Silver Acres Adult Family Homes Opens Second Location in Twin Cities

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With a home already in Chehalis, Silver Acres Adult Family Homes opened a new long-term care facility in Centralia earlier this month, adding a second spot in the Twin Cities where the business can help aging area residents live out their sunset years.

The home, which is located at 1221 Johnson Road in Centralia, had its grand opening on May 11 and used to be called “My Blue Heaven” under different ownership.

Owner Danae Elsner said she built and opened the first location after years of working with cardiac patients as a nurse. Elsner also served on the “code blue” team, which responds to patients in the hospital who have stopped breathing.

“I’m a registered nurse who has worked acute care for over a decade and then decided to open up a long-term care facility,” Elsner said. “I opened Silver Acres in May of 2020, (which) is when we took our first resident.”

The scope of care provided by Silver Acres is far-reaching, Elsner said.

“We offer all spectrum of care, from just basic medication assistance all the way to end-of-life hospice care,” she said. “Hospice — we have a passion for it — just helping elderly (folks) transition comfortably.”

If a person only needs help with taking the right doses of their medication on time each day, Silver Acres has staff to assist them, but the organization will also assist “total care” residents who need help with basic tasks such as eating and bathing.

She said the fact that she’s a nurse is a benefit to the home.

“There’s many adult family homes who are run by a nurse because it’s not a requirement, so I’m a nurse-owned-and-operated home,” Elsner said.

She added later, “Being a nurse-run home, we have the ability to take a little bit more medically-heavy patients, but we specialize in elderly care.”

Being under the official classification of “adult family home,” each location can only serve six residents.



Silver Acres’ elderly-care specialization and the six-patient limit have been especially beneficial during the pandemic era, she said.

“We never had a COVID outbreak because we were so small,” Elsner said. “We only have six residents and then staff, where a lot of the bigger facilities struggled.”

She said there’s a wide range of folks that are currently living in the homes, with one resident still able to legally drive their car.

The work is close to her heart and hits close to home, Elsner said.

“I have a passion — we have a big family, and I wanted an option that was like a home-like environment for our own family to go to and I couldn’t find what I was looking for,” she said. “And so the adult family home business — I knew that I could create it how we wanted it and then have it run efficiently and have the residents be cared for like they were our own family.”

She said Silver Acres is a boon for the community at large.

“This community really has limited resources for adult family homes,” Elsner said.

With the new location on Johnson Road added to the original location at 1266 Southwest 22nd St. in Chehalis, Elsner said she’s able to provide that lacking resource to the Twin Cities at double her original capacity.

All beds are currently filled. Visit http://www.silver-acres.com/ to get on a waiting list, or visit the organization’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/silveracresafh/ for more information.