When the new Dawn House location first started housing women in 2017, the walls were bare and dusty with drywall.

Two years later, construction has finished, the walls have been painted, and the house is bursting with colour.

“We didn’t want an institutional look, because Dawn House is all about being home,” executive director Maggie McLaren said at the home’s official opening on Friday.

Dawn House sold its original Victoria Street location — operating since 1986 — in 2016, and has been working towards making its new location in the west end a home ever since.

A Concentra grant helped fund the house’s kitchen, and two grants from the Ontario Trillium Foundation helped kick start the Spread the Love boutique and assist renovations on the Milford Drive location.

“You have to jump through hoops to make sure your application matches almost verbatim the words in the strategic investment plan,” Rai King, Ontario Trillium volunteer present at the opening to deliver funding plaques, said. “It’s not an easy project, it’s very difficult for anyone to do well.”

Called the ‘resident hoop-jumper’ by her fellow staff, McLaren has seen the project through many obstacles, including zoning problems, opposition from the location’s neighbours, and even theft of some of the building’s wires.

“But we’re here,” McLaren said. “We’re complete.”

Outside the house, landscaping renovations have built a gated patio, complete with a barbecue donated by Kingston Police, and help some of the women in wheelchairs move around outside with more ease.

Currently serving 17 women, McLaren said the home’s residents do their own cleaning, yard work, and hung up the decorations that fill the home’s walls.

“Most of the women who come here are coming here because they want to get away from the life they have maybe lived before or what they’ve been involved in,” McLaren said. “Downtown is often not the place they want to be.”

She added there’s a “huge need” for transitional, supportive housing in Kingston.

Dawn House’s purpose is twofold — to help homeless and impoverished women get back on their feet and to find permanent, affordable housing in Kingston, a feat that can take months.

Kingston has one of the lowest vacancy rates in Ontario, and a report released last November found that homeless women disproportionately outnumber homeless men in Kingston.

McLaren acknowledged the point-in-time homeless count is not always accurate, but agreed there are more homeless women than men in Kingston, pointing to the co-ed In From the Cold homeless shelter as part of the problem.

“Women want to go to a shelter where there are women, they don’t want to go to a shelter with men,” she said. “The majority would rather be on the street, sleeping in a tent somewhere, than be in a shelter with men.”

Without any consistent government funding, Dawn House is always looking for donations and community support, and hopes to someday secure enough funding to provide 24 hour staffing and make all the building’s doors wheelchair accessible.

McLaren, who is currently working on writing up new grant applications, said the grant that funded the service’s staffing for the past two years is set to finish up at the end of the year.

“It takes a lot of time, but it’s well worth it,” she said.

With files from Steph Croiser.