Mildred Cannady probably will have to leave her Atlantic Street home, despite efforts to convince the mortgage company to restructure her loan payments.

Cannady, one of thousands in the Durham area to be caught in the mortgage crisis, admits she was naive about the home-buying process when she purchased the home for $79,000 in 2001.

It needed significant repairs, some of which Cannady didn't discover until after she bought it.

She went for a small loan to help her pay for the repairs, but she didn't know that the loan actually became a second mortgage on the house.

Cannady, 61, is single and works two jobs to make ends meet. She couldn't afford two mortgage payments.

Angella Coleman, a homeowner counselor with the Durham Affordable Housing Coalition, has tried to help Cannady.

She has contacted Wells Fargo, which holds Cannady's first mortgage, and asked them to give Cannady a fixed-rate mortgage instead of the adjustable rate. Payments on the latter can rise after just a few years.

But as of Thursday morning, Wells Fargo had agreed to let Cannady stay in her house only if she resumed payments under the old structure.

"That's what got me in this mess in the first place," Cannady said.

Cannady, whose predicament was first described in a Durham News story March 29, doesn't want to move because she says her neighbors look out for her and the house is within walking distance of her primary job.

Coleman has sympathy for Cannady. She encourages any first-time homebuyer to take a class offered free by the housing coalition to avoid the same fate.

For one thing, Coleman said, Cannady should have retained her own real-estate agent instead of trusting the ones representing the seller. That might have led to the seller making repairs before Cannady agreed to purchase. The agent also could have advised Cannady on the best type of loan for her.

"She had a bad loan to start with," Coleman said. "Looking at the history there's a lot of things that went wrong with this one."

Cannady is trying to keep her spirits up, but says now she wishes she had never bought the house. She's not sure where she'll move, but dreads the thought of having to live in a bad neighborhood.

"I broke myself in this house," she said.