A once-condemned building located at 401 Elm St. in North Lawrence is pictured Friday, March 3, 2017. The owner of the building is holding an open house from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday.

After being condemned late last year, a 150-year-old building in North Lawrence is on the mend, and its owner is planning to hold an open house Sunday to meet with neighbors.

Margretta de Vries, who inherited the building from her father, said she wants people to see that it isn’t a blight on the community.

“We’ve been doing a lot of work on it, responding to the list of things from the condemnation order and getting things done that we want to get done anyway to make it look better,” de Vries said.

De Vries said she is also looking for input on the future of the property. Most recently, the two-story brick and stone building at 401 Elm St. has been a rental property, but in its early years it served several nonresidential uses, including a broom factory and a grocery store. The property is zoned single-family residential, but de Vries said she is looking into more options.

“That’s one of the things that I need to figure out,” she said. “… One of the things I’m looking for is ideas from people in the neighborhood about what they think it could be.”

Special-use permits for residential properties, however, are somewhat limited and include uses such as a day care, cultural center/library and a civic lodge. If the building were to have a commercial use, as it did in the past, it would have to be approved by the city.

The property is one of more than 20,000 rental properties in Lawrence that is covered by the city’s code enforcement program. The building — which had been split into two apartments — was condemned by the city in November for health and safety issues after its sewer line collapsed, and city inspectors subsequently found more than 30 other violations.

After reporting the sewage backup and other maintenance issues, the two families that had been living in the building moved out. Donations from individuals and community groups helped those families pay for hotels and other expenses. Whitney Anderson, a mother of five who lived in the apartment upstairs, said her family received upwards of $4,000 in donations, most of them given anonymously.

“It was mostly people that wouldn’t even mention their names; I don’t even know who these people are. I’ve never seen them,” Anderson said. “They’re just great people from Lawrence, Kansas.”

After the condemnation, Anderson said her family had stayed in a hotel for about a month and then stayed with friends or family as she and her fiance looked for a three- or four-bedroom apartment they could afford.

“We’re still kind of in the same position that we’ve been in since November,” Anderson, who works at a salon downtown, said, but she added that they now have plans to rent a house from a friend in Eudora. “I’m hoping (to move in) within the next six weeks.”

The city lifted the condemnation order Jan. 27, according to Code Enforcement Manager Brian Jimenez.

“We lifted the condemnation because there had been many things that had been taken care of,” Jimenez said. He also noted that after research on the property’s history, they concluded that the structure can only have one living unit. He said the occupancy requirements for the upstairs apartment are nearly completed, apart from some minor things.

The building continues to be vacant, and de Vries said she has “been working steadily through the list” of code violations so that a rental license can be obtained for the upstairs apartment. De Vries said the building’s open house will be from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday.