The taxes are paid. The work can start.
A short note on what the first months of owning 7348 Dupont Avenue actually looked like — and why paperwork came before plywood.
We took the keys to 7348 Dupont Avenue at a Joe R. Pyle public auction. The building is 3,399 square feet, single-story, mid-century, set on a quarter-acre lot a few hundred feet from the Kanawha River, fronting U.S. Route 60. From the curb it looks like what it is: a piece of small-business Appalachia that has been waiting on someone to come back for it.
The first thing we did after closing was not construction. It was paperwork.
That is the part of property rehabilitation that doesn’t photograph well — title cleared, county records pulled, parcel reconciled with the Kanawha County assessor, and then, the milestone we mark today: all back taxes paid in full. The lien is gone. The county’s books match ours. The building can now be improved instead of just survived.
For us, this is the order of operations the Marine Corps and the Army both teach. You don’t open a position you can’t sustain. You don’t build on ground you haven’t cleared. The same logic applies to a 3,399 sqft commercial building in East Bank as it does to anything else worth doing — first you take the ground administratively, then you do the work on it.
The next entries in this journal will be about the work itself: the structural assessment, the environmental review, the things we expect to find inside and the things we expect to be surprised by. We’ll publish progress here — quietly, methodically, with the documentation a grant reviewer or a community partner could pick up cold and follow.
For now, the small milestone:
The taxes are paid. The deed is clear. The work can start.