From the very start, we had a lot of local support on that house. The neighbors were tired of watching druggies pull down the boards covering the doors so that they could sneak inside and use the house as a shooting gallery. I had made a promise to the city and the neighborhood from the get-go: “If you turn that house over to me, I’ll clean it up, not destroy it. I’m going to put a new owner in that house. And nothing is better for neighborhood revitalization than an owner-occupant. Neighborhoods need people with a stake in the future if they are going to come back and thrive.”
Words can be powerful, but you have to back them up. I was faced with rebuilding the house with virtually no budget and few resources. As with the rest of my life at that point, it was going to mean starting from the ground up.
I hired a structural engineer to assess the foundation. I held my breath, hoping that he would say it could be reinforced and repaired. It would have been great if we could have done a little shoring-up work in the basement, spending a few thousand dollars at most, and had a solid base for the house. But I had worked with enough bad foundations to know it probably wasn’t going to be that simple. In the end, the engineer took my check and left me with a report that came to a no-doubt conclusion: The foundation had to be completely replaced. Replacing an existing foundation means lifting the entire house, something very few contractors ever have to do. But lucky me, I was about to become one of the select few.
If you’re going to do something as challenging and tricky as raising a whole house, replacing the foundation, and then putting the house back in place, you better have the best people working for you. That meant contractor after contractor would have to be interviewed in order to find someone who could do the job right and work for an amount I could actually pay. And this is where Leif came in. Leif is the brother of one of my clients. He had had the unfortunate task of helping me deal with all the boxes that came out of Minnehaha, and now he needed some work. More important, Leif had the time and the patience to meet the contractors at the house and let them in to inspect everything, again and again. (Incidentally, the sound of an impact drill taking out boarding bits is one that I can recognize from a million miles away. There are no doorknobs on abandoned houses—simply boards held in with special screws, and you need a “boarding bit” to get them out. You know a house preservationist when you see boarding bits in the cup holders of his or her car!)
We ended up interviewing almost twenty contractors before we found one who had the right credentials and experience, and could stay within my budget. Still, the job would cost me thirty thousand dollars, which was all the money I had on hand for the Dollar house.
Filming at the Dollar house happened around the clock.
One of the wonderful things about rehabbing decrepit buildings is that you’re always learning something new. I’d never lifted a house. First things first: We had to remove the chimney. I also used the opportunity to conquer my fear of heights when I climbed a ladder to the top of the roof to dismantle the compromised chimney. This sounds easy enough, but when you need to take down a chimney, whatever you think will be required is probably wrong. You have to climb to the top of the roof, and then to the top of the chimney, which is a good three to four feet higher than your roof peak. You then sit there and start to chisel it away brick by brick. And where do the bricks go? Into a bucket that you have to continuously lower to the ground to get emptied. Look at any chimney; they’re made of a lot of bricks. We started on that chimney early in the morning and it took us till early evening to finish removing all the bricks. The best part for me was that with every brick I removed, it put me closer to the ground.
While I was working on the house, Ethan was enjoying the first few days of summer vacation, coming over to the job site for fun—definitely not to work. I loved when he showed up. There’s a scene in one early Dollar house episode where Ethan chases me through the house and touches my face with his dirty hands to make me scream, because he knows I’m a germ- ophobe. Moments like these play over and over in my mind; the pure joy of horseplay and nonsense that comes with raising boys. He still liked the show back then and loved scheming with the crew to play pranks on me. Everyone loved to goof around.
My lead cameraman was Eric Klang. As far as camera operators go, many of them are twenty- or thirty-somethings, a few are in their forties, and then there is Eric. No offense to Klang, but the gray hair always made people assume he was more likely to be reading a book in the shade than jumping over walls, two-by-fours, shovels—you name it—to grab the shot. Not only is Klang a would-be gymnast, but he has, without a doubt, the most profound talent of telling you BS with a straight face, so you couldn’t tell fact from fiction. I arrived one day to the job site and said, “Morning, Klang. Any news?”
“Nothing much. Just kicked a prostitute and her customer off the steps when I arrived.”
And then without skipping a beat, he went on to tell me which shots he had gotten and where we were in the filming. To say that that part of Minneapolis was still very dicey was the understatement of the year. I was never surprised at what Klang would report, but if I looked worried, Klang would just matter-of-factly say, “Well, that’s what comes with what you do.” Don’t get me wrong; Klang and I have had our share of differences of opinion over the years, but it was at the Dollar house that he gave me some great advice one day when we were getting ready to film.
Ethan heading to Michigan with Max.
“Nicole, just remember that this might be an ordinary day for you, but when you are shooting with people who don’t do this regularly, it might be the coolest day of their lives.”
It’s reminders like this that have kept me grounded over the years. And after that, I thought that what Klang said is exactly right. Why not give this TV opportunity to everyone to enjoy? So I made an unprecedented move: I opened my construction site to visitors. After signing a release promising not to hold me liable, anyone who wanted to be a part of the action could visit, help out, and hang out at the Dollar house. Jose, our newly appointed production assistant from Chicago, was in charge of the “fans.”
Jose is an imposing six feet plus with a shaved head, and within two seconds of meeting you, he’ll let you know that he’s Puerto Rican. This description makes him sound like he could be a security guy, and over the years he has become exactly that and more, but at the Dollar house he was Klang’s right-hand man.
The day to raise the house came, and it was a fascinating process separating the house from the foundation. I even drove a Bobcat through the basement wall. We lifted the house and within three days set it back down.
That’s when the volunteers came in droves. Jose would welcome them with a smile and a release form. He’d call out to me, “Ma, we got a group from Pittsburgh. Ma, these folks drove from Chicago.”
Amazingly, people were driving and flying in from all over the country to come see us at work. I would stop what I was doing, climb down from the ladder, pose for a picture, and go right back to work.
Me, Jose, and Klang.
Some folks came by for an hour. Others worked for almost the entire project. Every day brought new faces, new, funny situations, and progress on the house. Ethan left for Mackinac Island with my parents, so my only responsibility was getting the Dollar house done and filmed. My friend Justin came from Michigan to help me. There we were: me, Klang, Leif, Jose, and Justin. It was mayhem and I loved it. I had lived in a bubble of negativity for the past few years, and I was coming back to being me.
We were on the job site around the clock. I started shooting small videos to post on Facebook. It really was uplifting to find fun in renovation again. On any given night, a friend would call and say, “I’m coming by with Chinese food and beer.” We’d sit around out front, laughing and eating. Then I’d get back to work. I’d work all day, and then at ten at night, I’d wind up painting rooms or power washing the house. The neighbors never complained. They were so
excited to see us turning a longtime trouble spot into a family home, we could do no wrong.
Justin and me rebuilding the porch.
When we were ready to paint the interior, I did a callout for a paint day to get some help, and thirty people showed up. Many folks took a vacation day from work—yes, a vacation day—to be there. I was in awe and humbled at the same time. One regular group of painters became known as “the Ladies That Paint.” Every day until we were done, they would come after work with paint clothes in hand and paint into the wee hours of the night. And around this time, a mystery man who had been chasing me started coming by and helping us out (hint: Chad). After a little landscaping, the house had incredible curb appeal. My punishing schedule of long days and longer nights was being rewarded with a beautiful house that would help transform a neighborhood—and prove that I could do what I had always said I could. All that working left me little time to ponder what might have been, with Mark or anyone else. As the summer came to a close and we wrapped up filming on the house, I felt like I was a new me. Or maybe I had re- discovered the old me, the me that could do anything I set my mind to.
The Dollar house was one of the rare projects that I was sorry to see come to completion. But the final product was well worth all the effort and the craziness. The house had a new foundation that would keep it standing for another hundred years and a historically accurate look. I could not have been prouder of the house, the people who helped make it a reality, and the neighborhood that supported our efforts.
Some of “the Ladies That Paint.”
Even though I often felt like I was working at odds with the city itself, I had one of my most satisfying moments in the Dollar house when Elfric Porte, the manager of residential and real estate development for CPED, called me one day. Porte was always a straight shooter with me, and one of the best people I ever dealt with in the city bureaucracy.
“Nicole, I’d love to see the inside of that house you just finished.”
“Sure. I’ll meet you over there.”
We walked through the house together and he stopped and admired the fireplace, and spent a long time looking at the redone bathroom with its stunning period mosaic floor tile. Elfric is not a big talker. But when we walked back out onto the new porch, looking over the tidy front-yard landscaping, he nodded.
“You did a really great job on that, Nicole. It’s beautiful.”
I’d gotten my mojo back and established my credibility to anyone who might have doubted my words. The Dollar house was my statement—of who I was, what I was looking to achieve with Rehab Addict, and what I was capable of accomplishing. I’d managed to build a brand-new foundation not only for a historic house, but for my life as well. Sometimes you have to put actions behind your words, even when that means starting all the way at the bottom and building back up from scratch. The foundations I’d re-created for the Dollar house and for my life were going to serve me well, proof in the future that I would do anything I said I would.
The Dollar house living room, before (left) and after (right).
Chapter 4
Own the Process or the Process Will Own You
case avenue house
Although the Dollar house should have completed season three of Rehab Addict, it was only seven episodes, which meant I was short five episodes. Once again, I had to find a house to shoot. The houses in my life always overlap. You can’t really tell the story of one house without touching on the story of another. That was the way it was with Case Avenue, purchased shortly after we began work on the Summit mansion, a new project.
The Summit mansion was monstrous. I mean, it’s a mansion; it’s over eight thousand square feet. The network wanted those final five episodes, and they couldn’t get them fast enough. We couldn’t delay our delivery, and I knew the work on that big house was going to take at least one to two years. So I had to find a stopgap house. That was when the Case house opportunity came my way.
