VIDALIA — The weekend is an opportunity for many people to kick back and relax. But when The Dart found Chris Hodges on Azalea Drive, he was working hard.

Hodges was helping a friend who wasn’t able to do the work himself remodel a rent house, and Saturday afternoon he was painting.

“My fiancée actually chose the color,” Hodges said. “My friend just wants it to look good.”

But painting was hardly the first step in the process.

The night before, Hodges and a couple of others had gone to work removing all of the carpet and flooring, working until 2 a.m., he said.

“We just started yanking everything,” he said.

The floors in the residence are currently nothing more than concrete slab, but when Hodges finishes painting, he said he will start installing wood floor in most of the house and ceramic tile in the bathrooms and kitchen.

“Once you put that floor down, you will be surprised how it looks,” he said.

And Hodges isn’t some rank amateur when it comes to fixing up houses.

The former owner of a construction company, he’s flipped a lot of houses in his day.

“Without sitting there and just counting them up, I couldn’t tell you how many houses I’ve done,” he said.

Hodges’ experience showed itself Saturday not only in how carefully he put down a touch-up layer of paint in the house’s hall, but in his tools as well.

His paintbrush, which was still in good shape, nonetheless showed its age with how it bent and bowed under his watchful eye.

“This brush, it’s probably been through every house I’ve been in,” he said.

When he’s done, the residence will be a rental house, and Hodges said the transformation from barren rooms to beautiful house will take approximately two weeks.

“There is still a lot that needs to be done,” he said.