THIS OLD HOUSE IN CURLEW - 5

In July, 2004, I spent a day in Curlew, Iowa, helping Dave and Karen Dreher prime and paint the old Wilson house they had bought for their retirement. My childhood buddy, Bryan Wilson, had grown up in that house. Bryan was killed in Vietnam. This is part of a report of my day with the Drehers.

How did Dave and Karen end up

with the Wilson house anyway?

Thinking about retirement, they had been looking for a house in the Emmetsburg area as a place to retire to. They looked in Rodman, they looked in Cylinder, they heard about this house in Curlew inadvertently, seeing it on an auction bill. The house had been empty for two years at that point, after the owner, Vi Sampson, moved into an apartment in Emmetsburg. The Drehers made Vi an offer. Vi accepted. A contract was drawn up on a slip of paper, with these words, and the deal was done: "I, Vi Sampson, agree to sell my Curlew house to David and Karen Dreher for X-amount." I don't ask what X-amount equals; it's none of our business.

Why this house?

It is in town rather than out in the country. The tax base is low. The house had a porch. Had nine-foot ceilings. Had big rooms for an old house.

So the Drehers had a house. An old house with surprises like those hardwood floors under the fifty-year-old carpet. The first surprise was that the place needed a new furnace. The old one "was a danger," Dave says. The second surprise? Contractor Rick Albert, who looked at the house for the Drehers, said "You can stick as much money into this house as you want to." The place needed new windows. It needed to be re-insulated. The doors upstairs wouldn't close because the floor had sagged three inches. The chimney was pulling the roof down.

They saved the trim for doors and windows, the woodwork, "but we had to gut the house," the Drehers say. They put nine tons of plaster and lathe into dumpsters. They went at the work in phases.

PHASE 1 - Gut the house.

PHASE 2 - Install new electrical wiring, plumbing, heating, and air conditioning (which the house had never had).

PHASE 3 - Tear off the old porch, put on the new porch, re-roof the house.

PHASE 4 - "Now we are putting in sheetrock, filling voids in the second-floor plaster, painting, finishing the bathroom," the Drehers say. "The next phase - get the trim back on."

They also have to finish the kitchen "and, sometime, build a new garage."

To be continued....