Anaheim Volunteers Do Home Work : Aid: With donated materials and 1,000 helpers, Paint Your Heart Out Anaheim spruces up 47 homes owned by the elderly and needy.

Edward Wulfestieg peeked out his front door Saturday at the platoon of workers applying a fresh coat of tan paint to his 68-year-old stucco bungalow and smiled at the buzz of activity.

“They’re really swarming all over the place, in and out and around,” said Wulfestieg, 89. “They’re doing a beautiful job, aren’t they?”

Across town from Wulfestieg’s Ellsworth Avenue home, a similar flurry of labor was bringing new life to two homes on North Riviera Street. Paintbrush in hand, Dottie Smith took a short break and watched as about a dozen workers changed the color of her house from orange to gray.

“I just had to get out and help,” Smith said. “This is really great.”

It was all part of Paint Your Heart Out Anaheim, a citywide volunteer effort run by Anaheim’s Community Development Department that Saturday put 1,000 temporary painters to work on 47 homes owned by the elderly and the needy. A week earlier the volunteers had trimmed the shrubbery and sanded peeling paint to ready the homes for Saturday’s effort.

Now in its fourth year in Anaheim, Paint Your Heart Out has put in more than $500,000 in neighborhood improvements to 156 local homes, said Carolyn Griebe of Garden Grove, a public relations consultant who is the group’s only paid employee.

As needed, windows are glazed, smoke detectors checked, fences are mended and driveways repaved in addition to the painting--all donated by local businesses, Griebe said.

To qualify, a resident must be elderly, low income or disabled and a homeowner, Griebe said. She estimated the group receives between $50,000-$60,000 in donated material and labor, with $25,000 in cash from federal grant funds.

“Our goal is to bring that down to $15,000 next year and by 1996 be completely off government money,” said Griebe, whose involvement in a local anti-graffiti campaign led to the house-painting effort. The contributors to Saturday’s effort included Dutch Boy Paints, which donated 1,568 gallons of paint; Home Depot, which donated $5,000 in tools and supplies, and Ganahl Lumber, which chipped in $1,500 in materials.

Keith Olesen of Anaheim, who is the event’s co-chairman with Griebe, said it was the purchase of a downtown Anaheim home built in 1903 that got him interested. He fixed up his own home and found out how it affects the entire neighborhood, Olesen said.

“Sometimes we’ll go in and fix up the worst house on the block, which can turn it into one of the nicest,” Olesen said. “That can cause the neighbors to fix up their houses.”

It was about 8 a.m. Saturday that about 20 workers from State Farm Insurance descended on Daisy Jones’ home on Riviera Street.

“This is a real lifesaver for me,” said Jones, 60, who lives in the home with her two adopted daughters, Christina, 11, and Elizabeth, 13. She has to support the three of them working part time with the disabled, 23 hours a week at $4.25 an hour.

“It’s not much, but it is some money coming in,” she said.

Although George Giroux is 69 and disabled, he pitched in with the workers from Lifefleet Ambulance service at his home on Malboro Avenue. Standing in his driveway with paint splattered over his shoes and shirt, Giroux said his daughters “would kill me if they knew I was out here working. But everyone else was working so hard I thought I would help.”