I ended up doing the majority of it. Me and my sisters and kids ended up
doing the majority of it, what we could in the inside. Now, the roof we
didn't touch. We
Page 26 had somebody that made
a mess, but anyway. We had that person. I had to get a plumber. During
the time that this lady got out of this house, the house was vacant. The
floors in here were like down hill, uphill. They had like run down,
rotted out. They were just—. You would walk in here and it
was like walking downhill. You walk over here it's like
walking uphill, all the way through the house. All the floors had to be
leveled. It was like the guy that was the contractor which was a city,
working for the city at that time. He tore out—. He was doing
the work and we gave him money. In fact, he got about $26,000.
Basically he didn't do anything. He would tell me that code
person say, "Yes it passed." Then I would see another
code person and they said, "No, I didn't say
this." By this time, all the monies was gone. That guy got
fired from the city. He was a contractor with the city. He got fired.
That still left me holding the gun with work to be done. I just got in
here, me and my sister. During that time I was at CATS. I would come
home from work and work on the house, go back to my other house that I
was living in. This was vacant and I lived over on Honduras. I would
come over here on my days off and work all day to the middle of the
night until finally it was just a shell. It didn't have
any—. The heat was good because I had to have a heating
system put in which was too small. It's sitting out on my
front porch, on the side over here. I paid $2500 for a unit
that was too small. Code enforcement said it was too small. I had to end
up going back to get another unit. This time the guy said
let's just get central air while you at it. I said whatever.
That's how I ended up with central air. I wouldn't
have had central air either. It's just been one thing after
another. I fix this, something else breaks down. It's just
like the house is so old. It's settling. Every time it
settles it's something going wrong, always something to fix.
Then when I was remodeling it the old drunks or the drinkers in the
neighborhood, they came over and they stole all of the copper piping. I
didn't
Page 27 know that they had taken the
piping. Then it had aluminum siding on the outside of the house, they
stripped all of the siding off the house one night. I came back and it
was just like who put the holes in the house. There was just holes
everywhere because the wood was decayed. I'm like who did
this. Nobody knew anything but all of the siding was gone. I had to go
out and get somebody to put siding on the house.