I spent a recent weekday morning in a former Saranac Lake Cure cottage with contractor Shawn Duheme, who had a plan to convert decrepit old Adirondack homes into affordable housing. This pursuit led him to the tax auction, a Mecca for flippers, bottom feeders  and homebuyers looking for a bargain, usually with no idea what they’re getting themselves into.

Shawn’s idea was to act almost like a one-man land bank, fixing up old homes for sale and then using the profit to fund the next purchase. To keep the sale price affordable, he would “subsidize” the sale by curating a YouTube following more or less following his journey and highlighting the pitfalls that these old properties present.

“It didn’t work,” Shawn said. He got hundreds of subscribers, not the hundreds of thousands he needed to achieve critical mass. He was competing with dozens if not hundreds of other DIY programmers — and he was selling a message people didn’t want to hear: These fixer-upper projects are way over the heads and budgets of people without proper training and skill.

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