More and More Women Repair Rehab and Renovate Their Own Homes

Elena is 34 years old, works for a Realtor in midtown St. Louis, and owns two houses that she is rehabbing. I met up with her on a chilly morning last fall, as she was scoping out another house as a possible project. The house was in a northern part of the county populated by older strip malls and middle-income housing. It had been slowly deteriorating over the past twenty years. Now the neighborhood was getting a fresh inflow of immigrant residents from different parts of the globe. There was a Korean couple living on one side of the house we were looking at, and a Bosnian couple on the other side. The house was a two-bedroom brick bungalow in need of some redecorating and repair, but it wasn't a bad deal for the $79,000 asking price, or so Elena was about to find out.

Elena began her inspection by looking at the outside of the house. There were a couple of areas on the front that needed paint, but the brick exterior was in fairly good shape. Out in the back yard we noticed that it was pretty overgrown, so some landscaping work was in order. There was a tree near the house whose roots may eventually cause a problem with the sewer. Inside, there was a nice fireplace in the living room, but the kitchen needed some updating. The furnace and plumbing all seemed to be in good shape, but all of the upstairs rooms would need to be repainted. Elena was interested because her own work crew could do most all of the repairs to the house to get it ready to be flipped without much outside help. The work crew consisted of one person: herself.

Elena was a petite woman, bordering on the slight. With her perky smile and long braided hair, she really didn't fit the typical stereotype of a construction worker or house rehabber at all. Her ford pickup truck was filled with the typical assortment of tools, ladders, and cans of paint, with one slight exception: the bungee cords holding some of the stuff down were hot shades of red, purple, and pink.