Sitting vacant since the early 2000s, 1507 Washington St. was a long-standing gap in the storefronts on Vicksburg’s main thoroughfare.

Built in the late 1800s, the building has seen several restaurants and a furniture store close up shop, leaving a for sale sign in one of its windows, but it has finally found a new owner in Rachael Walker, a local special education teacher with a flare for fixer uppers.

“My main gig is teaching, but I grew up around it. My dad was a carpenter, so I knew little things. I started building furniture and just kind of went from there,” Walker said. “I lived here when I was a kid and I remember there being one or two places to go downtown, but that was really it. It’s kind of exciting coming down here now and seeing everything coming back.”

After already owning two rental properties and doing renovation work in the past, Walker said she had been looking for a place downtown for some time, but with a teacher’s salary, she was waiting for the right fit.

“It’s just exciting for this side of the street. There’s a lot of vacant on this side,” she said.

Daryl Hollingsworth, Walker’s contractor for the renovation and chair of Vicksburg Main Street Program’s board of directors, has been hard at work removing the extensive termite damage in the building, removing sections of flooring and trying to get the place ready for Walker’s plans. It’s a renovation he called a total gut job.

“It had plywood on the walls and was just covered in termites,” he said.

As for Walker’s plans, “We want to keep as much of the old as we can. I think that’s the reason I work with Daryl is because he’s good at incorporating the old with new. I think that’s what people want in downtown Vicksburg,” she said.

Walker said she aims to make the first floor a store and make a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment on the top floor, a space she hopes to eventually move into by the end of the year.

“For the Christmas parade, I want to be standing on the balcony, and I want everything to finished. I want to watch the parade from the balcony,” she said.

The renovation project will include repairing the roof, increasing the top floor’s ceiling height to 14 feet and re-leveling it so water will drain a different direction, Hollingsworth said.

And that’s just the beginning.

Both floors are currently down to their studs so all the flooring, drywall, cabinets and fixtures needed to make the apartment into a home and the retail space usable are also in the works, he added, along with plans to add French doors onto a front balcony, create a courtyard outback and build a two-car garage behind the building as well.

For all the work Walker has taken on in addition to her position at Vicksburg Intermediate School, she said she hopes to be able to one day use the bottom retail space for a furniture store of her own.

“I don’t think a lot of the furniture stores here sell the kind of furniture I like and appreciate so I think there’s a market here,” she said. “I don’t know if that will transpire. It’s always surprising how much you can take on. You think, ‘I have so much to do.’ But then you take on more stuff and more stuff, yet somehow you still manage.”

Walker said she is ready to see the building cleaned up and come closer to her vision.

“I’m just ready to see it,” she said. “I don’t even care if it has a roof. I just want to see it (cleaned up).”