By twenty-four I had my contractor’s license and a used pickup truck with magnetic panels on the side that read Hayes Restoration & Build. I kept the name deliberately. I had considered something neutral, something with no family history attached to it. But I had decided, after some thought, that I didn’t want to run from the name. I wanted to change what it meant. I wanted to build something solid enough under those four letters that they would eventually describe something completely different from what my father had made of them.
People trusted me because I showed up when I said I would, finished what I started without leaving corners unfinished that I hoped nobody would notice, and treated the men who worked for me as people worth talking to rather than problems to be managed. A retired couple in Bexley hired me to rebuild their back porch after finding me through a county contractor directory, and they recommended me to their realtor when the job was done. The realtor’s name was Sandra, and she introduced me to a real estate investor named Paul who had a portfolio of distressed properties he couldn’t place with any of the contractors he usually worked with.
Water damage. Bad wiring. Structural problems — a collapsing porch, a failed foundation corner, joists that had been compromised by moisture and needed to be sistered before anyone put weight on the floor above. Code violations that had accumulated over years of neglected maintenance. Tax liens. Problem titles. The inventory of things that made a property difficult to sell and easy to bid on at a steep discount if you knew what you were actually looking at.
I took the ugly jobs because most contractors didn’t want them, which meant the margins were better, and because I genuinely liked the problem-solving. A distressed property was a set of nested problems, and solving them in the right order required the kind of thinking I had been doing since I was a teenager trying to plan a life my father didn’t want me to have.