The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The cheap old house
Willingness to buy one in need of work can be back door to homeownership.
Debbie Sue and Mark Przybysz’s home, a 100-year-old Craftsman bungalow in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that they bought for $65,000, came with original wood floors, a charming stone porch and a gaping, burned-out hole in the roof. Part of the house had been set ablaze when a previous resident flicked on a lighter near a set of curtains.
In addition to opening the cavity overhead, the fire left dark burn marks on the floor below. Despite the damage, the Przybyszes’ home had massive potential, with beautiful Dutch lap wood siding on a corner lot. So they dove in.
The Przybyszes (pronounced shibish) are part of an enthusiastic minority of Americans who live in a home built more than 100 years ago. It’s a choice that requires an openness to living amid architectural imperfection and a willingness to work on your home, sometimes without end. Buyers of historic properties say they are driven by a passion to preserve history, and they don’t mind shedding some modern amenities to do so.
“She’s old,” Debbie Sue says of her house. “She has withstood years of weather, abuse, expansion, contraction, so many things. I’m not bothered by imperfection. There’s chaos in nature. Imperfection and nature are things we expect, even in our houses.”
Houses constructed more than a century ago account for barely 6% of homes in the United States, according to the market research firm Statista. But interest in relatively cheap, old fixer-uppers has boomed as the cost of newer houses has skyrocketed over the past few years. The median price of homes in the United States rose to $416,100 in 2023 from $322,600 just three years earlier, according to data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Meanwhile, the mortgage interest rate topped 7% this year.
For people who didn’t or couldn’t buy a home before the price boom or while interest rates were low, achieving homeownership — long seen as a cornerstone of the American Dream — seems depressingly out of reach. A willingness to buy an older home in need of work can serve as a backdoor entrance into homeownership, say Elizabeth and Ethan Finkelstein, hosts of “Who’s Afraid of a Cheap Old House?” scheduled to premiere in the spring on HGTV.
“We believe that you’re being sold the wrong American Dream,” they write in their forthcoming book, “Cheap Old Houses: An Unconventional Guide to Loving and Restoring a Forgotten Home.” “For many of us, the trade-off for acquiring these homes is living beyond our means and accepting soul-crushing debt, not to mention contributing to the overabundance of waste that comes from accumulating everything shiny and new . ... It doesn’t have to be this way.”
St. Elmo district
The Przybyszes’ house is in St. Elmo, a designated Local Historic District that dates to the 1870s. Perched on the eastern slope of Lookout Mountain, the neighborhood boasts a collection of cute, but aging cottages, Gothic Revivals and Tudors. Stone churches and stately Queen Anne-style homes preside over the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, St. Elmo Avenue, which abuts the Tennessee-Georgia state line.
After decades of wear — and a nasty infestation of bedbugs — the Przybyszes’ house needed work, so they christened it “Casa Del Fuego,” then went about restoring it. They sanded and sealed the old wood. They didn’t mind that some of the planks still had black char marks from the fire; the imperfections were a part of the house’s history.
“Casa del Fuego is telling her story here,” Debbie Sue says of the discoloration. The bathroom, where past owners had
poured concrete with a metal mesh, required a jackhammer to remove and replace. The paint on the walls was made of lead. They also learned that a nearby underground spring regularly dumped a small lake of water into the basement whenever it rained — which it did, a lot, in southern Tennessee. The house got an updated nickname: Casa Del Fuego ... Y Agua.
It wasn’t the first home the Przybyszes had bought in St. Elmo, a neighborhood that at the time was suffering from decades of neglect. They had already flipped a handful of cheap properties in the area, but they planned to make Casa Del Fuego their home. On her days off from her nursing job, Debbie Sue had kept her eye open for deals. A neighbor sold them a house for $75,000, which they bought as a rental investment. A home appeared on Craigslist for $18,000, then a foreclosure popped up for $28,000 and another for $21,000. They scooped them all up. The houses were a mess. Black mold crept along the walls and ceilings; water damage warped the floors. But Debbie Sue, who quit her job to become a full-time general contractor and real estate agent, brought them back to life.
Remodeling old houses comes with challenges. The floors aren’t always level: Drop a marble and it might roll to the other end of the room. In another house that the Przybyszes worked on, “a gallon of roach eggs poured out” when they tried to remove an old door. Often the houses are built with toxic chemicals, such as asbestos. “I’ve probably shaved years off of my life working on old houses because of the exposure,” Debbie Sue says.
