Better Than New

by Nicole Curtis

  The Campbell Street project, before (left) and after (right).

  I pulled up in front of a 1929 Tudor that was in bad, bad shape. The yard was overgrown, and the house looked like it was about to tumble over. Rosie came bustling up to me as I got out of the car. She was adorable, like everybody’s favorite aunt. She had a big-as-life smile and sparkling eyes. She looked like a young Kathy Bates. She started crying and hugged me.

  “I’m so glad you came. My mom just loved your show. Me too.”

  I asked, “Where’s your mom?”

  With that question, more tears came and I got a sinking feeling.

  When she was able to compose herself, she explained, “She passed away three weeks ago. It was her dream to have you rehab the house. It would have meant everything to her that you came.” And that was it. I felt horrible. Here this woman had been writing to me for a year on behalf of her mother, Dorothy, and I had missed meeting her by three weeks. At that moment, I knew that whether I took on the project or not, I would do whatever I could to ease the burden of the house for Rosie.

  We walked up the cracked walkway to the front door with Rosie talking a mile a minute about how much her mother would have loved to see me there, and how much she wanted me to do the house. Her elderly father, Art, still lived across the street, so she was there daily. Old people and an old house. She was killing me with this stuff. The scene would only have been more complete if she’d had an old rescue dog with cataracts.

  The Campbell Street house exterior with the burned-out neighboring house, before (left) and after (right).

  When I stepped into the living room, my stomach churned. Standing there, I could see that the damage was extensive. The smell was actually a bit refreshing after the stench of the firehouses. Not rotting and horrible, but smoky like a campfire. The house next door had caught fire and fallen onto this one, spreading the flames. Downstairs, just past the dining room, the whole back of the house was missing. Upstairs, most of the roof had been burned away, and what was left needed to be entirely replaced. Almost half the house was gone. Everything that was left intact had twenty layers of soot on it. The plaster walls were streaked where the water from the fire hoses had made its way down.

  At moments like these, I always look for the diamonds in the dirt. The house had flashes of beautiful detailing. There were incredible plaster medallions on the ceilings and wonderfully detailed archways between rooms. The hardwood floors were charred, but they could be revived. The house would need new windows and doors, as it had none, but the bones were still okay. Ten minutes in that house after a long day of disappointment, and I had a good feeling. The truth was, that house—my soon-to-be Campbell house—had a lot of love surrounding it. I felt it and, more important, I needed it.

  The only room that wasn’t burned was the living room, before (left) and after (right).

  “Rosie, I’ve got to get to the airport. But I want you to know, I’m going to figure this out.” I thought she was going to break my bones with the hug she gave me.

  But as soon as I settled into my seat on the plane, my mind started racing. I had just agreed to take on a burned-out wreck of a house from a woman who rightfully anticipated I’d return it to its former glory. Had I done it because I needed to be a hero? I took a deep breath and thought it through. No, I didn’t need to be a hero. I knew that this house was as much a risk as anything else I had seen that day, but the difference was that this one would be a twofer: not only would I save a house, but I’d help Rosie and her family heal from losing their mom.

  By the time I arrived at the dreaded G22 gate at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, I was thinking I was either an adventurous genius or a naive idiot. It didn’t matter either way; I felt relieved that I had something concrete to back up my pitch to the network, and this wasn’t the first time I jumped into something I had no clue about.

  Sarah paints a medallion (left). This is what we call a “Detroit skylight” (right).

  A few years earlier, I kept seeing banners for the Tri-Loppet triathlon. Every day, I would run from my door around the chain of lakes and back. Well, I just told a big fib. Once in a while, I would run the chain of lakes, but most of the time it was simply down around Lake Calhoun and back, which is just under five miles. Most people think Minneapolis and think below-zero temps, but as soon as summer hits, it’s hot. I checked out the race online and was intrigued. It wasn’t a traditional tri where you swim, bike, and run. In this one, you paddle, bike, and run. Why’s that a big deal? I don’t swim so well. I get in the water, and while I appear skilled for thirty seconds, I have never really finessed the art of swimming, and I have a fear of sticking my face under water. So this kind of tri was made for me. I signed up and found a partner to canoe with for the paddle portion.

  The morning of the race, I was up early and I was nervous wondering if I’d be able to complete the race. It was my first triathlon. I had a little coffee for some extra pep and was on my way. When I arrived, I asked for my canoe, and I was told with a shrug by one of the organizers, “We’re out of canoes.” I looked at him and waited. No more words came out of his mouth. Usually when you tell someone something like that, there’s a second part . . . the solution. Instead, he said, “Don’t know what to tell you. We do have kayaks.” A kayak? I had never kayaked, and the kicker was, there wasn’t a double kayak; it was simply a single. So if I wanted to race that day, I was on my own.

  Competing in my first triathlon.

