The 2011 Mat-Su Fall Home Show offers up a variety of exhibitors

WASILLA — Back in the corner of the Mat-Su Fall Home Show, in the space reserved for Scofield Specialty Services, Steve Scofield spends a lot of his time explaining just what it is he does.

His business can be summed up in a sentence: Scofield decorates furniture, countertops and floors using something called “acid stained concrete.”

What that means takes awhile to unpack. For the tabletops, he chops out a spot in the wood to hold the concrete, pours it, etches it, then goes to work with the acid. Different acids have different minerals suspended in them. Copper gives a red hue. Iron is brownish. When the acid reacts with the concrete, the acid is neutralized and can’t keep the minerals suspended so they’re left behind, staining the concrete.

The result is a whole lot of bears and halibuts, geometric designs and some patterns that are a little more abstract.

“If you’ve got a concrete floor you can do this to your floor,” Scofield said. “A lot of people do it themselves but sometimes I have to come fix it.”

If you want to avoid that heartache, do it right the first time, Scofield said, he’s your man.

The home show is in its fifth year and ends today at the Menard Sports Complex in Wasilla.

Michael Fisher, who owns the show and puts it on with his company, DAMM Straight Productions, said this year’s event is about the same size as last year’s. But the lineup is pretty fluid from year to year; asked which displays were new, Fisher came up with nearly two dozen companies that came this year but weren’t here last year.

As of Friday, he said, attendance had been fairly typical for the first day of the show. He said they usually start on Friday for people who might not be in town for the weekend. Admission is free, so people who come in on a Friday and need to go home and think about a big decision like buying siding or installing a water filter can come back.

“They don’t’ have to pay admission to come back in to buy something,” Fisher said.

He said the home show fills a gap — it’s the only fall home show in Anchorage or Mat-Su.

“There are people who are looking to do home projects throughout the winter,” Fisher said.

Some people have summer projects that aren’t quite wrapped up yet. Other people have indoor projects — decorating, furnace upgrades, water filtration system installations. So what about people who specialize in outdoor work they can’t do during the winter months? Do they just stay away from the fall show?

“They do want to talk to people throughout the winter to get set up for the summer,” he said.

Gerald Minter with Alaska ICF Solutions falls into that latter category.

Minter is another person there who probably has to do a little bit of explaining about what his product is. ICF stands for “Insulating Concrete Forms.” The kind he uses are called Arxx forms. Essentially, they’re foam blocks that fit together like Lego bricks with a void in between two foam boards to hold poured concrete.

With the blocks, Minter said, he can put in a foundation and just keep going. The highest he’s gone, he said, was 30 feet for an addition to Chugiak High School.

“We’ve been active in this area for right around 10 years,” he said. They have a plant in Wasilla to build the blocks. “The Arxx plant is, I would say, a minimum of four years old.”

Arxx isn’t the only kind of ICF. But Minter said he would argue it’s the best one.

“Arxx is by far the superior ICF,” he said, before joking that, “I’ll probably get a few phone calls for saying that.”

This method of construction, he said, is growing in popularity in Alaska. With these kind of concrete walls, he said, people get up to an R50 insulation rating. Typical fiberglass insulation carries a rating of R5 per inch of thickness.

Loi Ricker actually wound up with two booths at the show but didn’t wind up with one big enough to hold her mobile greenhouse.

Her company Avant Gardens describes itself as “The New Look of Landscaping.”

She said she enjoys the work because it allows her to be creative. She’s been doing it since 1981 and, by now, she joked, has got a pretty good handle on it.

“There’s a lot to learn and it takes awhile,” she said.

Landscaping in Alaska has been going through a transitional period lately. Box stores have pushed out the local greenhouses. But box store plants are often ill suited for Alaska weather. Ricker said a landscaper has to be certain plants are big enough before taking them out of the greenhouse. Otherwise, there’s no way they’ll stand up to those vicious winter winds.

She said that traffic through the booth was about average for a Friday at the fall show.

“I’ve got three good leads already,” she said at around 5 p.m. “Usually on Fridays I just get two.”

As one can imagine, landscaping work does tend to slow down a bit in the winter, but Ricker said she tends to speed it up before she slows it down. Winter is a good time to plan out what to do in spring for clients. Winter is also time for what she calls “lightscaping.” More and more people are putting lights in their yards for the darker months. Anchorage, for instance, promotes a City of Lights campaign to encourage homeowners to have white lights outside until the last Iditarod musher is into Nome.

Ricker said she’d add her own little tagline to that for when to put the lights up.

“Leaves off, lights on,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.

IF YOU GO

What: Mat-Su Fall Home Show

When: Today is the last day. It runs 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Where: Menard Sports Complex

How Much: Admission is Free