Cheap Old Houses | Elizabeth and Ethan Finkelstein
Intro: Welcome to the one and only interior design book podcast, Decorating by the Book, hosted by Suzy Chase from her dining room table in New York City. Join Suzy for conversations about the latest and greatest interior design books with the authors who wrote them.
Elizabeth Finkestein: We are Elizabeth and Ethan Finkelstein and we are the authors of Cheap Old Houses: An Unconventional Guide to Loving and Restoring a Forgotten Home.
Suzy Chase: When I found the Cheap Old Houses Instagram account and the website about five years ago, I thought I'd found my people and my homes. Growing up in Kansas, my mom was a real estate agent and senior year of high school I started answering the phones at her real estate office. So back then there was an MLS book, a big thick book with all the homes for sale in Kansas City, and I would always flip through to find the oldest and cheapest homes that needed the most love and dream about what I would do with these homes to revitalize them. Could you just chat a little bit about what spawned your love of cheap old homes or just old homes in general and give a little overview of the concept of Cheap Old Houses for people who may not be familiar, which aren't that many because your Instagram has nearly 2.5 million followers. You have a super popular newsletter and you have a series on HGTV, so anyhoo.
Elizabeth Finkestein: Oh, I love that story of your childhood. That's so heartwarming and also goes to show really how much real estate and gosh, so many industries have really changed so much in not that short a time period. So Cheap Old Houses at its heart, what we started as is we started posting houses for sale that were beautiful, historical and full of character all around the country for under a hundred thousand dollars. It has grown into so much more than that. I think we had started posting these homes just to get them out there in the world and then people started buying them and people started sharing their journey. So it's really kind of come very full circle, very much at a time when people in this country, especially our generation, the Instagram generation feels very left out of the home buying market. They're priced out and it seems to be a pipe dream. It's really turned into so much more than just an Instagram feed.
Ethan Finkelstein: I think more and more we have been, for the past six years, we've been inspiring people to buy a cheap old house and find it, and then it came to fruition that so many people started actually purchasing these houses that we were posting on Instagram and it really started to lead us down like how do we want to structure this thing, this amorphous thing that we've created? And that turned into an HGTV show and it's now turned into this book and we have newsletters and we're working a little bit to kind of create this sort of semi lifestyle brand around how do you fix up these houses and how do we show people how to do it? So this book is really focused on one of the first forays for us into this lifestyle world beyond just real estate and showing people how to take a cheap old house and make it your own and make it a fantastic space. So it's really stepping into the interior design world a little bit and showing people a different way.
Suzy Chase: So when you first started the Instagram, was it more aspirational and then you were totally surprised when people started buying these places?
Elizabeth Finkestein: I think we are both shocked that we have as many followers as we do. That number is very overwhelming for us, but the idea that so many people latched onto it, I don't think is that much of a surprise. I think that we were in a way our own target audience. We were living in a city, a very overpriced city for a while. Then we were living outside a very overpriced city for a while, so it was still very overpriced and I think we in a way we're looking for our version of the American Dream, which was to find a beautiful old home that we could restore and that we could actually afford and that we could actually attain. It really felt like a very natural coming out of us. I mean, yes, I have a background in historic preservation. I actually have a graduate degree in that. I worked for many years in that field. So I think we come at this. And Ethan comes from a digital marketing world, so it really was the coming together of these forces to be able to create something that we just very much felt was speaking to a generation that wasn't really being spoken to when it came to what people want in homes and how people can actually have them.
Suzy Chase: So that leads me to this part in the book that you wrote. You wrote, "This is a story of a counterculture and a rallying cry to you, dear reader, to fall with us down the rabbit hole of Cheap Old Houses. There you'll meet people who have looked past commodities we are so often told will make us happier. Newer, shinier, and more expensive things. The houses featured in this book are from all across our country, were bought with only a few exceptions for less than $150,000 and have largely been restored or kept in their original states." Now, how did you narrow it down to these homes and talk a little bit about how the book's organized.
Ethan Finkelstelstein We came up with this concept about especially dream and what is our dreams and what do we kind of find the categorical sense of what people's dreams are for cheap old houses. So the book is categorized into cheap old farmhouses, which is our dream, and we're pursuing that dream. And cheap old mansions, which is just massive structures upwards of almost 10,000 square feet for under $150,000. And then unconventional homes, I think everyone has a dream of finding something different. I think our feed and to the people who follow us are extremely creative people and so they want something that is not cookie cutter, that is not something that is anything like anyone else has. So to live in a schoolhouse, to live in an old bank, to live in an old prison, there's so many, we've just posted a silo for under $50,000. It has no windows, but people kind of online were joking about it becoming their supervillain's lair. I think that's kind of a big dream is these unconventional homes.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: There's so many sort of ways you can jump on this train, whether you just love old houses and you're sort of an architecture nerd, or you are really just need an affordable place to live, or you're a part of this very design savvy younger generation who wants something creative and interesting, or you're looking to get off the grid, or you're looking to move to the center of sort of under the radar city where you feel you can be part of a community or something, or you've always had a dream to live in an old church. I mean, there's so many ways to go about this, but we think at the end of the day this is very much about aspiration and very much about escapism. And so we organized our book very much along those lines, whether your dream is to get off the grid and go get a farmhouse or your dream is to live in some quirky place, all of the people who follow Cheap Old Houses tend to have a very creative vision of life. We have a lot of artists, poets, writers, actors-
Ethan Finkelstelstein: Musicians.
Elizabeth Finke...: ... not surprisingly. Musicians, yeah. People who can just sort of see the potential in things that other people can't. So really I think the table of contents is just organized by dream.
Suzy Chase: So you believe that we're being sold the wrong American Dream. I'm so curious about that.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: Look, if the American Dream as it relates to home ownership is that everybody should be entitled to it, then I think the fact that nobody can afford a home right now is a major problem. So the American Dream needs to be redefined a little bit if we're to continue down this path, but also the route to the American Dream that we're told is to fall into extreme debt. By the time people even have the option to buy an old house in this country, you're already generally drowning in student loan debt. So there's that. And then you got to buy a car with a loan and then you need a house and then you need a big mortgage and then all the things that just compound and compound and compound. And I think what our book has attempted to do and I think does quite successfully is show two dozen people who have done it a little bit differently and are really happy.
Ethan Finkelstelstein: I think beyond just the kind of doing it in an affordable way and redefining that way, I think there's a massive push for new, new, new for everything. I think in the design world specifically, always gutting and newer is better. And our approach is really looking at what we can use sustainably for our future generations, whether that's the building, whether that's pieces of the building, whether that's fixtures that are also in the house. I think always starting from a place of the house's history and then moving down beyond. We like new sofas just as much as everyone else and I think they deserve a place in every home. But I think getting creative and showing people how to be creative with vintage, antique and used items I think is maybe a little bit underrepresented in the design industry because we're sold very new, new, new things. But I think the ecological perspective of this is a huge one. It's just a sustainability practice of not just throwing away things. So we're talking about saving money with antique things, we're talking about sustainability. These are all under subtexts, for sure, in the book.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: Yeah, the idea that you only have an entry point into the world of design if you have the money to afford all the things, all the latest trends, all the latest kitchen designers, whatever it is, is something we wholeheartedly reject. Someone just wrote an Amazon review of the book that just made us cry, that was just talking about how this is a book of real people doing very extraordinary things with their own homes and out of their own imaginations. And I think our book is every bit as beautiful and aspirational as a very expensive designer's portfolio and it has so much incredible soul and I think for that we're so proud of it.
Suzy Chase: So an example of something diverse and different is on page 246 with Ashley and Caleb, and they bought the little red schoolhouse in Michigan. Would you tell us that unique story with a crazy family connection?
Elizabeth Finkelstein: If we post a schoolhouse, it just immediately goes viral. There is something, I think the Cheap Old Houses really is such a uniquely American thing. We have really, and it started with a focus on old houses, but really has come to teach Ethan and me so much about so many places in this country that never are on people's radars, but that have a wealth of beautiful homes that have been so overlooked, maybe because there used to be a thriving industry there that has since left, but consequently because there was a thriving industry there at one point, these homes are left just beautiful and waiting to be rediscovered.
So Ashley and Caleb own such a place, it's a little red schoolhouse that they purchased. It was actually one of two buildings on the property. There was a house and this schoolhouse and they really fell in love with the schoolhouse and have been fixing it up and I think have really honored the history of this place and I think are such a good example of how to take a place that was kind of an unconventional space, like wouldn't have a kitchen or anything like that, really bring those things in, but really make it still feel like it has all the character of the original space.
Suzy Chase: Wasn't there some family connection to this schoolhouse?
Elizabeth Finkelstein: Oh yes. She found out that her second cousin used to teach at the schoolhouse 85 years ago.
Suzy Chase: That's crazy. And she didn't know that before?
Elizabeth Finkelstein: I don't think she did. No.
Suzy Chase: Oh wow.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: This is kind of something that a lot of times one of the really fun things is that when you start restoring one of these unconventional spaces, you realize that it's not just your house, but that a lot of people in the community feel that it belongs to them as well. And so people start stopping by and people start sharing stories. So we do find with a lot of these unconventional spaces that the community starts this outpouring of... Because I think with a typical house, maybe three families have lived there in their lifetime, so not that many people have crossed through these doors, but when you have a schoolhouse that every person's grandmother went to, the number of people that are going to know about your house and have stories about it, is just sort of exponential. And so you get a lot of history and so these stories really kind of come out of the woodwork.
Suzy Chase: I feel like another example of the community getting involved is Duncan Manor. Oftentimes these old landmarks get forgotten about, but the community still remembers them.
Ethan Finkelstein: Duncan Manor is an incredibly wild story. It's a 6,000 square foot mansion in the middle of a field in Towanda, Illinois, and it's noticeable from Route 66, literally right around Dead Man's Curve.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: It's a movie set kind of house.
Ethan Finkelstein: It is a movie set. It was in-
Elizabeth Finkelstein: Fargo?
Ethan Finkelstein: Fargo. In the end they actually help them restore pieces of their staircase for that show, and it is just an amazing place. They actually saw this on CIRCA. CIRCA Old Houses are other real estate website for somewhat more expensive properties. And they just decided to drive by when they were going to a wedding and they just fell in love like so many of us do where we're like, "What is going on with that old house? What is happening?" And you kind of look at this and you look at this and you look at this and you know the roof is caving in and there's so many issues, but you can't get it out of your head. And they did it. They took a leap of faith and they have been restoring it for probably six or seven years. It's fascinating to understand all of the things that they have done just including heating and getting the water in and getting it livable and having the roof fixed. Randi is a local post person and Dave I think works mostly on the house. He also has another career in, I believe industrial design, and they're just two fascinating people that really have galvanized the community around them. They are working on a nonprofit. They want to make it a structure that they can host weddings. It is the perfect destination for a wedding as well as doing film sets and as well as having events all the time. They have farmer's markets and craft beers and they always gather people. They're doing right now it's the haunted season, so they're doing a little spooky house tour or something and then they do a Christmas thing. So what I love about them is that they're massively creative on the financial front of making this old house just work for them and their family and then adapting to what the old house needs and how they live in it.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: When people buy these massive places that are kind of local landmarks, there are not a lot of examples out there of people buying them, and this is not a house museum, this is a house that people live in, but it is so important to the community that for them to just have to finance it on their own, it's very hard for the average person. So we really admire the way that Randi and Dave have been able to think creatively about how to finance this house, and it's something that many people before them have failed to do. It was actually on the list of Illinois' most endangered places before they bought it. It had been many people had tried to come in and preserve this house. Randi and Dave are not exceptional people. They're not moving into this house with billions and billions of dollars. They're just creative thinkers and they figured out a way to make this work for them. And I love being able to highlight their story because there need to be more examples of people doing this and doing it successfully and being able to just make it work. And they have young children. I mean, they're amazing. They camped out on their porch for a month when they first bought this house before they had one room that was livable. They're amazing.