  I carefully slid my rental kayak into the cold, glassy water and watched as it bobbed from side to side, making little ripples. It certainly didn’t look very stable, but I slipped in as gracefully as possible—which is to say, none too gracefully—settled myself, and started paddling. It was a real embrace-your-fear moment. All the things that could go wrong raced through my mind. But I was already sitting in this shaky little boat, and now I was committed. I made my way along slowly, trying to ignore the nasty looks I got from the more experienced paddlers who were passing me left and right. Yes, it may have taken me an hour to cover the picturesque route across Lake Calhoun to Lake of the Isles and on to the shore of Cedar Lake, but I did it. And I wasn’t even the last one to finish! I went on to bike and run the rest of the triathlon, but it was the kayaking that really stuck with me. The part that might have kept me away in the first place is now a favorite pastime of mine. I have my own kayak, and I love going out on the lake at the end of a hectic day. So tackling a burned-out house? No problem.

  That doesn’t mean I wasn’t scared. To be honest, I was terrified. I knew that whatever money I threw into this house, I probably wasn’t going to get back. This was simply a means-to-an-end kind of house. I wanted to go back to Detroit, and this house would be perfect for the show. And in no way, shape, or form was I looking at it as an investment.

  At the time, no one wanted to film in Detroit (unless you were a news station looking for a down-and-out story). But I had discovered that with the network, as with so much in business, it’s always best to present solutions rather than problems. I didn’t tell the network that I’d found a burned-out house in a challenging inner-city area. I didn’t ask them what they thought about bringing a crew to a neighborhood in Detroit. No, instead I sent them an impassioned mission statement in the form of an episode guide entirely thought out from start to finish. I described exactly how these powerful episodes would unfold, what we would shoot for each one, and how the stages would come together. It would be just the greatest thing ever. They didn’t have to do anything but say yes and promote the episodes when I was done.

  Sending the e-mail was easy. The network actually gave the project the green light. Getting everything else planned, however, was a little more difficult.

  Jose would be joining me in Michigan, and Justin was already there. People in Detroit expected trailers to roll in with lights and a production crew. They were sorely disappointed to find out it was jus
t the three of us. As for contractors? We would be starting from scratch.

  Ethan was on board as we spent the summers back and forth between Detroit and Minneapolis anyhow. He wished me good luck but assured me he would not be in Detroit on- site without water, electricity, or even a bathroom in the scorching heat saving a house. No, he would be an hour north hanging with my parents, most likely in the pool with my mom, hiking with my dad, or locked in on Xbox. The little boy who begged to have his own tools was now a teenager. My work was no longer intriguing to him.

  My return to Detroit.

  The priority was to track down the owner of the burned-out house next door to the Campbell Street house, as it was literally lying on top of it and we couldn’t do any work until that house was gone. I had hoped the owner could get somebody to demolish it and cart away the wreckage. But the house was in a kind of bureaucratic limbo. Technically, there was no owner. That mysterious “somebody” I had hoped to find would have to be me.

  The project called for roofers, plasterers, a carpenter, an electrician, a plumber, painters, and more. Unfortunately, it turned out that the biggest challenge of the Campbell Street house wasn’t going to be the work itself. I could figure out how to rebuild a burned structure and repair just about anything. The hardest part was going to be getting the professionals I needed to come to Detroit.

  Even for top dollar, no one wanted any part of driving to Campbell Street. I called everyone I knew, and everyone they knew in Detroit. I was already racing the clock and I hadn’t even found a roofer. I called dozens of companies and couldn’t even get someone to come out and give an estimate.

  One day I was having lunch at Woodbridge Pub and the owner came over to tell me he loved my work. I told him about my project, and he asked me how it was going.

  “If I can ever find a roofer who will work here, I’ll let you know,” I told him.

  “Sammy does roofs,” he said as he disappeared into the kitchen. He came back with Sammy. He was the cook who had just made my lunch. He did roofing on the side, and he had no problem working in the city. He lived in the city. So just like that, I had a roofer. That was all I needed to get my momentum back. Justin and I tracked down another friend we grew up with to do the electrical, and Justin found a plumber and landscapers, which wasn’t even on our list. I didn’t have a budget for landscaping and said, “Why did you find a landscaper? Really, Justin?”

  And with that laugh-scream-clear-the-throat thing, he said, “Relax. The landscaper knew I was working with you and offered to pitch in.” Lynn and Glenn at Four Seasons Garden Center were my first “we love what you are doing and want to be a part of it” company in Detroit. I was on cloud nine.

  For the most part, the project was looking up, but not as far as the weather was concerned. It rained so much, I actually thought about giving up on the house and building an ark instead. Even when it looked like a clear day, we’d just get started on the roof when all of a sudden dark clouds and lightning would move in and there would be yet another downpour. We wouldn’t have enough time to get the tarps back in place. Every time it rained, I watched something else in the house get damaged by the water. It was late June before it finally let up and we could really get moving on the renovation.

  The heat had melted the paint off the walls, but the glorious fixtures and the tile survived—as did the original medicine cabinet and mirror!

  In the meantime, I hired a guy named Ratty to demolish and remove what was left of the house next door. He was in his sixties and was another friend of a friend who told me that when he got done fishing, he would pay a visit. Ratty kept his word and rolled onto Campbell Street with his truck, trailer, and excavator. He got out with his lunch box in one hand and flip phone in the other, and said, pointing at the excavator, “I’m climbing in and won’t climb out for six hours.” He cleared that lot with a determination that I recognized, and I knew Ratty was one of those salt-of-the-earth guys that remind me of Gramps—no bullshit. And when he was done, the house was gone and the lot was cleared, but due to the rain, I was left with a big mud pit.