At this point, would I jump ship from one project to the next just for the sake of more episodes? Heck, no. It’s a disaster. But I didn’t have the wisdom of experience then, and Lord knew I couldn’t afford to risk the network losing interest. In other words, I had no choice but to strike while the iron was hot.
The Case Avenue house exterior, before (left) and after (right) renovations.
My e-mail in-box is constantly flooded with messages about foreclosed properties and estate sales. A lot of these come from what I call real estate “carpetbaggers.” These are a special kind of vulture that preys on people who are overextended in their homes and/or financially vulnerable through divorce, a death in the family—you name it, they exploit it. They swoop in, offer the family a minimal amount of money for the house, and then turn around and sell it to outside investors for a huge, quick profit.
These kind of investors aren’t worried about anyone but themselves. They just want to turn a fast buck. Case was typical. It was a cute little 1890s house—well, my version of cute—in the Payne-Phalen neighborhood of St. Paul. Just like the owner of the 20K house, this elderly owner had moved on to a nursing home. It was in utter disrepair, and I’m sure this was why the family had decided to sell it. Unfortunately, the only path they found was one of these carpetbagger investors, who, I would find out later, quickly scooped up the place for the paltry sum of less than ten thousand dollars. That person then sent information about the house in an e-mail blast to investors. I was one of them, and I was intrigued. I didn’t know this neighborhood, but I’d become a victim of my own success. The Minneapolis neighborhoods where I had already rehabbed houses had bounced back just as they were supposed to. But that rebound jacked up prices even on fixer-uppers in those neighborhoods. I wasn’t going to make it work financially anywhere close to home, which meant heading into St. Paul.
The estate houses I buy—like the 20K house and the Case house—can be risky in surprising ways. Not only am I paying for a house that may need much more work than is feasible given the budget, but I’m also inserting myself into an emotionally charged family situation. More than once, I’ve had someone contact me and say that I was profiting from their misery. It’s especially common when family members see the house after I’m finished with it. Not having been there throughout the process, they assume it just came together like magic. They forget what it looked like, the condition it was in when I bought it, and how much money I’d had to put into it.
That’s why, long ago, I decided to make the previous owners an offer on every house I rehab. If the original owner or a family member wants to buy the house back after I’m done, I’ll sell it to them for my cost.
I was at Summit and discussing the situation with Chad. He was completely supportive of the idea of my switching to the Case house and even took it one step further, floating me the twenty-seven thousand dollars to buy it. I listed the Dollar house at the end of September 2012, and it was sold within three days. However, as real estate goes, the time between offer to closing is typically thirty to sixty days. Therefore, when I was ready to purchase Case, I didn’t yet have the proceeds from the sale of the Dollar house. Although it was risky to buy one house when I hadn’t sold the other, I was confident the Dollar house sale would go through, and I didn’t really have a choice; I needed to get on with season three.
I truly thought Case would take no more than a few months to do, so I wasn’t worried about it causing delays at the Summit mansion. After all, we’d had to lift the Dollar house and completely rebuild it, and that only took from May to October. But what I wasn’t taking into account was that Case would be an entirely different project. I hadn’t stopped to think what effect a Minneapolis winter would have on productivity. We’d completed the Dollar house over a summer, working almost nonstop. But how do you paint a house in single-digit weather? Or repair a porch? What do you do when the daylight just disappears on you after a few hours of work?
Even getting started
on Case was an adventure. At the walk-through before the closing, I discovered it hadn’t been cleaned out. Oftentimes, when someone sells a house under stressful conditions and for very little money—especially when an elderly relative has lived there—they just abandon the house and everything in it. The family of the woman who owned Case didn’t want to plow through decades’ and decades’ worth of belongings. I suppose there’s a sense of sadness or defeat that people want to get beyond as quickly as possible.
I had the romantic notion that I could rehab the belongings that were left in the house the same way I rehabbed houses. Clean and mend clothes and take them to a thrift shop. Fix and refinish furniture. Clean up antique picture frames and salvage them. I’ve since learned through tough experience that renovating a house is hard enough. Trying to bring someone else’s belongings back to life is a fool’s errand. Leif and I spent hours sorting through stuff. And amazingly, much of everything you see staged in Case was there when we got it.
Adam and me, working late into the night.
There was also a deceptively large amount of work that needed to be done. Reporters who interviewed me and profiled Case would later say that what we did to the house were “cosmetic repairs,” and in a sense they were right. There wasn’t any serious structural damage. But the cosmetic damage was the most extreme I had ever seen. The water damage alone was appalling. Wood floors were warped throughout the house. Most of the walls had severe cracks and ugly black-and-gray water stains. The furnace needed to be replaced. The mouse infestation had, at one time, been so bad that mice had worn a track in the carpeting all around the perimeter of a room. I could have just torn everything out, but I wanted to save the exquisite wood moldings and woodwork throughout the house. It’s what gave Case most of its charm. Each of these problems, taken on its own, wasn’t especially troublesome. But add all of them together and I was facing a lot more work than I had anticipated.
Better Than New Page 9
