The blue-tinted windows looked odd, not the facade of your typical Florida house.
As Shaun Carcary cracked the front door of the newly bought investment home in Town 'N Country, the stench knocked him back. Hundreds of cans of food stacked in the house by the former absentee owner had burst and oozed all over the floors.
The blue windows? The panes were teeming with a living, feasting colony of flies.
"It was so bad the rats had died," Carcary said.
Carcary tells the yarn from the safe distance of a couple years, behind the iron-barred windows of his real estate office in a raggedy section of Ybor City.
He runs the region's most successful HomeVestors franchise. You may have seen the company's "We Buy Ugly Houses" billboards and its caveman mascot named Ug.