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.

Elissa Eubanks/AJC (ENLARGE)

Doretha Rease, in her bedroom at Shelvy's house, prepares for another trip to check the renovation. Her temporary quarters are the best living conditions she has ever known. But they're not home.

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'!

Doretha Rease sank into a folding chair and watched as the door to her past rolled up.

It had been several weeks since she moved out of her dilapidated little house near downtown Atlanta, and she was visiting her belongings in a U-Haul warehouse off I-20. Most of the dusty tables, chairs and chests were hand-me-downs she had gotten when she had a job cleaning a condominium tower on West Peachtree Street.

"Don't tell Auntie," whispered her great niece, Shelvy Davis, who had driven her to the warehouse, "but I think we're going to get rid of most of this and buy her some new things."

While her home was being renovated, Mrs. Rease was living in a downstairs suite at Shelvy's house in Douglasville, enjoying central air and heat and plumbing that actually worked. She spent her days sleeping late and watching soap operas in a den where portraits of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X gazed down on her, as if to say, "Rest easy, sister, you've worked long enough."

For a woman who had grown up in a shack in rural Georgia and resided in a string of substandard apartments and rental houses in Atlanta, her temporary quarters were easily the best living conditions she had ever known in her 81 years.

But they weren't hers. The dingy things in the storage unit — those were hers.

Mrs. Rease spotted some photo albums and flipped through one until she came to a grainy picture of herself as a younger woman. She was standing beside a short, squat man in a fedora and a brown three-piece suit. She stared at his smiling face for a long time.

Why would she leave her new suburban cocoon to return to a mill house in a crime-ridden area of the city?

The photo held the answer.

The man in the three-piece suit was her husband of 57 years, Booker T. Rease, who had died the previous spring, at 86. His widow still carried the program for his "homegoing celebration" folded up in her purse.

When the picture was taken in the 1970s, the couple lived in a rental house in Pittsburgh, a low-income district just south of downtown Atlanta. A few years later, they leased another house in the neighborhood, on Smith Street, for $79 a month and soon bought it — the home now being renovated.

The Reases could barely afford the place. She made little as a housekeeper, and he didn't earn much more as a carpenter and part-time auto mechanic and junk dealer. After he grew too old for physical labor, the couple got by on Social Security and charity — food stamps, soup kitchens, Meals on Wheels.

In his later years, Mr. Rease would putter with his cars or stroll down to the Big 4 Grocery on McDaniel Street to hold forth with some other old men, sipping Coke, dipping snuff and telling stories.

On Saturdays, he stayed home with his wife as she spent the afternoon cooking collards and pig tails and baking a cake. On Sundays, they walked up to the AME church on the corner and attended services. Then she would go home and relax, her husband turning away all would-be visitors with a gentle warning: "She works. She needs her rest."

The Reases never had children together and lived by themselves most of the time. But for a couple of years, Mrs. Rease's daughter stayed with them.

Carolyn was the result of a relationship Mrs. Rease had before she met her husband, while she was still a teenager in South Georgia. Raised by her grandmother, Carolyn followed her mother to Atlanta and got married. But like all too many people Mrs. Rease saw on the streets of Pittsburgh, her daughter had a drinking problem.

It got worse after she was struck by a car and confined to a wheelchair. About a year after the accident, in 2000, Mrs. Rease was summoned to Grady Memorial Hospital and watched as her daughter, just 55, died from cirrhosis of the liver.

The mother silently thanked the Lord for ending her daughter's misery.

Four years later, Mrs. Rease was praying over her husband's sickbed. She had tried to care for him at home, but his cancer and tuberculosis overwhelmed them both. She moved him into a nursing home in northwest Atlanta.

One night in March 2006, the phone rang with the inevitable news.

It was 3 a.m. Feeling compelled to go to the nursing home, Mrs. Rease left the house in a daze and wandered down to McDaniel Street, where she had caught the morning bus for work so many times. Her yard was swamped with her husband's cars, but they were no good to her; she had never gotten a driver's license.

A clerk in an all-night store noticed the frightened-looking woman standing alone on the sidewalk and asked what she was doing out at such an hour. He phoned the police, who took her home and called a cab.

When she reached the nursing home, she touched her husband's body. It was still warm.

Visiting the past

After she moved in with her niece, the best cure for Mrs. Rease's homesickness was to visit her house and check on the renovation.

Shelvy drove her in from Douglasville almost every week. They would stop at a soul food restaurant on University Avenue, where Mrs. Rease usually ordered ox tails, and the woman behind the counter usually asked about how the project was coming along.

Then they would continue to Smith Street to see the men who knew the answer, their contractors, Danny and Roger Funderburk.

One day last March, they found the brothers in the backyard.

"Look what we found," Roger said, presenting an ornate bottle that looked like it once held perfume.

Mrs. Rease giggled. "Oh, that's Georgy Girl. That was my fragrance before Estée Lauder."

Danny pointed at a rusty chain dangling from an upper limb of a pecan tree. "How'd that get up there?"

"My husband," Mrs. Rease said. "He climbed a ladder and put it up there."

The chain was a vestige of the days when he hoisted engine blocks and worked on motors. After his funeral, one of the first calls his widow made was to a salvage yard to haul off the auto carcasses.

Mrs. Rease took a seat on the front porch steps and removed her husband's homegoing program from her purse. It had been exactly a year since he died.

"This was our favorite place," she said. "We'd sit out here on the screened porch, and he'd put his head in my lap and we'd watch wrasslin' on TV. He loved wrasslin'."

She smiled. "This was our heaven."

At times, though, their surroundings were less than heavenly. From her spot on the steps, Mrs. Rease could see where thieves had stolen her husband's toolbox off the porch. Where they had broken into their car. Where they had walked into their yard and carried off one of their dogs. When they tried it again, Mr. Rease ordered them to stop and fired a pistol into the sky.

When she told such stories to Shelvy and her children, they shuddered and said, "Auntie, we don't know how you stood it."

But for Mrs. Rease, the occasional frights of a dangerous neighborhood were overshadowed by happier times. It was the only house she and her husband had ever owned. It was a source of pride, a repository of memories, a refuge in a part of town that could be cold and forbidding.

"When I'm here," she said, putting away his funeral bulletin, "I feel like I'm with him."

• Coming Wednesday: How a home makeover became a matter of restoring dignity.