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TV chef Nancy Fuller tours Closer through her rustic upstate New York estate.

Food Network star Nancy Fuller of Farmhouse Rules fame loves collecting antiques, so she just couldn’t resist nabbing a really big one: an upstate New York house that’s hundreds of years old! “[My friend] was doing her genealogy and said, ‘Can you get me into this house? I think my dead relative lived there,’ ” Nancy, 68, tells Closer of the 1766 Georgian brick house attached to a late-17th-century Dutch stone dwelling. But Nancy became the one haunted by it. “No one had been upstairs in one section since 1949, and there was an old newspaper with an ad for Ginsberg grocery store,” she recalls. Her husband, Ginsberg’s Foods business partner David Ginsberg,

71, is the son of the old grocery’s owner. “I thought that might be an omen,” she says with a laugh.

But David, her fourth husband, wasn’t a fan. “I told him I made an offer on it and he went nuts!” she admits. “I said, ‘If you don’t want the house, call the Realtor and tell him. I’m off for a girls’ weekend!’ I got back and they said, ‘David reneged your offer!’ But it ain’t over until the fat lady sings!”

After her banker agreed to give her the money, David finally gave in. “He said, ‘Now I’ve bought you the ultimate antique.’ I

thought, ‘ Yeah, right, you bought it, all right!’ ”

But their marital battle wasn’t over. “After I rebuilt the kitchen area, my wonderful, darling husband wouldn’t live in the 1766 part of the house because it wasn’t comfortable enough for him,” she sighs. So Nancy did what any loving wife would do: “I added on a barn, and that’s where he lives!”

The spacious addition, which is connected to the rest of the house, and whose kitchen was featured in her show, certainly beats the doghouse. It has heated poplar floors and locally sourced pine beams. “When I designed it, I decided that it needed a den area, and David wanted a screened porch, large bath and a good-sized closet,” she says of the barn. “So I went to my trusty graph paper and spent weeks creating these areas within the 1,100-square-foot interior, so it wouldn’t get too close to trees that’ve been here 300 years.”

Nancy, who also loved restoring the connected original dwellings, enlisted an airline pilot friend to build the barn add-on. Now, with five bedrooms, four baths and a combined 6,500 square feet, there’s enough room for the six kids she raised and her 13 grandkids (ages 7 to 17) to visit. “But it’s crowded for Christmas!” she says.

Still, Nancy, who’s getting ready for the new season of Spring Baking Championship, has lived on farms in this Columbia County area of New York her entire life, and she clearly loves their 150-acre estate. “This renovation was such a passion to me,” she says. “You know how you can walk into a place and know if it’s right? This feels right!” — Reporting by Ilyssa Panitz

Catch Nancy on the new season of Spring Baking Championship, debuting March 12 at 9 p.m. ET on Food Network When her kids are in the den, “they’re near me in the kitchen, so I can keep my eye on them and they can keep their eye on me!”

TUNE IN! Her limestone kitchen island has a Wolf stove. “I wanted space next to it to just chop and toss it into the pot!”

When she found it, the house had “one water line, one electric line and all the original 18th century modeling.”

Outside “there are tons of deer, turkeys and a trout stream with great fishing!” “My friends who own Genesee River Trading Company were making these red chairs. I said, ‘I need these [on the porch], but I have a big ass,’ so they made one a couple...