Fred VanWey isn’t afraid of bringing things back from the dead.
As a child, one of his chores, before he could go outside and play, was to do routine repairs around the house.
It wasn’t necessarily some unfair punishment meted out by an overbearing parent.
He was just good at it, whether it was fixing a computer on the fritz. Or a malfunctioning electrical outlet. Or an appliance.
“I don’t know how to explain it,’ he said. “My mind works differently. I could just fix things. And I fix it to where it lasts. I don’t like getting a phone call saying, ‘Well, this happened, or that happened.’”
That experience set the foundation for a career that has spanned everything from pipefitting to managing a grocery store, and now to running his own handyman business in California.
It was that attitude that led VanWey to restore a house at 429 S. Kentucky St. in Iola that as recently as February had been targeted for demolition.
VanWey showed off the resurrected home this week before returning to California, for at least a month or two, as he and his wife decide whether to move to Iola full time.
VANWEY, 41, who lives in Pittsburg, California, runs Fredimar, a handyman business with his wife, Mariluz.
He has several relatives in Iola and this part of the country. His father was from Emporia. His uncle lives in Iola.
The opportunity to live near family is what led the VanWeys to purchase a house on North Walnut Street, and then after seeing an advertisement for an investment property, to buy a second house at 429 S. Kentucky.
What he didn’t know was that the second house had been targeted by the city as potentially “dangerous and unsafe” and not worth saving.
“At the time he bought it, I had just started the (condemnation) process,” Code Enforcement Officer Gregg Hutton explained. “I’d just sent the previous owners a letter.”
Of particular concern was the home’s crumbling foundation, a roof in need of replacement, bad windows, partially gutted interior walls and a missing front porch.
In such cases, the foundation is typically the biggest obstacle to saving a home, Hutton said.
“It’s the hardest to get repaired,” Hutton said. “We have a lot of roofing companies around town, but if you have a bad foundation, getting that fixed is very tough.’