Suzy Chase: So are there any special financing programs out there to offset these renovation costs?
Ethan Finkelstein: First kind of financing thing that I would recommend would be historic tax credits. I think most people think of them as a prohibitive thing that makes you have to work on your house in a very historic way, and if you need a new roof, it's just really not the case. Basically the program is a carrot, not a stick. They will give you money on a tax credit basis.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: This is if your house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places or in a historic district. So first, when you're looking at this house, try to find out that information. A lot of people don't know that this exists, but it is hugely valuable. Actually, the house we live in happens to be in a national register historic district, and we were able to get a huge amount back on our roof that we had to redo, and that's-
Ethan Finkelstein: And it's dollar per dollar tax credit. So if you have no taxable income, it literally will be just a credit, so you will get the full amount back. So in our case, it's 20%. If for a commercial case it's 40%. So if you do a new roof, it costs you $40,000, let's say, and you have a residential property, you get $8,000 back, so you get 20% back. But if it's a commercial property, you're able to get double. So 16,000 or 40%, I'm sorry. I think in the book we have also featured a few other folks who have different financial ways that they've gone about it. So Lise in Detroit worked with a local Detroit city program and that program allowed her to pay, I think basically no money down or very, very little money down to allow her to get into her house and finance it. So she just had to prove that she was going to live in the home and she was able to work on the house and had a job. That's an amazing program in Detroit. I think another really creative person who came up with financing was Betsy Sweeney in West Virginia. She bought her house for $18,500. She bought that cash and then she has worked to obtain refinancing loans to work on the restoration. So once she obtained the building, she then worked on getting it refinanced and with everything that she had done, with each step, when she wanted her new kitchen, she was able to refinance and get a little bit of money back and out of the home equity. There's a decent amount of programs, but I think the real kicker is the cheaper you get it, the lower your interest rate is, the lower your initial payments are. I think the idealistic goal is to buy something in cash for 10, 20, $30,000, which there are properties available for that and then work on it slowly. I think the biggest sort of misconception or want is, "Oh, we need to flip this within a year." I think we need to be a little bit more patient with ourselves and know that if you're renting in a local place and working on it over three years, you can do that. So if you bought a house for $400,000 or $500,000 with today's interest rates over the full mortgage term, if you were to stay in that home, you're actually paying close to $900,000. So I don't think it's necessarily cheaper to buy a house with a mortgage. I think it's the smaller mortgage you can get, the smaller your interest payments will be.
Suzy Chase: Okay. I love Betsy Sweeney and that's Wheeling, West Virginia, right?
Ethan Finkelstein: Right.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: It is.
Suzy Chase: So she has helped revitalize that whole town.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: She works for, I think it's called, sorry, Betsy. I think it's Historic Wheeling. She works in preservation in Wheeling in a professional capacity. So she does have a lot of understanding of the specific programs that Wheeling offers and she has a lot of background in restoring a house herself. That said, this is her first home. I think like a lot of us, she is learning as she goes along, but she bought a house that honestly was so bad we almost didn't post it on our feed. It was that bad. And we've posted some pretty bad houses, so she really took a leap of faith on that house. We love her too. I think she's such a fantastic advocate for this and she figured out a way to really take on, I mean, her chapter in the book is called Save the Neediest House on the Block. I mean, it may have been the neediest house in all of Wheeling. I don't know. It was really, it was raining on the staircase when she bought the house.
Ethan Finkelstein: I think what's fantastic about Wheeling is that there's a lot of homes, there's a lot of abandoned homes, there's a lot of need. It's a smaller community than something like a Detroit, which everyone knows. But there's hundreds of these communities all across America similar to Wheeling that are just, there's many homes that are abandoned and are needed of someone to come in and restore some of the fabric of the community and the home specifically, primarily.
