Amazing Makeover

Dan and Marianne Clauw still remember pulling into the driveway shortly after purchasing their future dream home four years ago and meeting the existing tenants for the first time on a stoop littered with cigarette butts. "You're going to live here?" one of the tenants asked, surprised. It was a derelict rental house on a street near downtown Ann Arbor dominated by young renters, many of them University of Michigan students. Two empty nesters — a medical school professor and a nonprofit manager — may have seemed like an unlikely fit. But the Clauws had big plans to fix up the old house on Lawrence Street in the Old Fourth Ward Historic District. Read the story.