THE STORY SO FAR: When Doretha Rease refused to leave her ramshackle home in the inner city, her niece decided to rebuild it, starting a year-long project that would challenge everyone involved.

Elissa Eubanks/AJC (ENLARGE)

Keven Campbell totes tires from the backyard of Doretha Rease's house to a trash bin. Contractors Danny (far left) and Roger Funderburk hire men from a ragtag crew of locals to help with the cleanup. 'It's like an archaeological dig back here,' Danny says.

MAKING IT HOME An elderly Atlanta woman's journey to a new life in her old neighborhood: • Read the complete series! • Chapter 1: Doretha Rease leaves home | Photos • Chapter 2: No honor among thieves | Photos • Chapter 3: Relics of the past brighten suburbs | Photos • Chapter 4: Structural secrets | Photos • Chapter 5: Cops make unexpected visit | Photos • Chapter 6: Memories return home | Photos • Video: Keeping a promise • Video: Renovations a tall task • Video: 'I can't believe it' • Discuss 'Making It Home'!

One morning last winter, the contractors remodeling Doretha Rease's home arrived to find the back door jimmied open and her kitchen appliances gone.

Mrs. Rease had moved out weeks before, and the old fridge and stove she left behind were going to be hauled off anyway. But the incident served notice: This would be no ordinary job.

"I guess we're going to have to pack up our tools at night," Danny Funderburk said as he examined the holes in the door frame where the screws had been yanked loose.

"Yeah, everything goes home," agreed his brother, Roger.

As the barred windows suggested, Mrs. Rease, an 81-year-old former housekeeper, had lived with the threat of break-ins for years at her home in Pittsburgh, a poor neighborhood south of downtown Atlanta. Now that she had gone to live with her niece in Douglasville, her unoccupied house had become a magnet for all manner of roguery.

After dark, one neighbor told her, light flickered from the unfinished basement, which she took as a sign that someone was down there smoking dope.

By day, the house on Smith Street seemed more like the main attraction in a carnival come to town. When Danny and Roger pulled up in their trucks every morning, they felt like pied pipers as a ragtag crew of locals — some homeless, almost all unemployed — followed them to the job site.

Some were just curious. One or two were no doubt scoping out the place for things to steal. Most wanted to do a couple of hours' work, earn a few dollars, maybe bum a cigarette.

Danny and Roger would come to know their troubles as well as the floor plan. One evening, coming under police suspicion themselves, they would get a sense of what it would be like to live on the streets themselves.

"Local talent," the brothers jokingly called them — Tony, Angelo, Antoine and the others who gravitated to their project like ants after sugar. At first, the contractors didn't mind them hanging around; there was a lot of grunt work to be done. But as the job wore on, their patience would fray.

As night fell, they secured the back entrance and fastened a sheet of plywood over the front door, battening down the hatches as though a hurricane were coming. It would be a bother to unscrew it every morning before work. Nothing would come easy on this project.

On a gray, chilly morning, a flatbed truck bellowed down Smith Street carrying a 30-yard trash bin big enough to hold a couple of cars.

"That's the third one we've used so far," Roger said as the metal container banged to the pavement. "I think we're going to need a few more."

It was easy to see why. The backyard was a dump heap of dead gadgets, half-buried box springs, sodden building materials and a seemingly bottomless pile of tires — 173, they later counted — not to mention a collapsed garage. The basement wasn't any better, every dark recess crammed with moldy furniture and miscellaneous salvage.

Mrs. Rease's late husband, Booker, had been an auto mechanic and junkman whose pack-rat tendencies made TV's Fred Sanford look like a professional organizer.

"It's like an archaeological dig back here," Danny grumbled, as he slipped on his heavy gloves and waded into the morass.

While Danny and Roger tossed things into the bin without hesitation, two men from the neighborhood examined each object to see whether it could be reused or sold for scrap. Junk clearly meant something different to people who had little, Roger realized. But he was paying them to work; did they have to be so slow?

As the brothers chiseled away at the yard, they cut contrasting figures.

Roger, 44, stands 6 feet tall and has short, sandy hair flecked with gray and, on this morning, a two-day stubble. He looked like a contractor, with a tool belt strapped around his waist sagging from the weight of a hammer, a heavy-duty tape measure and a pack of Red Man chewing tobacco. He wore a gold wedding band as he worked.

Danny, a year older, is 6-foot-6, slim and craggy-featured, with a shock of thick dark hair. A pack of Marlboro Lights peeked from the pocket of his paint-splattered flannel shirt. He reached for them often, a habit, he later explained, dating to the stressful days after another brother of theirs was murdered in Florida.