Suzy Chase: The epilogue is entitled Our Cheap Old House. You both are key carrying members of the cheap old houses movement with your 18th century farmhouse you purchased for $70,000 in Upstate New York. I would love to hear about that.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: Well, this was another house that I had seen. I loved the area that it was in and I was going to post it on our feed, but then I was like, "Ah, it doesn't have enough left." And we actually passed on putting it on our feed. And then one weekend Ethan was camping with our son and I was home alone with my mom and that's always dangerous, because we start going antiquing or something and I was like, "Gee, mom, we're kind of bored. Let's go look at this house that I had seen come up." And we got there and I was like, "Oh, Ethan is going to love this." It's a farmhouse on land. It had been completely gutted, but the outside was very intact. And as we were there and poking around it, we started to see its history come out more and more and then just started to realize we can put this back. We can bring this house back. We found out that there was one other person who had put an offer on it. That quote was may or may not going to keep the house. We feel really fortunate that this house was in our hands. We're bringing it back to the late 1700s when it was built. It had been really stripped of all of its charm, and this is our passion project and we are chipping away at it quite slowly. It's been a long time.
Ethan Finkelstein: And to paint the picture for you, it's a farmhouse on almost 11 acres. It's in beautiful rolling hill country in upstate New York, and there is a small pond on the property. There's a barn across the property. The neighbors are flower farmers and maple syrup producers. It's in a very rural part of upstate New York. There's a cemetery on the property. So we're connected to all the families in the history of the home via that cemetery, and we know so much about the home because of that.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: There are tombstones in that cemetery that date back to the 1700, 1793 I think is the earliest tombstone, which is mind boggling.
Ethan Finkelstein: And so the history was the person who came over from Scotland who settled all of this area and actually split up a lot of the land, created the patents and lived in this home and lived in a cabin first and then moved into this home and upgraded it over the years. It was built in the 1790s, but it's been sort of revitalized on the outside, which is more of an 18th century aesthetic, and we're keeping it that way because that was the sort of predominant design aesthetic. And we're adding an addition on the back. We put the chimneys back on the inside. We're putting all new reclaimed floors. We have one and a half inch flooring that's going back in that are old floors that will stand the test of time for another two, 300 years.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: One thing I want to say about this though that I think is really, really cool is when we started sharing Cheap Old Houses with the world, I don't know that, I think we wanted to do this, we knew we could do it, but then we started seeing other people do it and it's like our own people that purchased the houses we shared inspired us right back. And when we first looked at this house, it was the other people bidding against us were probably going to tear it down. And I think most people would have, but I think because we had seen all the people, the people in this book be able to do it, it in a way gave us the confidence to say, "You know what? We can do this." And I think so many times we've looked at each other and thought, I can't believe there was ever a time when we wouldn't have had this farmhouse in our lives. It's such a rewarding thing to be able to do. I think a lot of people think when they, it's equated a lot to when you adopt an animal and you're like, "Who saved who?" And we feel like this farmhouse is just given us so much. It really is all of the people that have shared their journeys of buying cheap old houses and restoring them, that gave us the confidence that we too could do it in a funny way.
Suzy Chase: So you have little vignettes throughout the book called Favorite Things like vintage tiles, pocket doors, and beadboard. My favorite is tread marks. You say, "Floors and steps are a living canvas capturing the comings and goings of generations. Traces on floorboards by the windows indicate that perhaps a sitting chair once took up space there. Was it a homemade chair that created these dents?" Now, I thought I was the only person that thought about things like that. I love these vignettes.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: Absolutely. I think a part of what we do is to educate people on the things that are of value in a home. That yes, you could probably have straighter floors if you took out your old floorboards and replaced it with something brand new, but then you know what, just buy a new house. Are the perfectly straight floors going to make a huge difference at the end of the day? Probably not. And are you losing so much by getting rid of them? You absolutely are. And so yeah, these little things are just the things that we've noticed that when we post on our Instagram feed, people go wild for. I mean, there is never a time when we could post pocket doors that people wouldn't just exclaim how much they love them. Now, why pocket doors fall into sort of the romance of our minds? I don't know what it is specifically about them, and that's kind of what we're exploring in those passages. What is it about these specific things in old houses that come in a way like bragging rights of people who have them? It's like, "How many mantles do you have?" Counting bedrooms and bathrooms is far less interesting to us than counting the number of fireplaces really at the end of the day.
