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LAND O'LAKES - Janeen Salzgeber knows it's not often a person hears God "calling."
Sometimes it's loud; sometimes it's muffled; sometimes it's just a direct thought that dovetails with life. That's how it happened to Janeen and her husband, Jim, 56.
Jim's a pharmacist for Publix in Spring Hill. Janeen's a stay-at-home mom with movie star looks and bunches of friends.
She's the kind of person who sends recipe ingredients to one girlfriend down the street as she cuts out shepherd's tents for Bible study with another, all the while talking on the phone and supervising small children gliding through the front door on inline skates. By the way, the Salzgebers are both serious United Methodists who attend First United Methodist Church of Land O'Lakes.
They met on a Tampa Ski Club trip a decade ago. They might describe themselves as practical in every way. But a calling is a calling.
"We just knew," recalls Janeen, 41. "And we knew separately. It was something we never questioned, there was never a doubt. God called us and we were obedient."
About a year and a half ago, the Salzgebers were happily living in Denver when they felt a divine push to move back to the Tampa Bay area to care for Jim's mother, Gretchen, now 84.
Gretchen, whom they affectionately call Gret, was having "lots of health issues related to old age."
A nursing home never entered their minds.
"There were other family members around," Janeen explains of their cross-country move. "But we knew we were the logical choice since we've got small children and there's already lots of rhythm, routine and ritual built into our lives."
Instead the Salzgebers decided to build a "multigenerational" house, one that would be comfortable for Gret and offer wriggle room for their two exuberant sons, Matthew, 6, and Peyton, 4.
They wanted a place where they could live together comfortably and not feel like they were on top of one another.
"We're all contained within these walls, but we can close it off in such a way that Gret can have her privacy," says Janeen of the home that was completed in January.
The 3,400-square-foot house constructed by M/I Homes in Wilderness Lake Preserve was tailored to match their needs: The sunny upstairs bonus area was converted to a bedroom for the boys and an adjacent sewing room for Janeen.
The master bedroom suite sits downstairs off in its own corner of the house. It's big but not too big, spacious enough to accommodate a small corner study with an antique roll-top desk for Jim.
Gret lives in her own L-shaped wing that Jim and Janeen designed by eliminating a closet that once stood between two bedrooms. She has her own elegant sitting area, a bathroom built for accessibility and a quiet bedroom that allows plenty of room for photographs taken of Gret and her twin sister, Gertrude, in 1920s Cleveland. Gertrude died at 50, but Gret still keeps pictures near.
"Her dad was a furrier and her mom was a seamstress, so they were always dressed to the nines," explains Janeen, also a twin.
Janeen, who saw to it that everything from drawer pulls to faucets were friendly to elderly hands, also lobbied for more accessibility throughout. Tinkering with plans for a laundry room off the kitchen, for example, allowed for a walk-in butler's pantry instead. Janeen loves to cook and needed space for everything from her baking staples to canned goods. She has everything stored on shelves labeled for easy reading. The labels are for Gret, who taught Janeen to cook Hungarian and German cuisine over the years.
"Oh, I haven't cooked in ages," Gret demurs. "Janeen does the cooking now."
Says Janeen: "We eat together every night as a family."
They chose Wilderness Lake Preserve for a number of reasons, but partly because New Tampa - where they lived before moving out West - had already boomed too much. Janeen was particularly sold on the lodge, a place that reminded her of the architecture of Colorado, but offered great amenities like a spa and health club for adults and zoo animals and movies for the kids.
"We're not golf and country club people; we like to get out and do something," she says. "I love the social thing with the lodge. Just the other day, the moms all worked out while the kids watched a movie in the theater. We were all yakking and taking turns checking on them. It was great."
Neighbor Alisa Barnette, her husband and two children just moved to a two-story chocolate-colored house on the Salzgebers' cul-de-sac in April.
The Barnettes popped in for a visit Wednesday afternoon. The two women met at the lodge pool a few days before. They've already been shopping together.
"What's it been, four days?" Barnette asks. "And we've already clicked."
Four days.
Try 40 minutes.
Already Janeen has taken a visitor on a whirlwind tour of the house, chatted with Gret, rustled up some of her sewing creations that appeared in Sew Beautiful magazine (she designs classic "smocked" children's clothing), and explained the stories behind their classic Western furnishings, including a handmade "pole" bunk bed in the boys' room and a punched-leather carpetbagger's chair that a friend found in a trash heap in Temple Terrace.
"You cannot not be Janeen's friend," says Julie Laney, 33, another friend from an organization called Community Bible Study who has dropped by to work on a volunteer project.
"You meet Janeen, and you've got to be her friend."
As for the calling thing, it worked out just fine, Janeen explains.
"When you do what you've been called to do," she says, "then it's like everything is in 3-D, like you're seeing it from a more divine perspective. Ultimately, the idea is we need to take care of our parents. And the best part is we get to be with Gret during this last chapter in her life."
- My House is a feature that profiles people behind Pasco's housing boom. Elizabeth Bettendorf can be reached at ebettendorf@hotmail.com