MARSHALL, Va. — Frances and Clarence Corum moved into Frances’s mother’s house when they were married, raised children and retired there.
They drink frosty water from the well out front, simmer beans on an old potbellied iron stove and sit on the front porch, watching deer eat pears off the trees.
It’s home, even though it was never much and has broken down over the years. The toilet is outside. A bad leak in the roof has torn a hole in one ceiling and blistered walls. Duct tape holds windows together, and plastic bags stuffed into cracks around the door serve as insulation. The porch’s roof is held up with leaning two-by-fours. Fauquier County says the two-story, three-bedroom wood-frame house is worth $5,100.
And the bank might take it away: The Corums are behind on their mortgage payments.
Homes at risk of foreclosure dot the Washington region, but something about the Corums led people nearby to say: Not this house. Not here.
A team — led by a banker — wants to repair and save the tumbledown structure.
Laurie MacNaughton, a reverse-mortgage specialist, has assembled volunteers who have almost everything needed to help: A Warrenton church will provide and feed volunteers; college students are ready to pound out repairs; a group in Purcellville will gather leftover building supplies; and a Rotary Club is willing to provide an emergency grant.
They need time, but the Corums are so far behind on their loan that the bank could seize the house.
“No one wants to fix up this home if it’s only going to go to foreclosure,” said MacNaughton, a consultant with MetLife Home Loans, who learned about the couple through a lawyer they sought.
The Corums have been seeking a way to pay the roughly $5,000 that is overdue; they’re trying to sell some of their three-plus acres and lower their bills. MacNaughton’s idea was to find people willing to repair the house and get it into shape for the Corums to qualify for a reverse mortgage, which allows older homeowners to draw off the equity they have built. That income could help keep the couple in their home.
MacNaughton said her “heart sank” when she first saw the Corums’ house; she immediately knew it was too broken-down to qualify for the reverse-mortgage loan. But “it’s tidy as a pin — they clearly have loved this home.”
So she started calling churches. “It’s just a matter of making a phone call and being willing to flap around enough so that the community is aware this is going on in their midst,” she said.
She has done this before. The Thomas family had raised children and grandchildren in its house in the center of Leesburg. Over the years, the house’s plumbing gave out, its wiring frizzled and its toilet sank into a collapsing floor. The walls became blackened with soot from makeshift kerosene heaters, and termites and carpenter ants ate the joists. One bid to haul away rusting junk, piled waist-high in the yard, was $17,000.
Now, a year later, volunteers such as Steve Simons, owner of a few Handyman Matters of Northern Virginia franchises, have almost entirely rebuilt the little house, donating supplies or working evenings and weekends. Nearly a dozen local companies have pitched in, doing the wiring, plumbing, insulation and so on, so that Virginia Thomas can move back into a safe, clean, heated home this spring.
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