Online community
Old home aficionados like the Przybyszes have also found
a thriving online community where homeowners share photos of their house projects and dream of buying a charming fixer upper. The Instagram real estate powerhouse account @ CheapOldHouses, for example, operated by the Finkelsteins since 2016, serves as a home base for millions of people dreaming of living in something with a little more character.
In the beginning, the feed featured listings of houses that cost under $100,000 — they’ve steadily increased the threshold over time because of inflation — that were at least 100 years old. Posts featured charming historic homes from across the country, some decrepit and in need of desperate amounts of TLC and others that were surprisingly turnkey for the price.
On a social media platform with a reputation for content featuring manufactured photos of unattainable perfection, @CheapOldHouses bucks the trend by showing the before photos, giving viewers a chance to imagine a home’s potential. And people can’t get enough of it: The feed has nearly 2.5 million followers.
The houses that the Finkelsteins feature range from abandoned castlelike homes that
require a full gutting to beautiful cottages that are cheap because of their size and location. For example, they shared a 15,000-square-foot Neoclassical palace in Orange, Massachusetts, that was on the market for just $150,000. Then there was a $15,000 Victorian — but if you want it, you have to cut the house into two pieces and ship it out of downtown Austin. Or perhaps you’d be interested in a Greek Revival farmhouse in Colon, Michigan, with 600 bats occupying the attic?
While scouring the web for old house deals to post on Instagram, the Finkelsteins were also searching for their own dream house. After four years of posting houses for other people, they came across something for themselves. In 2020, the couple bought an uninhabitable farmhouse in upstate New York for $71,000. Tucked into 11 acres of wooded land, the structure, little more than a gutted shell, was close to falling down and needed to be raised from its original foundations.
“It was really, really bad,” Elizabeth says. “But it had so much soul.”
They removed the wood siding, refurbished it, then put it back on the house. Walls that had been shifted over the centuries were put back in their original locations. They kept the slate roof, excavated the land around the house and reinstalled internal chimneys. Instead of buying new furniture and materials, they’re taking their time to find used items whenever possible. When a contractor working on a house nearby was about to throw out a set of Victorian bathroom fixtures, the Finkelsteins jumped at the opportunity to give them a new home.
Three years later, they’re still working on the farmhouse while they live in a “newer” home that also predates the Civil War. “It’s cheaper to take it slow,” Elizabeth says.
As charming as the photos and descriptions can seem — who hasn’t dreamed of living in a castle? — old houses have drawbacks. Insulation can be minimal, making it difficult to regulate temperatures; and these homes are massive consumers of energy. The walls and ceilings could be full of things that are toxic, and ancient wiring can be finicky. Mold can be difficult to contain.
“Nobody is naive enough to look at a lot of these houses and think that they don’t need work,” Elizabeth says. “Our audience can read between the lines and know what they’re getting into. There’s a huge decrepit mansion in a field in Illinois. That’s going to take a different type of person.”
High demand
Like all things real estate, buying and restoring old houses has become more expensive in recent years, given the increase of the cost of materials and the scarcity of skilled labor. One couple featured in the Finkelsteins’ book who bought an abandoned manor along Route 66 in Illinois founded a nonprofit foundation to help cover the costs of upkeep.
While many buyers with do-it-yourself attitudes can save money, bringing in help can save plenty of hassle. But hiring a contractor to work on historic properties often isn’t easy, says Scott T. Hanson, an architectural historian and preservation consultant.
“Most architecture schools do not teach historic preservation, and the majority of registered architects have no understanding of traditional construction methods and materials,” Hanson wrote in “Restoring Your Historic House.” “One clueless human with a power tool can do a lot of damage quickly to a historic house.”
And these days, even the “cheap old house” market has gotten competitive. The Finkelsteins have found in the past few years that they must post listings as fast as possible if they want to feature them before they’re sold.
“They pop up on the market, and they’re gone in like five minutes,” Elizabeth says.
The change in attitude has even altered Chattanooga’s St. Elmo neighborhood, where the bargain prices the Przybyszes once enjoyed are long gone. Houses there sell quickly, including some for more than half a million dollars, an amount unheard of before the pandemic. Many of the homeowners who lived in the neighborhood for generations are gone, and so are the college students who once rented there. A real estate agent recently called Debbie Sue with a client who wanted to build a house in the neighborhood for as high as $1.3 million.
“The vibe of St. Elmo has changed tremendously,” Debbie Sue says. “I have Catholic guilt.”