There’s an Italian farmhouse on the Cheap Houses EU Instagram account that I have my eye on. It has red shutters, stone brickwork and a chicken coop out the back, and while the 1970s interiors are straight out of a horror film, for €65,000 – the price of a deposit on a one-bedroom flat in London – it has potential.
Instagram is full of escapist accounts like this. The largest, with nearly 3 million followers, is Cheap Old Houses, which features historic properties in far-flung parts of America and Europe being sold for less than $100,000. It’s run by Elizabeth Finkelstein, a historic preservationist, and her husband Ethan, who works in digital marketing, who relocated from Brooklyn to upstate New York to a soon-to-be-demolished 18th-century house they bought for $70,000. They want to show that home ownership is possible if you’re willing to get creative with the old and unorthodox: a church, a fishing depot or a historic home in need of restoring to its former glory, in deindustrialised communities in rust-belt America and depopulated regions of rural France and Spain. “The average home price in America is almost half a million dollars right now,” says Elizabeth. “We felt that this was a solution – sort of a hack to the system – to get people in the door, but also to save beautiful old houses.”
Elsewhere, Cheap Houses Japan lists traditional properties with tatami mat flooring and wooden verandas on remote Pacific islands and hillsides; while finds on Cheap Nordic Houses include cookie-cutter cabins in Norway, thatched houses in Denmark and a neo-gothic monastery school in Sweden. But does the rural delight portrayed by these accounts match the reality? And what does it take to renovate these properties? Here’s what happened next for some who took the plunge.
Bea and Mike Francis-MacRae in Momence, Illinois
It was early June 2020 when Bea turned to her husband Mike at home in Potton, Bedfordshire, and jokingly said: “You know, it’s my birthday in a couple of weeks, if you wanted to buy me a house in America.”
They had recently fallen for a white-fronted five-bedroom Italianate property in the small American town of Momence, Illinois, which they had found on the Cheap Old Houses Instagram account. Little did Bea know that Mike had already contacted the real-estate agent and put in a sealed bid of $76,000.
On her birthday, Mike surprised Bea with a red box full of photographs of the house, and the lyrics to their favourite country song: I’ll Name the Dogs by Blake Shelton. The song goes: “You find the spot and I’ll find the money.”
“She thought it was a joke!” Mike exclaims.
A few months later, the couple got the keys to their new home, pushed open the grand double doors, ascended the twisted staircase and looked out at the overgrown acre and a half of land they now owned. “It was absolutely surreal,” says Mike.
“We both felt a bit overwhelmed,” says Bea. “I think it had got a little bit worse from the pictures we’d seen.” The house had sat empty for almost four years, so everything was damp and dusty. “Have we done the right thing?” Mike wondered.
There were scary-looking cracks in the walls, thick 80s carpet throughout and a raccoon problem that they’re still trying to solve, which had left the place a mess. “The smell is really not one you’d want to be familiar with,” says Bea. The racoons chewed the wood to make homes in the walls and ceilings – sometimes they’d die there.
The house was built in the 1860s by Charles Lyman Worcester – a colonel in the civil war – and a prominent farmer. The scale, at 3,688 sq ft, for the price “was just insane”, Bea says. The location was perfect, too: an hour’s drive from Chicago, where Mike’s software company is based; it was near their friends in Illinois and Indiana; and set on the edge of a charming town with a river running through it.
Still living in Bedfordshire, Bea and Mike hope to move in next year – they’ve visited seven times, chronicling the renovations on their Instagram account Making Momence. To restore the old windows and doors back to their former glory – as well as replace the electricity, the water supply, the septic tank and the roof to protect them from the harsh Illinois winters – they’re expecting to spend a total of $200,000.
“We didn’t plan on buying a crumbling mansion,” says Bea. “It was just too perfect to turn down,” adds Mike.
Robert and Kim Sehl in Ebersbach-Neugersdorf, Germany
Once upon a time in a German castle surrounded by mountain peaks and forests, there was a 17th-century knight who started stealing from his king’s subjects. The town grew bored of his thievery, formed an army and tore the whole castle down. Today, its 600-year-old remains can be found in the basement of the Lampelburg hotel in Ebersbach-Neugersdorf in east Germany – the half-timber property Robert and Kim Sehl found on Cheap Old Houses in 2020 for $85,000.
Robert, a 51-year-old contractor with German parents, and his wife, Kim, live in California and hadn’t expected to find their retirement property in Europe for another 10 years. But they were excited by the prospect of opening a pub and restaurant – a lifelong dream – in a town three hours drive from Erfurt, where Robert remembers visiting his grandfather growing up. The building’s history fascinated them, with its stained-glass windows and carved timber ceilings. Downstairs, they found a two-kilometre tunnel that was used to smuggle Jewish people to the church in town, before getting them out of Nazi Germany and into neighbouring Czechoslovakia, less than a 10-minute drive away.
“I pretty much spent everything that I had saved up,” Robert says about buying both the hotel and their nearby home. He’s taken on extra jobs to fund the renovation, putting away between $15,000 to $20,000 each year, and travelling to Germany for a month of DIY each summer. Inside, there’s a single-lane bowling alley, a sprawling dining room and a function room that Robert has earmarked for a darkly lit sports bar.
The works needed were substantial. The roof had leaked, causing some rot in the ceilings, damage to wooden beams and the hardwood floors to buckle. Robert replaced the slate tiles with originals he found in the basement, and he spent last year rewiring the hotel. There was lots of cleaning to do, he says, but most of the work has been cosmetic.
Robert and Kim hope to open the restaurant next year, and move to Germany full-time soon after.
Taki Gold in Salem, Ohio
Taki Gold recently discovered the walls of the old schoolhouse he bought in the former manufacturing town of Salem, Ohio, are filled with asbestos. “I just can’t know that something toxic is in my walls and live in it. So I was like, ‘Everything has to come out,’ and that has been costing the most money,” he says. He estimates he will have to pay $200,000 to have it disposed of professionally.
When the artist first visited the Victorian building that would become his first home in 2022, he was amazed by its grandeur, sprawling over approximately 40,000 square feet. Gold had been looking for homes all over the world but thought the language barrier combined with the move overseas would be too difficult. “I’m a fan of chateaux,” he explains, which is why the former elementary school he bought for $63,500 felt like a dream come true. The double-fronted red brick facade with its white trim reminded him of a European castle.
He liked that it had been a school, too, “because at least it was a place of humans attempting to be good, to give knowledge to kids”. His own childhood was disrupted by the Liberian civil war in the early 90s. His parents had heard rumours of disturbances within the government and travelled to the United States to start a new life. But the war started before they could come back for him. For four war-torn years, he thought he had been abandoned.
He processes the darkness of that period in his vibrant paintings. “When you are without colour or beauty for such a long time and in such a drastic way, for me, as an artist, I kind of create things that I have lacked,” he says. He compares restoring the old school house to “my journey of healing from the wounds of my past”.
It has been difficult work, stripping away everything from the bird and bat skeletons lurking behind the plasterboard walls and old white boards to the cheap flooring and lowered ceilings – not least because of the sheer size of the building. But he’s been lucky to have friends that have volunteered to help. “We’re tearing all the new materials off just to expose the truth of the building, because the truth of the building is the most beautiful,” he says.
Once completed, he hopes to show his work in the space and run community events. Gold is now living between California, where he works, and Ohio, in a renovated outbuilding attached to the school – but he doesn’t have a move-in date yet.
“Even though all this is great, if I had a chance to just buy a chateau that was completed exactly the way I wanted it, I would just buy that,” he says with a laugh. He adds that if money was no object, and a space in California was easier to come by, he’d prefer to make cosmetic changes rather than the overhaul he’s had to do. “You can find growth in a lot of things that are challenging, but if you don’t need to be challenged, I would say don’t do it.”
Dani and Evan Benton on Omishima Island, Japan
Oregon-born Dani and Evan Benton are “essentially camping” in the abandoned inn they bought on Omishima Island, in Japan, 18 months ago. They don’t have hot water yet, so they go down to the public baths in town when they want to have a shower. “It’s adventurous,” says Dani.
They bought an old folk house and a ryokan, a traditional-style Japanese building constructed in the 1940s – as well as two small plots of nearby farmland – after initially seeing the ryokan listed on Cheap Houses Japan for just $18,000. The low price was in part thanks to the yen’s multi-decade low against the US dollar, and also because it had sat empty for 40 years.
Japan has no shortage of vacant homes like the ones the Bentons bought, as its ageing population has shrunk and young people have flocked to the cities. It’s estimated that about 14% of all houses in Japan – approximately 10m in total – have been abandoned. This is largely due to a boom in post-second world war construction, and the subsequent changes to building codes that have decreased their worth over time, with only the land retaining its value. By 2033, the Nomura Research Institute predicts that number could surpass 30% of all houses in the country.
“Both of our houses were full of the former owner’s belongings,” says Dani, whose aesthetic thankfully leans towards the retro. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s just a ton of antiques, vintage things, really cool 40s, 50s, 60s-era stuff.” Once their neighbours saw them restoring the furniture, they started bringing them their old things. “‘It’s been in my house for 50 years,’ they would say. ‘I thought maybe you wanted it?’’’