The Funderburks come from a large Navy family in Jacksonville. Danny has an artsy bent and moved to Atlanta in the early '90s to start a silk-screening studio. Roger followed and took a construction job. They began their contracting business a decade ago, Roger minding the books while Danny drew the plans. Once they appeared on a home makeover TV show, the H&G channel's "Room to Improve."

Danny hauled another load to the street, pausing as something about the front porch caught his eye: the blue trim. "I wonder if that's haint blue?" he said. "I read about it in Smithsonian. It's supposed to keep bad spirits away."

The Funderburks were as curious about the alien neighborhood they found themselves in as they were about the house. As seen from their trucks, Pittsburgh seemed to be having an argument with itself.

The area looked hollowed out, checkered with vacant lots where bungalows and mill houses had been demolished. But there were also glimmers of change. To the south, the old Crogman school had been converted into lofts. To the north, a public housing project that once festered with drugs and prostitution had been razed for a new apartment complex that looked like something Post Properties would build. In between were a surprising number of renovations and new construction — although a quarter of them were boarded up because of foreclosures and mortgage fraud.

The Funderburks tried to be good neighbors. They befriended the couple who lived next door and suffered the nosy lady across the street. They handled the bothersome stream of panhandlers respectfully but firmly.

Pittsburgh's criminal undercurrent found them anyway.

One afternoon as the contractors were cleaning up, a sometime helper, Tony, streaked into the front yard followed by two men. Roger thought one of them had a gun hidden under his shirt.

Tony ducked behind the contractor and cowered as the men took wild swings.

"Protect me, boss man," he pleaded.

"I don't know what he did," Roger told the pursuers, "but I want you to take this off the property right now."

Then he fixed his angry blue-gray eyes on Tony. "I've got a wife and two children. Don't you ever bring your [mess] to this work site again."

That night, when he returned to his ranch house in Lilburn, Roger decided not to mention the gun.

Last March, on one of the first warm days of spring, Danny and Roger were laying subfloor when the front door opened and a familiar figure appeared.

"Haven't you ever heard of knocking?" Roger called out.

It was Joe Clover, the most persistent of the "local talent" who hovered around the house. He looked much like the others, with his scraggly beard, red, watery eyes and his thrift-shop clothes, but he stood apart in one way: Sometimes he acted like he owned the place.

Joe was a casualty of Pittsburgh. At 53, he had once worked in a warehouse and as a cook, but he had been shot three times — once in front of a store a few blocks away — and his wounds had left him with a bad limp. By his admission, he drank and had not held a job in years. He stayed behind a house down the street, in a barrel-roofed storage shed.

Joe had known the Reases since they moved into Pittsburgh during the early '80s and had done occasional odd jobs for them. After her husband died and Mrs. Rease moved in with her niece, she gave Joe permission to stay in the vacant house when the weather turned frigid. But he didn't slip into the basement and use a soiled mattress, as others did; he went upstairs and slept in her old bed.

When Joe first materialized, Danny didn't know what to make of him. He called Mrs. Rease's niece, Shelvy Davis, who was paying for the renovation with her husband, and asked, "What's the deal with this guy?"

Like her aunt, Shelvy was ambivalent about Joe. She had given him $10 to get cleaned up and offered to drive him to apply for a government ID. She gave him her phone number in Douglasville and didn't object when he used her aunt's address to receive food stamps. But when he started calling and asking for money, Shelvy grew irritated.

Now, as Joe walked down the hall toward the contractors, Danny and Roger reflected their clients' attitude.

"It's looking better around here," Joe began.

No response.

"You got any work for me?"

Danny led him outside to his pickup, where lumber was stacked in the bed. "I'll give you a few dollars if you move some of these two-by-fours."

Joe worked slowly, lifting one or two boards at a time and toting them to the porch with a hobbled gait. After a few minutes, he stopped and approached Danny, who dutifully peeled off a few dollar bills.

"I'll see you tomorrow," Joe said.

The brothers exchanged looks. They knew he would be true to his word.

"I wonder what it would be like to live on $5 a day?" Roger mused as he watched Joe shamble down the street.

Danny lit a cigarette. "I don't know if he gets that much."

After a while, he flicked away the butt and turned to go back to work. But he had something else to get off his chest.

"Mrs. Rease can do whatever she wants when we're finished. But I really hope she doesn't let him stink up her pretty house."

Coming Tuesday

A dangerous neighborhood

is overshadowed by memories

of a loving husband.