It didn’t help that the area was crowded with moneyed, pompous, privileged people. Everyone in St. Paul seemed to know that I was doing the house and there was a lot of buzz that I was going to fall on my face. People love to see a high-profile person fail. I had set the bar high and was obsessed with keeping Summit historically correct.
I was still trying to wrap my head around fixing bathrooms that the contractor had gutted. My struggle was that I had seen the original bathrooms and loved them. Nothing in my mind could compete, so my vision was blocked. One day, while digging through Art’s stock of old house parts, I came across two old cat litter buckets full of porcelain octagonal tile. I have no idea where he got it, but when I saw it, I realized those tiles might be a perfect match for the powder room at Summit . . . and they were. I don’t think I ever shared with Chad where the “new” tile had come from—all I was focused on was that Art would probably get a good laugh knowing that his “junk” had made it into the mansion.
Installing Art’s tile in the powder room.
That solved one bathroom, but we still had the massive hole of destruction where the grand master bathroom had once been. Every time Chad and I would walk the house, huffing and puffing from floor to floor, he would joke about installing an elevator. We quickly sized everything up and to our surprise, there was an empty pocket in the middle of the house. Had the master bath been intact, we would have never dreamed of rearranging it to make room for an elevator, but now it was gone, and I thought, Well, that’s one way to fix this. Installing an elevator is no small feat. I was amazed at how it was built. It seemed to take forever.
The truth was, every day I spent in that house, Chad and I would add on something more extravagant and more fabulous to the home, which meant it just kept getting further and further behind schedule. I had promised the Summit mansion to the network for season four and was missing deadline after deadline. It wasn’t good. In very simple terms, if I wanted to keep my job (by this time, the show had become my main source of income), I had to find a solution to delivering episodes fast, and a never-ending Summit mansion renovation wasn’t going to do it.
The Summit pool, before (top, left). Getting pulled into the pool by Ethan (top, right). The renovated pool (bottom).
I made some calls, and Brian, whom I’d met at the Dollar house, had some ideas. Three properties in north Minneapolis could be had fairly easily. Just like that, I was off and running. Chad was on the verge of a heart attack. Within a few weeks, I closed on the 4th Street and 25th Avenue houses (I had my sights on Hillside Avenue as well, but that would take another two years to come to fruition, and the details would require another book). I thought I had finally created the perfect model for how to shoot Rehab Addict as the two houses were within a few blocks of each other so we filmed them simultaneously. It was nuts. Chad grew more resentful with every swing of a hammer I took at the other properties. I was still overseeing everything going on at Summit, but it didn’t seem to matter. At one point, I said, “Why aren’t you over there managing Summit full-time? It’s your house!” I was doing what I should be doing—focusing on my own business and career—but I was made to feel guilty. The truth was, Chad had a very easy “do whatever the heck I want routine,” and I didn’t. I had done what everyone had warned me against and once again mixed business with pleasure. And now I was paying the price. I wanted to leave my job site and get swept off my feet, but the romantic, “Let me spoil you” Chad was long gone. With one angry phone call, he called it quits.
The Summit pool, before (top, left). Getting pulled into the pool by Ethan (top, right). The renovated pool (bottom).
My heart was broken, and upon finishing the 4th Street house, I found solace in setting my sights on a new challenge: Detroit (more on that later). And as fate would have it, I eventually came back to Summit. This time not as the girlfriend, but as the designer. There were attorneys involved, and we signed a contract so that we could use the house on television. And again, did I know better? Yes, but I knew disaster would come to that house at the hands of anyone else, and deep down, I missed Chad. He was and still is a pain, but in the moments he isn’t, he’s great.
When I first came back to Summit, we didn’t speak. Not a word. I just worked on the house, which was turning out to be absolutely beautiful. With each room nearing completion, my heart melted. I remembered the first time I was there. I remembered my funny “mister,” as I called him, saying, “Forget about Minnehaha; this is yours.” We started dating again. My crew was exasperated, saying, “Love him, hate him, we don’t care; let’s just finish the house.” And of course, within the amount of time it took for the floors to dry, Chad and I ended up being back at each other’s throats. I felt unappreciated; he felt neglected.
The house, with the exception of the kitchen, the master suite, and the basement, was almost complete. I had the furniture in. It felt like everything was coming together as we were falling apart. We were fighting, I was working, and Chad? Well, the kindest way to put it is that he was seeking a way to not feel neglected.
Here I was putting every bit of energy I had into this house—his house—and in return he was spending his days telling everyone how horrible I was. His favorite word to describe me was “dismissive.” I would retort dismissively, “How have you not figured out that my attitude is a direct result of your decision to treat me like your contractor instead of your girlfriend?” A common misconception about strong women is that we don’t need the hand-holding, the flowers, and the nice gestures, and what I’ve found to be true is that it’s the strong women who want it the most. I took a long hard look at the relationship and realized it still wasn’t right after all these years.
Dave and me pretending to shoot. He’s saying to me, “Just a few more days; you’ve got this.”
I finished the rooms I had been working on, and I packed my things to go back to Detroit. During the summer, it became apparent (due to contractual obligations) that I would indeed have to return to Summit because after more than a year, that damn elevator had finally shown up and I needed to film it being installed to close out the episodes. Chad thought for sure that meant I would be staying on to finish the house. Had he responded the way I’d hoped to some news I would soon receive, I most definitely would have, but in the end, that was the last time I would work on the Summit mansion. He was convinced that I would edit the show to make it appear that I had finished the renovation, but I didn’t. I told the truth.
It wasn’t done, but I was reluctantly moving on. Chad had no choice but to take over the “design” of the house. I was called incompetent by every Tom, Dick, and Harry he had working in there after me, of course. Unfortunately, homeowners who have a beef with their previous contractors are magnets for contractors who see an easy dollar to be made. They remind me of divorce attorneys; the rich ones only get that way by keeping their clients fighting.
The fact was, I could have just taken it on the chin and tried to make lemonade out of Summit. But instead, I worked with the lemons. Someone else’s lemons. I never had an open house for Summit, and I don’t like to talk about it. The sour aftertaste of lemons is what keeps me focused these days, anytime I might be tempted to consider taking on a house that someone else owns.
Filming the walk-through for Summit, Dave and Andrew wore construction vests to try to get me to laugh.
Chapter 6
Passion Allows the Phoenix to Rise from the Ashes
campbell street project
I went back to Detroit not just to distract myself from my broken heart, but also to snap myself out of the monotony that I felt Rehab Addict and my life had become. While the 4th Street project and the 25th Avenue houses were great, they didn’t quite ignite a fire in me. 4th Street hit the market and sold right away. 25th Avenue? It was just about finished when I saw something I couldn’t resist: a Curbed.com advertisement for firehouses for sale in Detroit. Imagine living in an old firehouse!
I was sure one of them would make an incredible project for the show, and a terrific single-family dwelling that could be the centerpiece of a neighborhood springing back to life. So I sat down and wrote a long e-mail to the network and pitched Detroit—specifically, a firehouse.
The tweet that started the firehouse search.
It wasn’t going to be an easy sell. Former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick had just been convicted of corruption and was in prison. The city had no money. Neighborhoods were devastated in the wake of the real estate bubble bursting. Homeowners were being evicted for back taxes. Bailiffs would show up in the morning, and by the afternoon, former owners would be standing on the sidewalk with dazed looks on their faces and their possessions in dumpsters. There were blocks upon blocks of empty houses, with broken windows and overgrown yards. It was the very definition of blight. Banks were foreclosing with no plan in place and then letting the houses sit empty and fall apart. I had my work cut out for me. The whole world looked at Detroit like a wasteland.
I’m always a bit surprised when I see projects listed on the Internet and the phone number actually goes to a live person. I get sent hundreds of “Nicole, check out this house” e-mails a week, and honestly, very few are legit. The person on the other end of the phone in Detroit introduced himself as James. When I inquired about the firehouses, he launched into a diatribe, describing each one. I stopped him and said I would check them out for myself.
It’s such an easy commute from Minneapolis to Detroit, I could be there within two hours. On the day I’d arranged to meet with James, my mom picked me up at the curb outside Detroit Metropolitan arrivals. She was as excited as I was. In those days, the show and the houses were still very much a family affair, and my mom knew that if we grabbed a firehouse, it would bring me one step closer to calling Detroit home again.
As we drove east on I-94, I felt so excited. The city of Detroit might have looked abandoned to anyone else, but I envisioned it as the bustling metropolis it had once been, with the beautiful stores downtown that my grandparents always told me stories about. We pulled up to Cadillac Tower, where James’s office was located, and parked right out front. (One advantage of a broken city is the ample parking.)
Cadillac Tower has a little shop in the entry and beautiful brass doors and elevators, but the rest of the building had gotten a “makeover” in the 1980s, and what big hair and neon did for fashion, mauve carpeting and drop ceilings did for design. I called James from the lobby and he answered. At any minute, I expected this adventure to go bust. I mean, it couldn’t seriously be this easy, could it? A few minutes later, a tall man in a tan suit, very businesslike, approached us with keys in his hand and said, “Nicole? Let’s go.”
I said, “James?”
And he said, “Yeah.” And then there was an awkward pause.
“We can just follow you,” I told him.
“I have a city van. This way we can talk and you won’t get lost,” he explained.
I didn’t argue; I got the feeling you just went with what James said. And I love seeing how situations like this play out. In a life where I have to take charge of just about everything, it’s refreshing when someone else has a plan. And James had a plan, all right. What I soon found out about James—the voice on the end of that 313 extension—was that he wasn’t just a fly-by-night city employee. James—James Marusich—headed up Detroit’s Planning and Development Department. He had seen it all. He had been around since the Mayor Coleman Young administration, a time when I was dealing with multiplication tables and wearing jelly shoes. Through all the bureaucracy over the years, James had managed to do something unheard of: He had stayed on the city payroll through several administration changes.
