Smart Buying
Restoring Really Old Houses Has Built up Our Net Worth
Mark Schiavone and his partner, John Restaino, parlayed $50,000 and two rehabbed 18th-century houses into a $1.5-million farm.
From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, January 2006
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John was down from New York visiting friends 20 years ago and fell in love with a stone house, built in the mid 1700s, in Gerrardstown, W.Va. He bought it for $19,000. The house had had only one coat of paint since the 18th century. It didn't have indoor plumbing. The woman who lived there before us had a coal stove, drew water from a pump and used an outhouse.
Three years later we paid $30,000 for a 1795 stone-and-log house in the same area. It took about ten years to renovate both houses. The challenge: how to get modern systems into a structure without screwing it up. John is a woodworker and cabinetmaker. His hobby is plumbing, and mine is electrical wiring.
We did most of the work ourselves. The first couple of times we watched outsiders put up the drywall so we'd know how to do it. Occasionally we would hire a stone mason for the day and pick up tips. Our goal was to pay cash for the renovations. I saved some money for retirement, but we never owned a new car and, as John is famous for saying, we ate a lot of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.
We watched Berkeley County come of age. By the time we left Gerrardstown, there were two rush hours -- one toward Washington that began at 4 a.m. and another that started at 8 a.m. for people commuting the eight miles to Martinsburg.
We sold the 1795 house in 1996 for $165,000, and sold the stone house in 1997 for $135,000. We used the money to buy our "new" place, an 1835 stone house near Harpers Ferry, W.Va., for $212,000. The house sits on 50 acres. About half the land is open fields, and the other half is woods.
We took out a $40,000 mortgage so we could afford some amenities. We updated the plumbing, renovated the 1940s kitchen, and fixed up the interior, exterior and roof. The next major project is a three-bay garage with two bedrooms on the second floor.Now that the restoration is complete, the house is worth about $500,000. With land in the area selling for about $20,000 per acre, our property is worth about $1 million. We're not going to sell this house. They'll have to take us out in a box.
--As told to Kimberly Lankford
