year old daughters for the final day of shooting.

“My kids love the show. They watch it every Sunday,” Severson said. “So, I show up that day and introduce my girls to this production coordinator and she says, ‘Go get some hot chocolate and cookies and look around. We’ll be ready for you in about an hour to move you into a spot we reserved for you. ’ This is silly. Now, they have reserved a spot for ‘Eric the drycleaner.’ There were 20,000 people down there!”

The reserved spot turned out to be right in front of the house in a section cordoned off for host Ty Pennington, the designers and their special guests — the Seversons.

They had a front row view of the family’s reaction when they arrived.

The experience made “drycleaning fun to the next level” for Severson, who tried to prolong the excitement when he returned back to work at Geneva.

“We called this six-week period ‘Extreme January’,” he explained. “We have two window displays that show Extreme Makeover characters and little vignettes. We brought it back to the audio/video merchandising of our store and our poster advertising. That trickles all the way down to the customer. It allows them to watch the show on Sunday and say, ‘Hey, my drycleaner is helping out on the show.’”

Geneva’s customers won’t be the only ones feeling the aftershocks of Severson’s cleaning and publicity efforts. CRDN and Extreme Makeover stand to mutually benefit from a long-lasting relationship in the future.

“Every building that they have done since then, I generally am now getting phone calls from a CRDN partner in that state or city asking me how to take care of them and what their needs are, ” he said. “Because they were gracious and fun to work with on my end, I’ve done everything I could to help pave the way to having the same type of service at their other sites. ”