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 dig out a mountain of junk and navigate a neighborhood teeming with crime and homelessness. The job proved more complicated than anyone had imagined — and more rewarding.

Elissa Eubanks/AJC (ENLARGE)

Doretha Rease enters her renovated house and is thrilled with what she sees. 'I can't believe it,' she said.

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'!

In the predawn stillness, Pittsburgh seemed as silent as a Monday morning sanctuary.

Shelvy Davis turned the pickup onto Smith Street and pulled up in front of her great aunt's house. After more than a year of work, the renovation was finally finished. It was move-in day, and Shelvy had risen hours before sunrise on a damp December morning thinking of pictures, pillows and towel rings. She wanted everything to be perfect for the woman she called Auntie but regarded as a grandmother.

Stepping onto the porch, Shelvy turned the deadbolt and swung open the heavy metal security grate. Then she unlocked the front door and reached inside to flip on the lights.

Nothing happened.

Oh, no, she thought. Has someone already broken in?

She tried the lights again. Why won't they work?

Shelvy had never liked Pittsburgh, the inner-city neighborhood where her aunt had lived for more than a quarter of a century. She was a Cobb County sheriff's deputy, but it didn't take law enforcement training to detect a whiff of crime in the boarded-up homes and loitering young people she saw whenever she visited.

Last night, when she and her husband had stopped by the house to take care of a few things, Shelvy displayed her feelings plainly after Marvin announced he was going to run out and buy some window shades.

"No," she protested, "don't leave me here alone."

Soon her 81-year-old aunt, Doretha Rease, would be here alone. This morning, it was Shelvy.

When the lights still didn't work, she backed away from the front door and retreated to her pickup, where she had left her service revolver. If someone was inside the house, she wanted to be ready.

Before she went back to inspect, she phoned her husband.

It wasn't burglars, Marvin said; it was the contractors. They had been shutting down the power every night. All she needed to do was hit the master switch.

Relieved, Shelvy turned on the lights and went to work. She was planning to hold a small housewarming party at noon. She had a couple of hours before she had to go back home to Douglasville to pick up her aunt, who had been living with her family for the past year.

Tonight, Mrs. Rease would be sleeping in her own home.

'Welcome home'

The contractors were the first to arrive for the party.

For months, Danny and Roger Funderburk had spent most of their working hours at the house. Built in 1908 as a four-room dwelling without plumbing, it had been improved and modestly expanded over the years, providing shelter for a long line of working people. On the eve of its 100th birthday, the brothers transformed the structure into the vintage charmer it had never been.

Even the name of the paint they chose for the exterior siding seemed to evoke this fictive past — a light green shade called Grandma's Linen.

"This was not a restoration. It was a complete overhaul," said Roger, who figured the only original items left inside the house were the mantels and a reconditioned claw-foot tub.

Those and a portrait they had found after Mrs. Rease moved out: an image of Jesus the brothers had placed in a front room like a talisman. Shelvy bought a frame for it and planned to display it in a prominent location.

It was starting to sprinkle as Shelvy's pickup appeared with the guest of honor, her aunt.

"Welcome home," Danny called out. "Long time coming, wasn't it?"

It had been two months since Mrs. Rease had seen the work-in-progress. Since then, the contractors had finished the kitchen, installed bathroom fixtures and poured a driveway. For a retired housekeeper who had worked most of her life cleaning and cooking for other people, who had never had much herself, it was almost overwhelming to see what had become of her home.

"Oh, wow. Oh, wow," she repeated as she looked around. "I can't believe it. I'm not going to know how to act in a house like this."

She made her way down the hall, past the central air and heat controls that she didn't know how to operate, to the kitchen, where she had no clue how to run the dishwasher.

"Don't worry about all that," Roger assured her. "We'll come back and show you how to work those things. We've still got some touch-up to do."

The contractors had shifted their attention to another renovation in another in-town neighborhood, and they were already sounding oddly nostalgic for the hassles and scrapes of Pittsburgh.