The plan was to turn one house into an inn, and use the other as their home. The couple applied for a six-month startup business visa when they first arrived in Japan, but to gain a more permanent status, they needed to prove that their business – the Benton Guesthouse – was successful. This meant prioritising the renovation of that building before working on their home.
Omishima Island sits in the middle of a chain of protected islands in the Seto Inland Sea, 30 minutes from Shikoku and Hiroshima. “For us, it was important to be in a rural area that also has a steady flow of tourism,” says Dani, who quickly fell for the calm sea and promise of mild winters on the largest of the Geiyo Islands.
“Evan and I both really enjoyed big-city life for a long time,” adds Dani, a professional photographer who lived in both Portland and Dallas, while Evan, a massage therapist, lived in Tokyo for a year. But after relocating to the outskirts of New Orleans, where they kept an urban farm, growing their own food and keeping bees, the couple decided small-town life was what they wanted as they started trying for a family.
“There’s a lot of older folks here, farmers,” Dani explains about Omishima Island, where 50% of the residents are now 65 and older. “With us doing the honeybees and natural farming, we’ve just been very welcomed by everybody.” While Evan minored in Japanese in college and is fluent, the language barrier has been the greatest hurdle for Dani, who is still learning. “It’s challenging, but it’s not impossible,” she says.
Cristiana Peña and Nick Porter in Granville, New York
When Cristiana Peña first saw a glimpse of a mural beneath the thick, gloopy plaster in the 18th-century church she had bought with her partner Nick Porter, she was excited. What emerged was a beautiful geometric pattern that she hopes they will be able to fully restore one day, using the skills of her friends who studied materials conservation at Columbia University with her. “When you find those kinds of special things, it feels like, OK, all this uncertainty and difficulty – and all the expense – feels really worth it.”
With her background in historic preservation, “an older property was always on the cards for me”, she says. Initially, the pair were looking as close to Brooklyn as possible, having spent the past 15 years there. But with their grad-school debt, and salaries unlikely to quadruple overnight, they were priced out: “Our range got bigger and bigger, and the further we were willing to look, the more interesting the options became.” In the towns in upstate New York, churches were increasingly coming up on the market for adaptive reuse. In the US, between 6,000 and 10,000 churches close each year.
“People think that [preservationists] want things frozen in amber; that we just don’t want anything to change. And that’s not it at all,” says Peña. “The point is to take this building and to learn about it and to understand what makes it so important, and then to keep it being a valuable contributor to your life and its community. For us, it means making this our home so that we can care for it.”
The couple had seen lots of other churches that had the same big hurdles as the one they would end up buying: no plumbing, no heating, huge holes in the roof. Some even required new foundations. “We just couldn’t be the kind of couple that keeps their place in the city and comes up on the weekends,” Peña explains. “It was an all-in kind of proposition for us.” In the end, they paid $99,999 for one with a habitable outbuilding on site.
Because the property hadn’t been lived in, and had a giant hole in the roof, the biggest ticket item was comprehensive mould remediation caused by damp. “The slate roof we have is probably over 150 years old, which is a great run,” says Peña. “There are slates out of whack – you’ll see a little bird shimmy itself underneath into the roof, into the attic – and you’re like, ‘Well, no idea what’s going on in that attic, it can’t be good.’” They’re in the process of installing plumbing, and are hoping that will be completed in spring 2025.
Cristiana works for Circa Old Houses, a marketing platform that allows people to shop for period properties across the US, whose offshoot, Cheap Old Houses, showcases less expensive homes. She fell in love with the building after the latter account’s founder, Elizabeth, sent her the details, and she had asked to look around the place before it was posted on Instagram. Built in 1782, it was the first church in Granville, a small town about an hour and a half from Albany, the state’s capital.
For the couple, it’s definitely been a shock moving away from New York, where shops are open 24/7. But for Cristiana, who grew up in South Dakota, and Nick, who spent his formative years in a suburb in California, it’s not unfamiliar territory. “You just start to adjust,” says Cristiana. “Like, ‘OK, well, I guess if I go get a matcha, I’ll also do these other three errands because I gotta make it worth it,’ you know?”
“Having something that was ours was really attractive to us,” adds Cristiana, about their relocation upstate. “We didn’t want to be lifetime renters.”
• This article was amended on 30 October 2024 to refer to the Benton Guesthouse rather than the Benton Inn; and to note that the Bentons bought one ryokan rather than two as an earlier version said. The other property they bought was a traditional folk house.
