Myrtle Beach community comes together to help local veteran

On Friday morning The Home Depot Foundation – partnered with a local non-profit organization, Canine Angels – gathered at the home of Army veteran Chris Skinner to donate its time toward renovating his home to make it handicapped accessible.

“It’s overwhelming and it’s unbelievable that these people would do something like this for me out of nowhere,” said Skinner. “They just came to me and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this grant and we’d like to do this.’ ”

Skinner, a C5-C6 quadriplegic, is wheelchair bound after being injured in a car accident. Being a C5-C6 quadriplegic means that Skinner has feeling only from the top of his shoulders and up. He is able to move his arms, but he cannot feel his hands or move his fingers. This means that Skinner has trouble opening cabinets in his home and moving from the front of the house to the back of the house on his own.

That’s where The Home Depot Foundation comes in.

“There’s three main projects that we’re doing,” said Wayne Alton, materials supervisor at The Home Depot. “The biggest thing that we’re doing is on the outside of the house. We’re building a deck with a pergola and a wheelchair ramp for him. We’re replacing all of his sod with a grass that is better for his wheelchair. And then we’re doing stuff on the interior of the house. We’re adding new shelving, we’re converting all of his lighting over to LEDs so he doesn’t have to worry about changing light bulbs for quite some time. And another big thing at the house is we’re installing handles because he cannot grab knobs at all, so we’re changing the cabinet knobs over to handles so he can grab everything now.”

The goal of the project is to make it easier for Skinner to interact with his wife and two kids, a boy and girl who are both 9 years old.

Skinner became a candidate for the project after The Home Depot Foundation partnered with Canine Angels, which focuses on saving dogs from shelters and training them as service dogs for veterans. Skinner has his own dog, Zoey, from the organization, which is part of the reason Canine Angels thought of Skinner for the project.

“They recommended Chris,” said Alton about Canine Angles. “Chris has a service dog through them and I approached them about three to five months ago and they recommended Chris and his family for the project.”

Skinner is not only grateful to Canine Angels for the recommendation, but also for the dog he was able to adopt through the program.

“You rescue a dog, number one,” said Skinner. “Number two, you rescue a veteran … it’s a win win situation. The dog feels loved and has life and the veteran feels loved and has life. And that’s what Zoey has meant to me for the past three years.”

The focus of The Home Depot Foundation is to help veterans, so a partnership with Canine Angles only made sense.

“The main thing with veterans is that veterans are most likely to be homeless,” said Alton. “They’re one of the largest groups that have issues with their homes and they’ve done so much for the country and done so much for us that Home Depot wanted to help them out. One in four veterans are likely to be homeless, which is one of the reasons we want to help them out.”

Skinner and his wife Suzie are more than grateful.

“I love Chris, I love my husband, I love that he is so sacrificing like with his own comfort,” said Suzie Skinner. “He’ll be in pain and he’ll do whatever the kids and I want to do. He just pushes himself through it. And so, it just means a lot to me because this gives him some comfort. It gives him the ability to do things on his own and he doesn’t have to work as hard. He doesn’t have to call neighbors and call people and ask them to help and all that. He doesn’t have to struggle as much.”

“It’s amazing,” said Chris Skinner. “You know, with the election going on and all that stuff, and with what’s going on in our country, it’s amazing that you see what unity can do when a bunch of people come together for a common cause. They can do so much good in the world, and that means the world to me.”

This story was originally published November 4, 2016 at 6:50 PM with the headline "Myrtle Beach community comes together to help local veteran."