Available for the price of amusement park admission: 25,000-square-foot mansion. Fully renovated. Air conditioned. New sound system and lighting. Friendly, if furry, neighbors. Close to the marsh.

Metro Atlanta’s latest real estate makeover is the old Monster Plantation, Six Flags Over Georgia’s outdated ride, beloved by kids, parents and teens who’ve long made it a junior high tunnel of love.

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Kent D. Johnson/kdjohnson@ajc.com

‘There’s not that much that’s gone. We just added,’ says Gary Goddard, the ex-Disney imagineer whose company designed and built Monster Plantation and did the renovations to Monster Mansion.

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It’s now Monster Mansion — same building, same winding water trail, same cheery, impossibly-stuck-in-your-head music but a new ride.

It opens Saturday. Until then, it’s more like Monster Construction Site or Monster Operating Room. On Monday afternoon, workers in knee-high rubber boots waded through the stream to rewire furry bogeyman backsides and repaint googly eyeballs. Mizzy Scarlett, keeper of the Plantation-turned-Mansion, was there in all her monstrous, pneumatic glory, naked as the day some technician assembled her.

That was back in 1981, after a $3 million investment and a whirlwind nine months of building in the space that had housed the Tales from the Okefenokee ride. Atlanta headlines at the time: gunman holds hostages at federal building. Man suspected in dozens of child murders. The Centers for Disease Control recognizes a rare illness in five gay men in Los Angeles, one that hits only patients with weakened immune systems.

Monsters actually seemed kind of pleasant — especially the animatronic kind. They lived on in the Plantation for 28 years, until last summer, when the park dismantled their home for a much-needed makeover.

They called in Gary Goddard, the ex-Disney imagineer whose company first designed and built Monster Plantation. Since then, Goddard has done major amusement park rides and shows like Deepo’s Undersea 3D Wondershow at the Georgia Aquarium.

Six Flags wouldn’t give the price of the renovation, but Goddard said most of their handiwork held up over time — it just needed some modernization.

“There’s not that much that’s gone. We just added,” Goddard said. “The eagle eyes will go, ‘Oh, what about that one?’ but I don’t think anybody’s going to miss anything.”

Since the ride closed last fall, more than 300 people have worked on its remake. Six Flags brags that it has more interactive 4-D effects than any other — those little touches that engage riders’ senses in real life, not as a simulation on a computer screen.

For the amusement park geeks out there, consider this your spoiler alert.

Riders will sense heat from the monsters’ chili cook-off, an aroma of cinnamon and apples from the pie-eating contest, bubbles at the entry and a few close brushes with water-spouting characters. Riders can sing along or see a photo of themselves. And watch out at the end: one monster has the sniffles.

Mizzy Scarlett’s house got new paint and shutters. Her 100 animatronic friends got 230 yards of new fur, new costumes and smaller, lighter parts to keep them moving for years to come. The AstroTurf is gone, in favor of textured paint. There are new music recordings, backdrops, audio system, lights — mood lights, maybe, for all those awkward first smooches the monsters will witness in the next 30 years.

“It’s like a whole new mansion,” Goddard said, knowing how tough it is to renovate a home people love.

“Except we kept all the things we think people remember.”