Ethan Finkelstein: Yeah, I think they really should have real estate listings that you can filter by, how old are the floors? How many fireplaces do you have? How many pocket doors?
Suzy Chase: That's brilliant. So now to my segment called Home where I ask you to describe one memory of your childhood home, and please start by telling us where it was. So Elizabeth, you can go first.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: Yes. I grew up in upstate New York. I have probably two memories. My fondest memory of childhood is I suppose every morning running downstairs and pushing my siblings out of the way to fight for a spot in front of the fireplace. That's just kind of how I spent my childhood. But I love this question because I think that raising children in an old house is the greatest gift you can give them on so many levels, and that's a podcast episode for another day because I have so much to say about that, but I remember so many memories. The original part of the house was built in the late 1700s, and then they built a large Greek revival edition on the front, which turned out to kind of be the main house. And those two houses were connected by a tiny little corridor, really a pass-through that as children, we called the secret room. Everything that happened in my childhood happened in the secret room, which was really honestly just a little set of stairs connecting two parts of the house. But the imagination that came out of that little nook, the little nooks and crannies in these houses, I think shaped so much of who I am now. And I think there's nothing that can spawn a child's imagination, like the secret sort of stories and mysteries that can come out of an old house.
Ethan Finkelstein: I think for me, my home story really revolves around, my dad was in the Navy. We moved around a ton when I was very, very young. And then we moved to Bremerton, Washington to a cute little bungalow, and it was one of our first homes that we actually had a house. It was, I don't know-
Elizabeth Finkelstein: On a naval base.
Ethan Finkelstein: .. captain housing. It was on a naval base. And I think the first thing about that home was really the adventure of going across the country, driving across the country, seeing the full country, stopping at Yellowstone, seeing all the animals, and just creating a massive imagination through that travel experience with my parents, driving through the sequoias, literally under and beneath the tree like you would McDonald's in a drive-through for the tree and getting to finally our new home and it was the cutest little bungalow home, west coast house. It had built-ins at the kitchen nook and amazing 1920s cabinetry and just continued to fill my imagination with so many different fun experiences of just living in that old house.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: And what I love about Ethan's story so much about that particular home is that this was an average kind of American bungalow. And I think what Cheap Old Houses has tried to really do is get ourselves out of the mindset of what is worth saving in this country as being somewhere George Washington slept or Thomas Jefferson's old home, but really the real everyday American homes, the pink bathrooms, your great aunt's kitchen, the things that have really shaped life in this country so much. And I think that that's just the perfect example of it. It doesn't have to be a palatial mansion to have given you a strong sense of nostalgia about your childhood, and it's just reshaped our ideas of what is really worth saving.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Elizabeth Finkelstein: Cheapoldhouses.com @cheapoldhouses on social media. If you'd like to sign up for our subscription newsletters, you can do that at cheapoldhouses.com. You can find us on HGTV. Our new series, Who's Afraid of a Cheap Old House, is premiering in Spring 2024. We just actually wrapped filming. And you can purchase our book, Cheap Old Houses: An Unconventional Guide to Loving and Restoring a Forgotten Home on all major booksellers online and all major bookstores in person across the country.
Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh, Elizabeth and Ethan, I cannot thank you enough for coming on Decorating by the Book. This has been such a treat for me.
Elizabeth Finkelstein: Suzy, you're amazing. Thank you for having us.
Ethan Finkelstein: Thank you, Suzy. This has been amazing.
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