MANITOU SPRINGS – How are you spending your summer vacation? No doubt you will have more fun and relaxation than Diane Fitzkee.

Her summer break from teaching blind children in the Falcon School District is shaping up like a disaster.

She is bunking with friends while she salvages what’s left of her beloved 135-year-old cottage before having it demolished and rebuilt.

Worse, the experience likely will force her to delay retiring in a few years because of the strain on her finances.

The wrecking crew is coming, even though she absolutely loves the little white house with the maroon trim and white picket fence.

It doesn’t matter that she may lose the flagstone patio she installed. Or that she recently added new hardwood floors and new carpeting, new kitchen cabinets and counters, new windows and even a new roof and water heater.

All the memories and improvements don’t matter because the house is rotting around her – rotting so dramatically that experts warned her to get out before it collapses.

“It’s a bit of a nightmare,” Diane said. “It’s a big mess.”

From outward appearances, the house looks great.

But walk up the driveway, and you’ll see a trench dug by contractors trying to determine why a crack in her bathroom wall was seeping dirt and water. No doubt they were as shocked as I was at what their backhoe revealed:

There is no foundation under the cottage. It was built on railroad ties that rotted away over the last century-plus.

Same for the south wall of the cottage, which backs up to a hillside. Dirt covered the south wall up to the windows.

When exposed by the backhoe, huge gaps existed in the rotted exterior walls, allowing dirt and mud to push against interior walls.

“It explained why the kitchen wall was bulging in and dirt was seeping inside,” Diane said. “I never noticed because it was behind the washer and dryer.”

And it explained why the bathroom wall was cracking, which led to the dramatic discovery a few weeks ago.

“When they came to fix the crack, they opened up the wall and all this dirt and mud came in,” she said. “So they wanted to pour a concrete footer on the foundation and rebuild the wall. Then we discovered there is no foundation.”

Instead of making repairs, Diane is paying to destroy what’s left of the two-bedroom, one-bath home.

Already, the bills are piling up. The price to determine that the house is an uninhabitable mess: $2,500. The estimate just to demolish the house: $15,000. She’s hemorrhaging cash on builders and engineers and architects and asbestos and lead paint inspectors and more.

Then there’s the cost to reshape the lot to allow proper drainage; to pay for all the experts and permits; and to design and build a new house. She doesn’t know how much it will cost, exactly, but it will be a big number with several zeros at the end. And her insurance won’t pay because it wasn’t an accident or natural disaster.

Worse, she still owes $56,000 on the place. And she figures she has invested at least as much as the $107,000 she paid for the home in 1999.

So instead of pursuing plans of retiring in seven years, Diane now expects to keep working indefinitely.

Despite all the misfortune, Diane remains remarkably upbeat.

“I’m trying not to stress out,” she said. “I’m grateful I have a job and a place to stay.”

Her friends say this is typical of the way she approaches life. They use words like “selfless” and “giving” to describe her. And they’ve rallied around her during her crisis.

“I’ve found I have an amazing network of people in my life,” Diane said. “They came in and helped me and are supporting me.”

So, perhaps her house is crumbling, but her life is not.

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Diane Fitzkee of Manitou Springs says she first noticed a small crack in the wall of the bathroom of her East Fountain Place home after heavy rains in May. A contractor she hired to repair the crack found the wooden foundation of her home rotting way. She had to cut utilities and move out of the house three weeks ago. Photographed Monday June 1, 2015. CAROL LAWRENCE/THE GAZETTE

CAROL LAWRENCE,THE GAZETTE

Bill Vogrin – Side Streets

The bathroom of Diane Fitzkee’s bathroom shows the water damage from heavy rains, Monday June 1, 2015. The heavy rains uncovered a rotting foundation in her Manitou Springs home. CAROL LAWRENCE/THE GAZETTE

CAROL LAWRENCE,THE GAZETTE