Home Show coming back in 2024

After a three-year pandemic pause, the Hamilton County Home & Garden Show will return in 2024.
Back on the calendar for the second weekend in February, this once annual event will have a familiar look and feel, with one major change reflected in the schedule. Organizers announced that the 2024 Home Show will begin on Friday, Feb. 9, then conclude on Saturday, rather than Sunday as in years past.
“Keith (Wasem) was very energetic about getting people involved with this event and then of course COVID hit,” noted Hamilton County Ag Society board member Alan Charlton, who will co-chair this year’s event with Christina Dose. “It was a hard decision for the Ag Society not to do the Home Show when the opportunity came back, but the Ag Society kind of felt like maybe we needed to step back one more year, just with the amount of people that come through that building for the Home Show.”
Memorial Hospital conducted its annual health fair last year, which again will be part of the draw to the Hamilton County fairgrounds on the second weekend in February. The combination of events in the midst of winter has always been part of the event’s appeal, Charlton said.
“I always enjoyed the Home Show and so I really pushed pretty hard to get it back in 2024,” he shared. “We showed the fair board the numbers that the Home Show generates just in revenue from vendors and that really means a lot.”
What many people may not realize, Charlton noted, is how Home Show proceeds benefit the community.
“Home Show money does not go to the fair,” he explained. “It does not go to the expenses of the Ag Society. The Home Show money goes 100 percent to repairs and maintenance of the facility and to buying chairs and tables. All the black chairs and all the plastic tables were 100 percent bought with Home Show money, so it is specifically allotted for that.”
Charlton and Dose have been working hard to contact vendors who participated in previous years and were excited to report Friday that the response has been encouraging.
“The last five days it really picked up,” Dose said. “We reached out personally to a lot of vendors and said this is going on, that it’s kind of a great deal and that they really need to be a part of it. We also had an early bird special (a deal offering a $50 discount for registering early) and my phone just wouldn’t stop ringing.”
Capacity at the Farr Building has been set at 96 vendors, and the co-chairs they are well on their way to filling out, with a wide variety of mostly local participants including lawn care, landscaping, heating and air, home decor, flooring and cabinets, general construction, candy, insurance, a travel agent as well as the Ag Society itself.
“We’re renting out the buildings out there, we have the gun show, the haunted fairgrounds and stuff like that, so just anything the Ag Society does we’re going to have our own advertising for that,” Dose said. 
“With the new people that have come on the fair board they have brought a lot of new ideas into ways we can use the facilities,” Charlton added. “It has really brought about some new life into the Ag Society.”
Food will also be available as always, with the Hampton FFA Club set to provide concessions, including the Saturday morning pancake breakfast.
As for the change to a Friday-Saturday schedule, Charlton said this will be a first.
“It used to be a Saturday-Sunday show but this year we kicked it around to being Friday and Saturday,” he said. “We have some vendors who couldn’t be around on Sunday just because of church commitments and stuff like that so we decided to start on Friday afternoon and end on Saturday.”
This year’s event will run from 3-8 p.m. on Friday, continuing from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday.
For more information, or to reserve a booth, contact Charleston at 402-363-1649 or huskeralan@yahoo.com, or Dose at 402-604-1027, cdose10@gmail.com