Dorothy DeBose is back home.

The 76-year-old retired phone company employee who was evicted in March from the East Oakland house she inherited from her mother got the keys back on Friday afternoon.

The plywood and “No Trespassing” signs — put on the windows by a property management company that bought the house at auction — are gone.

And the plastic bags into which she had stuffed her clothes when she was given only 10 minutes to move out in March have been hauled back into the Bancroft Avenue house. On Saturday, she went to work pulling weeds in the backyard.

“I was thinking of my place as alien,” said DeBose, chuckling to herself as she sat on her couch on Sunday. “But now, I’m back in it.”

DeBose was living with her nephew, Omar Taylor, in a unit attached to the house. She has an agreement to purchase the house from Community Fund LLC, the San Leandro property-management company that bought it for $347,100 at a foreclosure auction in October.

She had owed $128,000 to Wells Fargo when the bank foreclosed on the property after she fell behind on the mortgage payments following her sister’s death.

Now, she has 120 days to come up with the $420,000 she’ll need to buy back the house she lived in for four decades.

Where’s she going to get the money?

When a house is sold at auction, the foreclosed owner is entitled to the sale surplus above the amount the homeowner owed the bank. In DeBose’s case, that amount was $219,000, but she was unaware of that provision, or that the money was set aside for her, until a few weeks ago. That means she still has to take out a mortgage of more than $200,000, which is $70,000 more than she owed before this financial mess.

To me, this hardly seems like a fair deal.

But it’s the best DeBose could get, according to David Hall, the attorney who represented Taylor as Community Fund tried to evict him. Taylor had a lease with DeBose that established him as a tenant, and it had allowed him to stay in the unit. Because an agreement was reached, a trial to kick him out was averted.

“The alternative is, even if we had gone to trial and won, that wouldn’t have gotten Dorothy in the front unit,” Hall told me. “That would’ve only secured the back unit where Omar was. This settlement got Dorothy back in, which was a huge incentive and that was a high priority for us.”

Together, DeBose and Taylor are paying $3,200 a month to rent the house from Community Fund until the sale goes through. If it does, 75 percent of the paid rent will be credited toward the purchase.

I spent time with DeBose on Sunday. She was chipper, a ball of energy moving between the living room and kitchen. She was much more talkative than when we met the first time, in late March — after she had been evicted. At that time, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, a tenant activist group, was protesting her eviction on the overgrown lawn in front of her house.

On Saturday, the grass was cut.

Back to Gallery Evicted retiree back in her Oakland home, for now 8 1 of 8 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 2 of 8 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 3 of 8 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 4 of 8 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 5 of 8 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 6 of 8 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 7 of 8 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 8 of 8 Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle















DeBose is already back to her old routine of sleeping on the couch. A floral blanket keeps her warm at night.

“I sleep on the couch more than I do my own bed,” she said.

She wants to clean up the place, because she said it looks likes she’s a hoarder. There are stacks of books on shelves and the floor. Same with VHS tapes. And there are tumbleweeds of plastic bags containing who knows what.

“If we had an emergency, and you have to run, what are you going to do with all that stuff,” said DeBose, sitting underneath the keypad for the alarm system Community Fund installed.

“You need to get the necessary stuff apart from the crap,” she said. “I thought I was doing a lot, but when I got up this morning, I could see I was going from one thing to another — no organization.”

She had left a lot behind — medicine, important paperwork, family heirlooms — when she was evicted on March 8 and moved to Taylor’s unit. Both are relieved that she’s back home.

“We’re not where we were,” Taylor said. “Now we’re in a situation where we have to be diligent, we have to be organized. It’s not enough to be here.”

There are still a lot of questions that still need to be addressed, like why DeBose wasn’t notified that she had $219,000 after her home was auctioned by the company Wells Fargo turned to when she fell behind on her mortgage payments.

“My clients never got that letter,” Hall said. “It’s hard to say why they didn’t get that notice, but my understanding is they should’ve gotten some kind of notice, particularly because that’s a fairly large amount of money.”

And get this: A woman in San Bernardino has already made a claim on the money.

The woman, whose middle name is DeBose, also claimed that Dorothy DeBose was dead. According to Taylor, none of DeBose’s family has heard of the woman. Still, Hall sent evidence of Dorothy DeBose’s identity. He hasn’t heard back from the woman’s attorney, and he hopes they don’t take the case to court because that will delay getting the money — and buying back the house.

As I sat with DeBose and Taylor in the living room, an early-evening breeze crept through the open front door. Cars sped past on Bancroft, and a neighbor unloaded tile for a backyard patio. DeBose said she was looking forward to sitting on her steps again.

Life is almost back to normal.

“I’m extremely lucky,” DeBose said. “I’m aware of that.”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr