Atlantic Builders is thrilled to welcome back Melanie Edwards as Design Director. Melanie rejoined our team on August 30th.
As Atlantic Builders president Tom Schoedel noted, “ It is fantastic to be a part of the modest turnaround in new home sales in the Fredericksburg, Virginia area and to be able to bring back our first full time hire. Everyone – customers, trade partners, and fellow team members – loves working with Melanie”.
Like most of our tight team here at Atlantic Builders, Melanie is a great multi-tasker. While her primary responsibility is to coordinate our design center (now located at the Breckenridge model home), she is involved in almost all facets of our company.
“What I do touches every piece—not just floor plans, brochures, optional features selections, and design selections, but takeoffs, purchasing, and marketing,” Melanie pointed out. “I get the biggest kick out of putting all the little pieces into a gracious living experience,” she enthused.
Melanie manifests a rare combination of talents that includes a great sense of color and design flair, amazing people skills, and tremendous attention to detail that makes her formidable at helping homebuyers make the best design option and color selections for their new homes. And as Atlantic Builders’ sales continue to increase, she will provide superior service to customers in the design center, while allowing our sales team of Michele Gillenwater and Charlie Baity to spend to spend more time with prospective and newer customers.
Melanie has devoted much of her life to helping the disadvantaged, the homeless and the disabled as part of her deep faith. During her short “sabbatical” from Atlantic Builders, she amped up her community service work by helping Hope Tree Family Services to conduct in-depth needs assessments and to create a database about the people with intellectual disabilities who live in that organization’s Fredericksburg area group homes. She has also spent countless hours with the people served by Hope Tree providing TLC.
Melanie has also been heavily involved in helping the over 100 children born in refugee camps in Rwanda/Burundi who have relocated to Fredericksburg in the past few years. She has helped organize day camps and ESL preschool for children mostly from Tanzania, and has worked for years with the Fredericksburg Baptist Church providing spaghetti dinners weekly for the hungry and homeless.
Melanie enthusiastically recommends the book Same Kind of Different As Me (especially page 104) by Ron Hall and Denver Moore, about the authors’ shared experiences in a Ft Worth homeless shelter.
Melanie feels “it is important for us to build relationships and families and not just homes”. A little wistful about becoming an empty nester, Melanie has just seen her daughter off to James Madison University. And she has a lighter side, too: She is a “very heavily weaponed assassin” called Bella Donna in Mafia Wars on Facebook.
Guess that means that working with Melanie is an offer that nobody can refuse!
Adam M. Fried
Chief Executive Officer
