At a timeworn house surrounded by discarded tires and decomposing junk, an elderly woman sat on the porch and watched men haul her furniture to the street.

She wasn't getting evicted. If all went according to plan, she would be getting the home of her dreams.

Elissa Eubanks/AJC (ENLARGE)

A black and white photo of Dorotha Rease and her late husband Booker T.

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'!

At 81, Doretha Rease had spent most her life cleaning other people's places. In her last job before arthritis hobbled her, she vacuumed 24 floors of lobbies and hallways at the Peachtree Towers condominiums in downtown Atlanta. Then she boarded a bus that took her back to her low-rise world, Pittsburgh, a poor neighborhood few outsiders ever see unless they get lost on their way to Turner Field.

Now her piece of that world was about to change. A great-niece had decided to renovate the house after her aunt refused to leave it.

Mrs. Rease's attachment to her dwelling seemed perplexing. The yard was a swamp of scrap, the basement a jumble of rummage, the living quarters decayed to the point that she wouldn't walk to the rear for fear of falling through the rotted floor.

Her environs were little better. Once a stable working-class section, Pittsburgh was a ghost of the neighborhood Mrs. Rease and her late husband had embraced in 1981. Since then, it had lost more than half its population as residents moved out and drugs and prostitution moved in. Four of the five houses she could see from her front porch were vacant. The remnants of plastic baggies littered the sidewalks -- evidence, the police said, of the crack trade.

Most people wouldn't want to be caught after dark in such an area. Few would want to inhabit such a house. But Mrs. Rease wanted to live out her days there, under her own roof, in her own community.

Her insistence on staying in this poor pocket of the city started a yearlong project that would incur a large personal debt for her family, pose unique construction challenges for her contractors and expose tensions in her beloved neighborhood.

In rebuilding an old house in the heart of Atlanta, all the parties would learn, they were giving fresh meaning to the very idea of home.

Mrs. Rease rested her hands on her crook-handled cane and nodded as the men packed a rental truck with her possessions: a scratched chifforobe, a box of eight-track tapes, a lamp with a shade stained by water from a leaky roof.

She wanted to take more, but her niece drew the line.

"Auntie, you don't need to keep all this junk," Shelvy Davis said. "We'll get you whatever you need."

Shelvy planned to move her great-aunt, whom she regards as a surrogate grandmother, into her home in Douglasville while the house was being remodeled. The furnishings would go into a storage facility -- the less they had to move, the better. Besides, who needed 10 TVs that didn't work?

Shelvy and her husband, Marvin, were paying for the renovation. With their steady jobs -- she's a deputy sheriff, he's a railroad engineer -- they figured they could afford another mortgage, despite having four girls to support.

To Shelvy, the project was deeply personal: the fulfillment of a promise she made to her late mother. To the practical Marvin, the renovation represented an investment in turnaround real estate. He stood by that judgment even after a friend saw the place and exclaimed, "Man, that's a crack house! Why y'all doing a crack house?"

No one had to tell the lady on the porch that her house looked rough.

Mrs. Rease, a plump, bespectacled woman who always seems on the verge of a mischievous smile, simply couldn't afford to get her home repaired. As for all the junk, her husband, Booker T. Rease, had been a part-time mechanic and full-time scavenger who believed that everything could be reused.

"He couldn't throw anything away," she told one of the men toting her things.

Joe Clover laughed. He had known Mrs. Rease and her husband for years. He still called her "Mrs. Booker."

One of the neighborhood's many homeless, Joe wore an unkempt beard and tattered clothes and looked altogether as shabby as the house. He had done odd jobs for the couple and seemed friendly enough, but he drank and couldn't hold a regular job. In a way, he reminded Mrs. Rease of another castaway: her daughter.

Joe had his own motives for pitching in. He asked if he could stay in her house after she left and the weather turned cold, and she agreed.

"I'll keep an eye on the place for you," he promised, appointing himself night watchman.

Shelvy looked Joe up and down. That's exactly what she was afraid of: all the eyes that would be watching an empty house.

It isn't the kind of home they usually feature on home makeover shows.

Before the renovation began early last year, the little frame structure on Smith Street looked like a thousand other mill houses in the weathered districts ringing downtown Atlanta. At 1,200 square feet, it was a shoebox of a place, with four rooms on either side of a central hallway leading to a kitchen and bathroom in the back. The exterior had burglar-barred windows and sported a crayon box of fading colors: red, pink and something that might have been yellow at one time. A screened porch ran across the front, with swags of Christmas lights that had been there for several holiday seasons.

"I couldn't bear to take them down," Mrs. Rease explained one day. "My husband put those up."

They were together almost 60 years.

The couple met in Savannah after World War II. They married and moved to Atlanta, where he worked for a home builder and she got a job in a cafeteria. When they weren't eking out a living, they caught R&B shows at the Royal Peacock and movies at Bailey's 81 and wrestling matches at the Municipal Auditorium, where they were relegated to the balcony with the other black folk.

Over the years, they lived in a succession of apartments and rental houses in the inner city. When they were in their 50s, they found their final home in Pittsburgh, one of the oldest black sections of Atlanta. The neighborhood had developed in the late 1800s around railroad repair shops that were so smoky they reminded people of the steel mills of Pennsylvania.

