WATERVILLE — Laurie Leahy is spending her retirement renovating houses in Waterville. She said it’s because she speaks house.

Having grown up between Vacationland and Dallas, Leahy has always loved central Maine. She wants to protect its history in memory of her grandfather Bob Goode, who she called a pillar of Waterville’s community. And she wants to make Waterville’s houses beautiful.

But even with two Waterville renovations under her belt, she was hesitant to take on a historic home on Nudd Street, which spent 14 years languishing, unloved. Leahy was desperate to save the house, but, overwhelmed, thought it needed more care than she could give it.

In May, Leahy decided to pass on buying 1 Nudd St. with the renovation company she founded with her daughter. Then she woke up from a dream where the house told her it needed a chance to be a home again. She closed on it a few weeks later.

When she bought the property for $75,000, it needed new plumbing, electric, heating, insulation and windows. The junk inside would cost her $4,000 in dump fees and take two weeks to remove.

But Leahy followed her gut, listening to what the house was telling her. She imagined the Nudd Street bannister, which sits just inside the entryway, asking the front door every day whether anyone was coming to save them. She wanted to be the one to do that.

After closing on the house, she flew from Dallas, where she still lives, to Waterville. Seeing the neglected building, Leahy sat on the front steps and sobbed. She didn’t know if she’d be able to fix it.

Then a family of neighbors came to see her. A little boy gave her a fist full of lupines, and told her he knew she’d be able to save the house, which was finished in 1900 and had been falling into disrepair longer than he’d been alive.

“I can tell you speak house,” he said. She knew he was right. Leahy does speak house.

LEAHY’S INSPIRATION

Leahy’s grandfather’s legacy looms large for her. Goode was the manager of Waterville’s Western Union office and was a noted hunter and fisherman in his day. She’s heard many stories that when local children found themselves without a winter coat or sturdy shoes, they went to see Goode.

When he took Leahy to the grocery store as a child, Goode always brought her by the Servants of the Blessed Sacrement convent on Silver Street to donate vegetables from his garden and whatever meat he had from hunting.

“He would say to me, ‘You do good while you’re doing good,'” Leahy said. “He was just such a generous and kind human being, very devoted to the community.”

Seeing Waterville struggle as it lost its mills, Leahy promised herself she would do something to help revitalize the city. When her grandfather’s house on Franklin Street came on the market, she jumped at the chance to remodel it.

It’s her way of helping Waterville thrive.

“If we, as a city, stand behind some of these beautiful houses being restored, if we stand behind making residences that attract people that are going to live in and celebrate this city, to me, that’s another piece of a puzzle,” Leahy said. “There’s no one-size-fits-all answers. I think it takes a village to make Waterville the village that it deserves to be.”

Leahy spent her career working for a venture capital group, assisting in running design-based businesses and working on consumer products, mostly tabletop and housewares. But she’s always had an interest in remodeling homes, and when she retired, she knew that’s how she wanted to spend her time.

She and her daughter Lauren, who Leahy described as her financial and design partner, named their company Goode Works Maine, after Leahy’s grandfather. They plan to do one — or maybe two — renovations per year, using Maine materials and Maine labor wherever possible.

She remodeled her grandparents’ former Franklin Street home — which she rents for part of the year and occupies in the summer — and then took on a bigger challenge with Mount Merici’s former convent on St. Angela’s Way. Ignoring advice to break it into five different units, Leahy transformed the building into a duplex, in the hopes of attracting executives and professionals as renters. That’s exactly what it did.

When the renovation was complete, Leahy said she got an outpouring of love and support from the community. She dedicated the remodel to her mother, who graduated from Mount Merici’s Catholic school.

“She would have been thrilled to see this happen,” Leahy said.

MAKING A HOUSE A HOME

Between the 1,800 miles she travels to get to Waterville regularly and the constant management a renovation takes, Leahy’s partner, Scott Zurlin, said she doesn’t sleep much. But she’s uniquely suited to this kind of work, he said, and it makes her happy.

“She’s really talented. She sees things in pictures in her head,” Zurlin said. “She’s more talented, I would say, than Martha Stewart. She’s just not as well known.”

Leahy lets her personal style into her remodels — she wants them to have character. She spends time antiquing, collecting lamps and decorations, and she’s adamant about preserving the house’s quirks. Like the bannister.

In her version of the house’s story, Leahy imagines that after years of the bannister asking the door if anyone was coming to save them, the door finally saw her team pull up with all the equipment to begin work.

Leahy imagined the door telling the bannister, “Someone’s here.”

“This bannister is going to be very hard to save and its going to be expensive to strip,” Leahy said. “I don’t care. This bannister waited, asking the door if somebody was coming for almost 20 years, it’s staying.”

On Nudd Street, neighbors are constantly stopping by to thank Leahy for saving the house, chatting to Waterville native contractor Craig Shores and admiring its progress on their walks.

Leahy is planning a block party to celebrate the finished house on Dec. 1. She’ll sell it after that, and when she thinks about a family cooking Thanksgiving dinner there, she starts to cry.

She wants the community to be involved in her remodels where they can be, and to celebrate the finished projects with the city that will benefit from them. It’s part of her commitment to Maine, and to her grandparents’ legacy.

“The Mainer spirit could be utilized in many other places in the world,” Leahy said. “So I just wanted to come back and sit at my grandparents’ grave and say, ‘you guys did good, and I’m gonna come back here and do a little good before my time’s up and honor you guys.'”