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“It was a labor of love.”

That’s what The Boardinghouse Apartments Owner Keith Biggs said about the renovation project of the old Biggs Boarding House on South Trammell Street.

Atmore Area Chamber of Commerce officials, friends, family and construction contractors celebrated the new apartments ribbon cutting Aug. 2. There are five units inside the house, which at one point had eight separate rooms. The boarding house served as a hotel for those who had just moved to Atmore, and were looking for permanent accommodations.

Biggs said his earliest recollection of his grandmother, Neoma, was the house.
“This is all I knew,” Biggs said in one of the five units. “She’s kind of like the guiding light of our family.”

Biggs said everybody came to the boarding house to visit, including his nine other siblings.

“They all came to the boarding house,” he said. “It kind of meant a lot to us.”

Biggs said when he was a defense contractor, he did a lot of business with the Poarch Band of Creek Indians and Muskogee Technology. He said he’d drive back and forth in the 1990s while a resident of Fort Walton Beach.

“I was coming up here back and forth, and kept seeing the house, and getting madder and madder,” he said. “And finally, my wife (June), she looked at me and said, ‘you shouldn’t get mad unless you want to do something.’”

From there, Biggs – through some calls – made contact with the owner, who wanted to make a deal for the house.

Biggs purchased the house some three years ago, early in the pandemic.

“After we did that, we had to call in the engineers,” Biggs said. “The old house, we found locations where three separate fires had been set. It was built out of the old hard pine. The house was sound. The structural engineers came and looked at it.”

Biggs said from the moment he purchased the house, he was encouraged to renovate the house for his family.

“If I would’ve passed on and had been capable of doing it, I would’ve felt bad the rest of my life,” he said.

From there, Biggs got hooked up with Triptek Construction LLC, and everything clicked with the local company.

“We made a decision to move forward with them,” he said.

For some 11 months, Triptek Construction worked on the renovation project.

Biggs gave kudos to Triptek for overcoming some obstacles to get to the finished product.

“It was a big undertaking, and those guys did a great job,” he said. “They were able to get over all of the hurdles and get us here.”

The apartments include one and two-bedroom units with kitchen, living/dining room, a bathroom/s and laundry space.

The color and paint scheme, along with the overall look of the units, was completed by June, Biggs said.

“My wife is the input,” he said. “All of our lives, we’ve taken on projects and did things. She told me this was it, that this was the last project. I was resigned with that, but when we finished, she’d already started another one.”

Biggs said they should start leasing the units out within the next couple of weeks.

“A lot of people are applying,” he said.

When asked if there is a special memory of his grandmother he had, Biggs smiled and said that she was never unhappy.

“She was that kind of person,” Biggs said. “She could get disappointed. She tried to stay positive in everything, and always wanted to help people.”