  During it all, Rosie’s visits to the site kept us focused on what was important and why we were there. She came by the house almost every day and handed out hugs, baklava, chocolate chip cookies, or still-warm donuts. There was never a time when she didn’t show up and start crying, saying how much her mother would have loved what we were doing. The Campbell Street house was, to Rosie, all about her mother.

  Rosie’s dad, Art, would also visit every day. He was a Korean War vet. (We would later renovate his house for season seven.) He brought the same photo album over each morning and told us the same story of his family, the house, and the neighborhood from beginning to end. This kept us grounded, too.

  Lucy peeking out (left). Celebrating our progress (right).

  Getting the roof on was where I really learned about all that needs to be done to correctly repair burned structures. First we had to decide which rafters and wood we could keep. We then cut out the charred parts and “sistered” in new sections alongside the old. We stripped the charred sections, then primed and sealed them. It was a lot of work that would be hidden from view, but if we hadn’t done it, the burned smell would have been in the house forever.

  When the roof was finally finished, I felt incredibly relieved. It was almost July, but with the interior protected, I could get to work on everything that needed to be done inside the house. As I inspected the roof from the backyard, a neighbor came by to see how we were doing on the house. He and I started talking about the neighborhood and about Rosie, and he said, “You should have Rosie show you her gun sometime.”

  The upstairs bedroom was a disaster before (left) and turned into a boy’s room after (right).

  Her gun? “You’re kidding, right?” Rosie was like the neighborhood’s Aunt Bee. Everyone loved her and you couldn’t be around her for fifteen seconds without getting one of her hugs. It didn’t seem possible that she would be carrying a gun. So when she came by that day, I couldn’t help but ask her, “Rosie, are you packing a gun?” Sure enough, she pulled up her jacket to reveal one.

  “Yeah, of course. I’m a federal law enforcement officer.”

  “A federal agent?”

  “No, a federal law enforcement officer,” she told me.

  Here I am, the person who always says, “Don’t you dare judge a book by its cover,” and I had completely done that with Rosie. Just because she came by every day, was emotional about the house, and brought us home-baked treats, I couldn’t imagine she was in law enforcement. One more lesson the house on Campbell Street taught me: Don’t be trapped by your own assumptions.

  That was the way it went with the Campbell Street house. Despite all the challenges, it taught me a lot. At that moment in my life, as I threw myself into everything that needed to be done to rebuild a charred wreck, it felt like parts of my life had burned. The reality of the battle I was in for in Minneapolis was just starting to hit home. Pro-development forces in local government were looking to make me a villain. Developers were pushing back against my efforts, and the local media was taking every opportunity to criticize my work in Minneapolis. The developers would eventually gather friends in Minneapolis City Hall and really come after me. That summer, I could already read the writing on the wall.

  This bedroom looked like something out of a horror film before (left) and became a guest room after (right).

  My passion for what I was doing in life, for the buildings I rehabbed and the people around me, had been flagging. But Campbell Street reignited that passion.

  I knew that with a house that is half burned, you can either tear it all down or you can say, “Hey, I’ve got this good half left, and man, how about those plaster medallions?” I always take an optimistic approach on my houses, so that’s what I was doing with my life. It wasn’t “What’s missing?” It was “What do I have? Let’s build on that.”r />
  In any case, the Campbell Street house didn’t leave me a lot of room to think about what was going on in the rest of my life. It brought a challenge a day. I lost so much time with bad weather that I just had to keep on going forward, making as much progress as possible every day on whatever part of the house I could. I was still scrambling to find the rest of my trades. My friend Kelly would get on the phone each morning, calling companies out of the Yellow Pages, off Craigslist, and anywhere else. By the afternoon, she would have made forty or fifty calls, with not one yes to show for her effort. So I did whatever I could—including getting up on scaffolding and lying on my back hour after hour fixing and painting plasterwork—to keep moving the house toward the finish line.

  Me and Ann Baxter.

  One day, Ann Baxter showed up and introduced herself and said, “I’m here to do your stained glass windows.” I looked up at her, exhausted, and said, “I don’t have a budget for that.” She smiled and said, “I’m here to do your windows, Nicole, and I figured that.” Ann’s love for history and Detroit brought her to me. Throughout the years, Ann and her husband David’s love and support have carried me through many of my projects, and at Campbell Street, Ann’s appearance gave me a jump-start.

  And the road was predictably bumpy. When you’re restoring old houses, you have to be ready for scary surprises. One day I was in the back under a blisteringly hot sun, covered in sweat and dust, working on the small flat roof off the back office space. I was trying to remove it so I could get the new roof on and get started on the inside. Only after I’d peeled off most of the roof did I realize that nobody had ever installed a substructure. There were just layers of tarpaper tacked over the rafters. One wrong step and I would have fallen right through it.