My neighbor called me at work just after lunch, while I was standing thirty feet up on a scaffold with a heat gun in one hand and a scraper in the other. By the time I drove back to Ohio that night, my parents had “sold” my house to pay off my brother’s gambling debt, my father had called me selfish to my face, and a man named Vinnie had given my family until noon to come up with eighty thousand dollars or my brother would “lose a thumb.”
I should have been shaking. I should have been begging.
Instead, I laughed, pulled out my lawyer’s card, and told my dad calmly, “I hope you like prison, because that power of attorney you used? It was revoked years ago.”
The look on his face was the moment the beam finally snapped. —
Most days, my life is measured in layers of paint and generations of dust.
I restore old houses for a living. The kind of houses that show up in coffee table books and historical society calendars: Queen Annes with turrets, Greek Revivals with sagging porches, Craftsman bungalows someone once thought were too plain to save until I proved them wrong. My job is part surgeon, part detective.
You strip away what’s rotten, brace what matters, and bring a place back to the way it was supposed to be. It’s patient work. Quiet, mostly.
That afternoon I was in Savannah, Georgia, on the third floor of a crumbling 1890s manor, slowly peeling away century-old varnish from an ornate crown molding. The air smelled like warm pine resin and sawdust. My safety goggles were fogged, my T-shirt stuck to my back, and my brain was in that nice, empty zone where the only thing that exists is the next inch of wood in front of you.
Then my phone buzzed against the metal scaffolding. It startled me enough that I almost dropped the heat gun onto the hardwood thirty feet below. I wedged the scraper on the plank, peeled off one glove with my teeth, and fished the phone out of my tool belt.
“Mrs. Jones,” the screen said. My stomach did a weird, cold flip.
Mrs. Jones is the kind of neighbor you don’t take lightly. Seventy-something, white hair in a perfect helmet, floral blouses, and prize-winning hydrangeas along the property line.
She lives in the brick ranch next to my little Craftsman bungalow back in Columbus, Ohio. Four years of living next door, she’d only called me once—to tell me a delivery truck had taken out my mailbox. We have an understanding.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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