Built in 1908, the house had always been home to working people. City directories list the occupants as porters, barbers, carpenters, laundresses, day laborers. In the early decades, the initial "c" appeared next to their names, for colored.

No one lived there longer than the Reases. They leased the house from a white landlord in 1981 and then bought it for $14,000.

It was in terrible shape but still an improvement for a woman who had grown up in rural south Georgia in a shack with no power or running water. The walls and ceilings of their new home had no insulation, and the only source of heat was a wood stove. The couple slept under four layers of quilts until they could afford gas space heaters.

Using salvaged materials, Mr. Rease nailed thin paneling over the unfinished walls and jerry-rigged additions to the back. Gradually, he and his wife turned it into a home. It was their sanctuary as the neighborhood changed around them.

But the house became too much for them as they aged. The roof sprung leaks. The floors went squishy. The rubbish piled up in the backyard.

Four years ago, Mr. Rease developed cancer and had to go to a nursing home. Before he left, he placed a shotgun by the front door and gave his wife a loaded pistol to keep in the nightstand. If anyone tried to break in, his instructions were clear:

"Shoot first, and ask questions later."

The first time he visited the house, Danny Funderburk noticed a metal plate over Mrs. Rease's bedroom window. It didn't seem like a good omen.

Danny and his younger brother, Roger, had been renovating houses around Atlanta for a decade, but they had never worked in a neighborhood quite like this. Danny was mildly apprehensive. He lived 10 minutes away in Capitol View, a nicer area, and remembered what people told him about Pittsburgh when he moved into his bungalow: "Don't go over there. That's the 'hood."

Their prospective client, Mrs. Rease's great-niece, was even more squeamish.

Growing up in Florida, Shelvy had visited Smith Street on many occasions with her mother. As the house sank into decline, they came to dread it. Once they saw a rat scurry down the hall.

"We have got to do something about Auntie's place," Shelvy's mother vowed.

She never got the chance. In the spring of 2005, she died unexpectedly. As the closest relative, Shelvy felt obligated to carry out her mother's wishes.

After Mr. Rease died in 2006, Shelvy tried to persuade her aunt to stay with her family in Douglasville or to get an apartment in a seniors complex close by. But Mrs. Rease wouldn't budge. Shelvy felt like she had no choice but to fix up the house. She and Marvin figured they could do the job for $60,000.

They called a friend of a friend about a loan, Laura Ferguson, a mortgage broker whose company, New South Lending, specializes in gritty urban areas that show signs of renewal. Laura recommended the Funderburks. She assured the contractors that Pittsburgh was improving.

Danny went to check out the house one evening. Opening the door, he entered the world of the old and the poor: battered furniture, musty air, spent oxygen tanks, a pervasive dimness that made it hard to evaluate the skin and bones of the structure. When he caught his first glimpse of Mrs. Rease, propped on her bed, he thought of Miss Jane Pittman sitting in her cabin in the classic movie about a former slave. He said hello but hesitated at the doorway, not wanting to violate her sanctum.

A few days later, Danny returned to take measurements with his brother, who lives with his family in Gwinnett County and has a decidedly more suburban sensibility. "The owner is going to be there," Danny warned him, "so whatever you do, don't say, 'Oh, my God!' "

As raggedy as the house looked outside, Roger thought it was even worse inside. The ceilings sagged. The floors slanted. The additions looked unsafe.

And that was just what he could see. Who knew what structural surprises lurked in the dark recesses behind the paneling?

Roger held his tongue. But as he unspooled his tape measure, he couldn't help but think: Oh, my God! Danny, what have you gotten us into?

They soon got an inkling. That metal plate in the window? Mr. Rease had put it there after a stray gunshot broke the glass and lodged in the wall over their bed.

Despite the menacing neighborhood, the brothers decided to take the job. They were makeover artists, and this sad little house in a forgotten part of the city promised to be their biggest challenge. In time, they would regard it almost as missionary work.

On a cold, gray morning last January, Danny and Roger arrived in their pickups to start work. Shelvy and her aunt showed up after a while.

"I think we can finish this one in about four months," Danny told them optimistically.

The contract said as much. It specified a finish date of June. The cost: $125,749 -- about twice what Shelvy and Marvin had expected.

As the brothers started cleaning out the interior, they found a portrait of Jesus stuck in a window frame. It was one of those idealized renderings that make Christ look less like a Jewish holy man than a golden-tressed singer-songwriter of the 1970s. Strangely, there was a hole in the forehead, perhaps where a nail had held the picture to the wall.

"It looks like he got shot," Roger said.

Something about the picture tugged at the brothers. They carefully placed it on a mantelpiece next to a copy of the renovation floor plan. Every project needs an angel -- especially in a neighborhood like Pittsburgh.

Shelvy approved. "Maybe people will think twice about stealing anything with Him there," she joked.

As they were getting ready to leave, Shelvy asked her aunt if she had anything to tell the contractors before they started tearing into her home. Perhaps she wanted to preserve some vestige of her husband's handiwork, a piece of her past.

Mrs. Rease just smiled and told them, "Make it pretty."

COMING MONDAY

Before they can make it pretty, Danny and Roger must begin an archaeological dig of a cleanup.