BRIDGEPORT — Priorities Home Improvement is devoted to making quality home improvement accessible to the public.

“We built our business with the idea of making home improvement more affordable for those who couldn’t typically afford it. We do everything apart from electrical HVAC, refrigeration and plumbing. We don’t offer those services but we do everything else. We have a wide variety of things that we do from interior and exterior painting to roofing to drywall, general handyman services,” said Ashlee Bowen, who owns the business with her husband.

They have been in business for close to two years. Ashlee Bowen said they decided to make this move when they saw the lack of affordable home care services available.

“My husband is very good with maintenance and things like that. We got our home … he went through and re-drywalled the whole thing. He wanted to give back to the community and make it more affordable after looking at the prices that were being charged to people who are living on Social Security or have a monthly income and can’t really afford things,” she said.

“He was raised by his grandmother, who was on Social Security and had a military pension from her husband, so she didn’t really have a whole lot of money, but she couldn’t get her house worked on due to not having a lot of money,” she said.

Ashlee said many of their clients are in similar positions.

“We do have a lot of senior citizens, and we offer senior citizens a discount. We also offer military and police discounts,” she said, adding that other discounts are available for firefighters, EMTs and health care workers.

She said those discounts usually are about 10 percent.

“Our prices are already low,” she said. “We try to be affordable. We can’t do it obviously without turning some sort of profit, but we don’t make a huge profit from people.”

She said this is their first venture into owning a business.

“We’re hoping to see it grow and have several offices. We would like to see it in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. That’s kind of the goal at this point, to be a service to the Ohio Valley and the tri-state area,” she said.

She also said that with the changing weather, they have been called to do more work inside clients’ houses.

“We’ve been very busy with exterior painting, but as we move into cooler weather we’ve been getting a lot of drywall jobs and flooring, basically a lot of interior work is starting to flow through us, but in the warmer weather we mostly do exterior painting and roofing.”

The business is located at 67889 Johnson Avenue in Bridgeport. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, but they take “emergency calls” for issues that cannot wait until morning. The phone number is 740-310-7731.