"It's going to be boring compared to this place," Danny said. "We met a lot of colorful people on this job."

He ran through some of them — the street people, the day laborers, the constant procession of panhandlers, one of whom, a woman who called herself Chocolate, got Danny's cellphone number and text-messaged him asking for $5.

He did not mention the menacing stories: the day he and Roger heard gunshots and ran inside the house to hide, or the afternoon someone took a swing at one of their workers, or the night a couple of cops tried to search them for drugs on the front porch.

Fortunately, the contractors were on better terms with the police now. Two officers had befriended them, stopping by to chat during their foot patrol and promising to keep an eye on Mrs. Rease.

A little help

They wouldn't be her only guardian.

"Mrs. Rease," a voice came from the door. "Someone outside wants to see you."

It was Joe Clover, a homeless man who lived down the street in a storage shelter behind another house.

He had known Mrs. Rease for years and made no secret of the fact that he wanted to move into her unfinished basement. "But there's no bathroom down there," Danny and Roger would tell him when he pressed the point. "So?" Joe would answer.

Mrs. Rease wasn't going to let Joe stay down there — "he'd burn us both out!" — but she did have a certain affection for him. He used to run errands for her and do odd jobs. He had promised to look out for the house while she was gone. He drank to excess, true, but so had her daughter, an alcoholic who had died of her addiction.

Mrs. Rease motioned for the ragged man to come into her cozy new home. Upon seeing him, she blurted out, "Go away, Joe!" But she was laughing.

"Welcome back," he said, laughing himself.

When Mrs. Rease moved out more than a year before, Joe had helped haul some of her things to the truck. Now he wanted to help her move back in.

He limped out to the pickup and toted some framed artwork into the house. After a couple of trips, he approached Shelvy in the kitchen, where she was setting out food for the friends and family she had invited over.

"Is there anything else I can do for you?" he asked.

Shelvy shook her head.

Joe mumbled something about needing money.

She reached into her purse and handed him $2 — and a warning.

"Now don't be coming around here drinking," she said.

Joe shrugged his shoulders. As he left, he paused on the steps and looked over the tiny front yard, where the trees had dropped their canopy.

"Someone needs to get up these leaves," he said. "I'll be back."

Alive again

Joe had stacked the artwork in the dining room. Of the several pieces there, only one caught Mrs. Rease's eye: a portrait of her and her late husband.

"I'd like that one in my bedroom," she said.

The house had completely changed in the 21 months since Booker T. Rease died of cancer in a nursing home. All of his junk and salvage autos were gone. The additions he built with his own callused hands had been demolished. Almost all of the couple's furniture had been given away, replaced with new sets Shelvy and Marvin had bought and had delivered the day before.

Mrs. Rease's home — the repository of her fondest memories — barely resembled the place where those memories were made. Yet everywhere she looked, she could see her husband. She could see him in the yard working on cars. She could see him ambling down the hall asking about dinner. She could see him on the porch taking in the evening air.

Mrs. Rease settled into a new sectional sofa next to Laura Ferguson, whose company, New South Lending, had arranged financing for the renovation, and recounted the night her husband passed away. After the nursing home called, she wandered into the street in shock to catch a bus that wouldn't be running at 3 a.m. The police called her a cab so she could go and say goodbye.

At the nursing home, Mrs. Rease continued, a hearse arrived to take the body away. She climbed into a passenger seat and asked the driver to make an unplanned stop first. She wanted to take her husband by the only house they had ever owned.

"I wanted him to see it one last time," she said.

Mrs. Rease looked around the living room. A year before, it had been cluttered with wheelchairs and empty oxygen tanks. Now it had new flooring, new walls, new furniture, a refinished mantel. It was alive again.

"He would love this," she said. "He wanted us to have nice things. We just couldn't afford it."

Laura turned to Mrs. Rease and asked the question everyone had been wondering since the project began. "Are you going to be all right alone?"

She smiled and calmly replied, "I'm not alone."

The housekeeper had come home.