Reclaiming an old house that needed power, heat, water, windows, pipes and repairs from basement to attic is a rich source of vivid material for a writer.
So it's natural that Amy Haimerl, entrepreneurship editor at Crain's Detroit Business, has posted words, photos and videos at her blog and on Facebook to chronicle the leap of faith she and husband Karl Kaebnick took by paying $35,000 in June 2013 for a Van Dyke Place home in the West Village area just east of downtown.
Now she has a deal to tell the story in a 2015 book to be titled "Detroit Hustle: Rehabbing a House and Constructing a Life in a Bankrupt City."
A publishing site blurb that Haimerl posted Monday morning says she'll describe "her flight from Brooklyn to Detroit and buying and renovating a historical house in the city that built and lost the American Dream."
Amy Haimerl says that as she and her husband "got to know the people and the community here, we couldn’t imagine a future and home anywhere else."
"The book will be about our search for a place to call home," Haimerl tells Deadline Detroit, referring to her husband of two years. As the subtitle suggests, it's as much about building a relationship with Detroit and each other as it is about new walls, floors, fixtures and appliances.
"Most people wouldn’t put Detroit on their short list, let alone turn down other opportunities to come here," she adds in an email reply to questions. "But as we got to know the people and the community here, we couldn’t imagine a future and home anywhere else.
"So the book will have a lot of reflection on what is happening in the city – challenges and opportunities – and our place in it. But there will also be stories of other Detroiters who have chosen to stay – or who have come anew – and are rehabbing these crazy historical houses. It will also feature reflections on being newlyweds and the past history of [our house]."
The Philadelphia publisher, Running Press, wants the manuscript in just 90 days. "This is really scary," the author tells Deadline. "The idea of writing the book is way better than the reality of now having to write the book – and people reading it."
A preview of sorts is available at The Detroit House, the blog where 52 posts since May 2013 sketch the exhilaration, shocks. costs, frustrations and other realities of a room-by-room, floor-by-floor makeover while living with four pets in a two-story brick property nicknamed Matilda after the song "Waltzing Matilda." (Haimerl explains that the house "was once the home of Arthur Herzog Jr. , who wrote for Billie Holiday. My husband is a jazz pianist by hobby, so that really resonated with him.")
The project tab so far is near $350,000, including purchase price, taxes and insurance, Haimerl posted at this month's one-year mark.
Excerpts from the blog:
June 5, 2014: It’s been a wild ride, both more expensive and more fulfilling than we could have expected. . . . We’ve also gone from starry-eyed dreamers excited about the low cost of living in Detroit to being broke, just like everyone else.
March 20, 2014: We have a little one-room crash pad with a working shower and laundry. So we feel like we’re living large compared to where this project started. To refresh: This time last year Matilda was standing, abandoned and alone, with no power, heat or water. She was down on her luck, a moldering old lady of a house. Today we have heat and can wash our dishes and clothes. She no longer sags. . . .
We bought the house last June, just six weeks before Detroit entered bankruptcy. I suspect we’ll finish this phase of the house about a year later, and just as Detroit is scheduled to emerge from bankruptcy. It’s an interesting set of bookends, kind of like A Year in Provence, but different.
Dec. 27, 2013: When the sun comes down on Dec. 29, we will spend our first night in Matilda. After almost seven months of construction, we’ll finally be residents of Van Dyke Place.We’re so excited. It’s the best Christmas present ever.
May 23, 2013: Did you know that many insurers won’t cover homes in historic districts? Yeah, us either. . . . It will likely cost us 20% more because of the replacement costs associated with being in a regulated area. Joy.
May 5, 2013: We love this old house and we’re okay with an old house. What we don’t want is a new house in an old shell. Yes, we want amenities like, well, water and power, but in terms of needing new perfectly straight walls and Dwell-worthy fixtures, that’s not really us. So now we start exploring who we are aesthetically and what our budget will allow.
May 2, 2013: Karl and I don’t choose to live in places where normal is, well, normal. We choose to live in places where life is actually a little harder, where the traditional paths and methods don’t work, but we get a strong community in return. We get to be a part of something. And yes, we know all the history and stories and hating on Detroit. Whatever. It’s our kind of town. As the saying goes: Detroit hustles harder. So we’re hustling. . . . Now we’re hoping our marriage can survive.
Haimerl, 38, joined Crain's in April 2013. Earlier positions included nearly three years as personal finance editor at CNNMoney.com.
Images from the author's blog in March.
Even before buying a West Village fixer-upper, she was no stranger to gritty work. "I come prepared with my own pair of Carhartt bibs, every grease stain earned in service to my father’s small excavating business," her LinkedIn bio says.
She and Kaebnick, a 42-year-old software engineeer at an Ann Arbor company, previously lived in the Red Hook community of Brooklyn. The couple married in June 2012.
They studied in Ann Arbor in 2012-13 on Knight-Wallace Fellowships.
"At the end of a fellowship year at the University of Michigan," she wrote at Crain's in March, "we had a choice: Go back to our $3,500 a month rent in Red Hook, a neighborhood we loved that had been devastated by Hurricane Sandy, or embark on a new life in Detroit – one with square footage. We chose the latter."
Haimerl's academic focus during the UM sabbatical seems fitting: "Abandoned places and the American dream."
