THE STORY SO FAR: When Doretha Rease refused to leave her ramshackle home in the inner city, her niece decided to rebuild it. As the contractors started work, they had to navigate a neighborhood teeming with crime and homelessness. The job proved more complicated than anyone had imagined.

Elissa Eubanks/AJC (ENLARGE)

Roger Funderburk, reflected in a bathroom mirror, finishes painting the baseboards in what will be the new guest bathroom in Doretha Rease's house.

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'!

Shelvy Davis had a simple request: "Couldn't the drywall be up?"

Her contractors knew that she had a gaggle of relatives coming to town over the Memorial Day weekend and that she wanted to impress them with some dramatic sign of progress at the house she and her husband were renovating for her great aunt, Doretha Rease.

But the drywall wasn't going to happen. Danny and Roger Funderburk were going to miss their first deadline.

The brothers were running behind schedule because they had underestimated the time it would take to haul off all the junk inside and outside the little house in Pittsburgh, a tough neighborhood near Turner Field.

As he waited for Shelvy and her family to arrive on this Sunday morning, Roger whipped out a pencil and began scribbling numbers on a 2-by-4 that was part of the house's new framework. He calculated the number of trash bins he and Danny had rented, their capacity, the dimensions of the structure, and arrived at a startling conclusion: They had removed 5,400 cubic feet of debris — enough to fill the house halfway to the roof.

Drywall or not, the contractors at least wanted to have the premises looking shipshape for what amounted to a command performance.

So they swept off the front porch, tidied the interior and inspected the grounds for trash lingering from its days as a shade-tree mechanic's scrap yard and auto shop. Danny picked up shards of glass glinting in the sunlight while Roger noticed part of a box spring and yanked it out of the dirt as if it were a rusty worm.

"Make it pretty," Danny said, repeating the instruction Shelvy's aunt had given them when they started the project last winter.

They'd had no idea how difficult that sweet, simple goal would prove.

Structural secrets

In the early stages of the renovation, Shelvy asked the contractors repeatedly why they couldn't just tear down the place and start over.

Danny and Roger reasoned with her. The house was almost a century old. As dedicated preservationists, they wanted to respect its history and build something appropriate for one of Atlanta's oldest black neighborhoods.

But as they plowed into the job, they sometimes wondered whether Shelvy's scorched-earth approach would have been wiser. In their years of working on vintage homes around Atlanta, they had never seen such slipshod construction.

The brothers could tell from looking at the ceiling joists that the house originally had been four rooms with a bathroom added later. But until they started removing the wall paneling, they didn't know about the building's darkest structural secret.

"There aren't any studs!" Danny exclaimed.

Actually, there were some vertical supports, but not nearly as many as the 16-inch interval required by modern codes. Instead, the weight was carried by tongue-in-groove panels. In effect, it was a house of cards.

Everywhere they looked, the legacy of age and irregular construction had to be remedied. The rafters were weak and needed bracing. The flooring was partially rotted and much of it had to be replaced. The only thing that had kept Shelvy's aunt from falling through the kitchen to the basement, it appeared, was eight layers of linoleum and vinyl.

"People say they don't build them like they used to," Danny said. "Well, thank God."

After weeks of hauling off debris, the contractors were finally ready for the coup de grâce. On a sunny afternoon in early May, they prepared to rip off the rooms that Mrs. Rease's husband had added onto the back. They were the last remnants of his painstaking efforts to improve the home.

The addition perched dangerously on 9-foot piers of dry-stacked concrete blocks. Danny and Roger first tried to amputate it by sawing and prying loose every structural connection with the rest of the house. Then they took turns whacking at the support piers with a mallet and a piece of 2-by-4, looking like a couple of lumberjacks attacking a diseased tree.

One corner of the addition tilted but clung to the house by the skin of its siding. When the other corner disengaged, the whole thing broke free and collapsed in a heap of dust and debris that looked like a miniature dynamite implosion.

The brothers were practically high-fiving until it dawned on them that the backyard was again a mountain of wreckage.

"I'll call for another Dumpster," Roger said.

Family inspection

There wasn't any drywall, but at least the house looked orderly when Shelvy and her family drove in from Douglasville on the last Sunday in May. A caravan of vehicles filled Smith Street, and 20 brothers, sisters, cousins and kids piled out, swarming the property and snapping photos.

Shelvy's husband, Marvin, charged into the basement to inspect the joists and the new plumbing. The contractors had recommended using CPVC pipe instead of copper to ward off Pittsburgh's scrap metal thieves. "Copper," Roger had cracked, "is the filet mignon of scrap metals."

Marvin was dubious of using plastic pipes, even if they were less likely to be harvested for drug money, but now that he saw the results, he pronounced himself pleased.

His enthusiasm masked a deep ambivalence he and his wife still felt about the project. Simply put, the numbers were scary.

A decade before, the couple had paid $97,000 for their four-bedroom, three-bath home on a quiet cul-de-sac in Douglasville. Now they were borrowing $146,000 to redo a house that was half the size of theirs and in a precarious intown neighborhood.

Marvin, 42, works as an engineer for Norfolk Southern railroad and has heard the crackle of gunshots as his locomotive idled on the tracks that cut through Pittsburgh. Even so, he thinks the neighborhood has improved, and he'd actually consider living in the house some day.

Not his wife. Shelvy, 38, has seen criminal behavior up close as a Cobb County sheriff's deputy. "I know what crackheads look like," she told Marvin when he mused about living in Pittsburgh, "and some of those people around that house are crackheads."

For the people writing the checks, the Davises had been remarkably willing to leave most of the decisions to their contractors.

As the extended family toured the premises, Danny pulled Shelvy aside for a design consult. "Let me show you these kitchen cabinets," he said, opening a catalog to a reasonably priced oak line. He let her examine the images. "You can take some time to think about it."

"I don't need to think about it," she answered. "You chose. I trust you."

Taking it all in

No one this afternoon was more impressed with the renovation's progress than Shelvy's 81-year-old aunt, Mrs. Rease. Her devotion to her home was the reason for the entire project.

Mrs. Rease wandered around the house with an astonished expression, as if she no longer recognized the place. It had been dark and decaying when she lived there with her husband. Now her niece and these nice white boys were turning their disheveled poverty into something bright and charming. Her wide eyes could barely take it all in.

"You're going to love central air conditioning," Roger said, joining her where she had settled on the front porch.

"We never had no kind of air conditioning," Mrs. Rease said. "It might make me live a little longer."

"It just might," he agreed.

Her mind flashed back to the way it used to be, when she and her husband couldn't afford to fix anything and the scrap inundated them. "I guess," she said, "I won't have to sleep with a bandana around my head anymore."

Roger was puzzled. "Why did you do that?"

"To keep the roaches away."

He didn't know what to say.

When her husband lapsed into his final illness, Mrs. Rease later explained, she had to feed him in bed. The crumbs attracted bugs. One night as she slept, a roach crawled into her ear and nearly drove her crazy with the sound of its thrashing. They had to call 911 and get it extracted at Grady Memorial Hospital's emergency room.

The troubling image of an elderly woman beset by infestation lingered with the contractors after Mrs. Rease and her family left. It reminded Danny of a comment one of their clients made after they finished a job: When you renovate a house, you restore its dignity.

That, they now knew, could apply to the person living in the house as well.

• Coming Thursday: The cops hassle the contractors, the burglar bars go back up and a homeless man plans to move into the renovated house.