By Dudley Brown
Philip LeRoy ’16 likes both building communities and being a part of them. He recently got to share that passion in front of the camera while renovating a home.
LeRoy and his sister Elyse South hosted “Sibling Space Solvers” on the Lowe’s Home Improvement YouTube channel. The episode debuted in July, and it coincidentally allowed them to renovate the living room of people they knew, including one of LeRoy’s Wofford College classmates.
LeRoy and South have a good working relationship and had renovated and sold homes together leading up to their involvement with the show.
While they were prepared to work and share a family’s story with Lowe’s, they didn’t know who the production team would find for them. Zane Vickery, a high school friend of LeRoy’s in Greenwood, S.C., and Vickery’s wife, Rebecca Willis Vickery ’13, were selected.
“We were like, we know these people, intimately,” LeRoy says.
The episode shares that Zane Vickery was involved in a major automobile accident last year and has had multiple surgeries. Between physical and emotional recovery and the sheer surprise of the makeover, it was an emotional project.
“Those were genuine tears,” says LeRoy of what the video’s viewers see when the completed project is unveiled. “You can’t see it, but everyone is sobbing. The people behind the camera and the people crammed in the kitchen. We all were sobbing.”
The Vickery family is enjoying the new living room. Rebecca says she has the fireplace of her dreams; Zane has a dedicated space to work on his music; their kids have special places for their things, and LeRoy even dreamed up a nook for the family’s cat.
“The fact that we knew so many people involved in this project actually cared about our family and our well-being just made it all the more special,” Rebecca Vickery says. “A lot of happy tears were shed at the end of this. We are so grateful for them, and everyone involved in our living room blessing.”
LeRoy and South hope to complete more projects for families needing a little “pick-me-up.”
Some of LeRoy’s work has been in Spartanburg’s Northside neighborhood adjacent to Wofford’s campus.
“I think we have a good story to tell about our business and about Spartanburg, and the affordable housing piece is part of that,” LeRoy says.
A personal finance class LeRoy took on a whim during his final semester at Wofford helped get him to where he is today.
“Up to that point I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he says. “The personal finance class taught me a lot about how to look at finances differently and some practical applications, and that introduced me to the business world. I had always been interested in entrepreneurship, but that one class changed the trajectory of where I thought I could be.”
Furthering the Wofford connection, Hunt Grafe ’24, a finance major from Pawleys Island, S.C., was introduced to LeRoy’s family through friends and has now worked with The LeRoy Group as a project manager planning construction projects.