The city van was, without a doubt, the best representation of what was wrong in our beloved Detroit. It was caked with layers of dirt and road grime, which covered the paint and hid a patchwork of dents. The brakes were barely there and the heater was on the fritz. The city seal on the outside had seen better days. I get carsick at the drop of a hat, which is why I insist on being in the driver’s seat whenever I travel. But I was going to have to grin and bear it as we headed off to the far corners of the city in search of the next Rehab Addict project.
I had started the trip with my usual optimism, assuming we’d find structures exactly as the firefighters had left them. I had imagined that these structures would be clean and bare, and would only need to be converted into a residence, not necessarily rebuilt from scratch. Silly me.
We drove in a zigzag pattern all over the city. I didn’t have a good sense of where we were at any given point because it was pouring rain. But my fantasy of a firehouse located right downtown started fading soon; each one was located farther out and in a more desolate part of the city. The locations were bad enough, but the biggest shock was the state of the firehouses.
By the time we walked through the fourth firehouse, my romantic notions were gone. I was wet, hungry, nauseated, and cold. Even my mom was losing steam. If you lose both of us, it’s never a good thing. The firehouse in the Mt. Elliott section of the city was one I’d had high hopes for as I knew this area and my grandmother had spent the majority of her childhood in an orphanage around the corner. It’s not far from the Detroit River and the setting, I’m sure, was absolutely picturesque eighty years ago. We opened the doors and it was a mess, just like all the others. Trash was piled up in the fire truck bays. The place had been vandalized. The windows were broken out. The walls were bashed in or spray-painted with nasty comments about the new fire commissioner and other choice sayings you wouldn’t want your children to read. The large garage doors were jammed half open, and everything else in the place was in disrepair.
My romantic idea of firehouses was shattered.
I always look past the bad and focus on one good thing. A project just needs one thing to get me inspired: a fireplace mantel, an original sink, even a bit of hardwood flooring. During this whole process, I had focused on the fire pole. I was heartbroken when I learned there were none. No fire poles? They had been deemed obsolete and removed years ago. I told James that had he told me that when I called, I would have stayed home. He said matter-of-factly, “You didn’t ask.” No fire pole, complete devastation, risky chance for resell, and the city still wanted twenty to sixty thousand dollars for a firehouse.
James sensed my defeated spirit and asked if I minded if he took me on a detour. He drove though Brush Park.
“Nicole, forget the firehouses,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. I said earlier that this man had a plan, and he did. He parked in front of the Ransom Gillis mansion, a dilapidated but still beautiful 1800s house with a turret—in other words, my dream home. He took me through the interior and I was in love. Looking back, I realize that James was a great salesman. He saved the best for last, knowing I would leap through the house like a child toward a puppy they didn’t know they were getting.
I started doing the budget in my head, and we discussed the house all the way back to his office. When James finally dropped us at my mom’s car, I told him, “I’ll give it some thought and get back to you.” But I already knew that as much as I loved the Ransom Gillis mansion, at that time, it was a no-go. I love saving old houses, but I’m still a mom who has a family to think about. Paying even a penny for any of these buildings at the time was too much. That wasn’t the last of James or the Ransom Gillis mansion, but I didn’t know that then.
My mom and I decided to have lunch before I flew out. I did the numbers over and over again. My budget wouldn’t work. I was in a panic, to say the least. I had sold Detroit to the network. I couldn’t go home empty- handed. Sometimes, desperation leads to brilliance. And if there was any time I needed it, it was then. I started brainstorming. And just like that, a name popped into my head: Rosie Mackenzie.
Rosie Mackenzie was a fan from Detroit who had written letters, e-mails—I’m pretty sure the birds outside my window were
carrying messages from her: “Nicole, you have to see this house.” I finally called her one day just to say, “No, I’m sorry.” But she managed to win me over with niceness and promised, “I’m not a crazy stalker.”
Now I was desperate, and it just might be Rosie’s lucky day. I frantically searched through my phone and realized I didn’t have her number. I was out of time. I sat there in disbelief. Then I recalled having asked Justin to check out the house if he was ever in the neighborhood. Justin had worked on the Dollar house with me but was now living back in Detroit.
I called Justin and asked, “Any chance you have the number of that woman with the house in Detroit?”
Justin has a habit of making a noise that I can’t quite describe, but it’s a mix between clearing his throat, laughing, and screaming.
“Rosie’s? Nicole, what are you up to? That house is a mess. It has a burned-down house lying on top of it. There’s nothing there.”
“Just give me the number!” I told him. I felt like Nancy Drew finally getting that last clue. I repeated the number out loud and my mom wrote it down on a napkin. I quickly dialed it, and Rosie answered. Later on I would realize what a miracle this was, because Rosie never ever answers her phone. Finally, something was going right.
She couldn’t have sounded more excited when she picked up the phone and found out I was calling her about the house. “I have to be honest, Rosie. I’ll swing by, but I’m not making any promises.” I certainly didn’t want to break this woman’s heart; she had waited almost a year for me to come by, but I knew I had no time and if it wasn’t great, I’d have to walk away. Thankfully, the address she gave me—Campbell Street North—was on the way to the airport. “Make sure you put in the North or you won’t find it,” she warned. I didn’t know the area, but I could still make my flight and see the house; this seemed perfect to me.
Better Than New Page 12
