‘I Accidentally Bought a 200-Year-Old Abandoned Mansion for $460K—It’s Taken 4 Years To Renovate It Into Our Dream Home’

A man who “accidentally” bought an 1830 stone house at auction is laying bare the major (and unique) renovations the home has undergone to be habitable, revealing how the one year he thought would be required to transform the property has actually turned into a mammoth four-year project. 

Laying down floors, installing plumbing, and even insulating the whole house in sheep’s wool are just a few of the updates Tyler Bouldin and his family have done to the crumbling property.

On Halloween 2020, Bouldin decided to bid on the Central Pennsylvania home at an auction that was held in the front yard of the property, known as the Forge House. He had never before undertaken a project of this kind. 

“I had a chance to see it twice before we bought it. And the auction itself was not something I had, like, ever done before. I’m not like a property investor or something; I’m just a guy,” Bouldin tells Realtor.com®.

According to the original listing, the starting bid for the six-bedroom, eight-bathroom home was set at $200,000.

The home offered a “once in a lifetime” opportunity, according to the description. It had been vacant for years and was “a complete fixer upper and rehab project.”

Still, Bouldin was eager to try his luck, competing against the dozens of registered bidders.

“There were probably, like, five people that were really serious, and it’s a well-known house locally. It’s in a really small town in Central Pennsylvania. I think there were a lot of local people that had driven by the house a million times growing up and stuff like that,” he says.

“There were a lot of people that were just hoping it went super, super cheap.”

Bouldin researched tips for buying a house at auction, including how to bid and “how to crush it at real estate auctions,” he says with a laugh.

“The consensus I did find was take a risk and go over budget, right?” he says. “So it’s like you get all caught up in the emotion of it, and you go over budget. I was very committed to ‘I’m not going to go above our budget.’ We had some guesses of what the renovation would cost.”

He placed himself in front of the auctioneer and shouted his bids in an attempt to scare off the competition, but when he smiled at $460,000, Bouldin didn’t realize it counted as a bid. His budget had been $450,000, but he was fine with going over it.

“I tried to dress as nicely as possible. I slicked my hair back. I was, like, I’m going to try to go for, like, this old money look,” he says. “I’m 6-foot-4. I’m like a bigger guy. So … I’m going to stand in the very front of a whole crowd and I’m going to, like, yell very loudly—so everyone sees me and they’re just like ‘Forget about it.'”

He also bid in big increments, which he believes helped him appear to be a serious buyer.

“Meanwhile, it was everything I had,” he says. “I could not see anyone else who was bidding. I just know, like, there were other people that were involved.”

The auctioneer took a five-minute break before the winner was determined, Bouldin says. “They had a guy that stands next to you when it gets down to the final couple of bidders, so they don’t miss a bid.

“He looked up at me and he smiled, and I looked back at him and I, like, smiled kind of nervously,” he says. “Smiling at them counted as a bid, evidently. I had bid $460,000 on it, and they said, ‘Going, going, gone, sold.’ And I had no idea that I got it.”

When the auction came to a close, Bouldin says he and his real estate agent started walking back to the car, unaware that he was the winner.

“Everyone started congratulating me,” Bouldin adds. He called his wife, and they laughed and then cried.

Then came the hard part. Both of their parents had renovated houses growing up, and Bouldin had done some “light” renovation projects, but they were not the kind of work that would ultimately be required for the Forge House.

“We underestimated the amount of work that we would need to put into it,” he admits. 

They scrambled to sell their old house, while Bouldin’s wife was pregnant with their second child.

They lived with family for several months while they got part of the property to the point that it was livable. They moved in and started working on other sections of the house.

They built a kitchen from scratch, installed floors, rewired the property, and replumbed the house. They installed all-new furnaces, and they took about a year to do the structural work.

“What we ended up buying was … a big stone box,” he says.  But the upsides have been rewarding.

“What’s great about it is that it is stone. So, like, the walls are almost 30 inches thick. … It’s like living in a castle,” he says. “It’s held together with massive logs, so the outer walls and some of the interior framing was just absolutely rock-solid.”

Bouldin says he’s also learned some valuable life lessons from fixing up the house.

“With any renovation project, you start out seeing everything is a problem. But the more you work on it, the more you begin to kind of see, like, the outcomes of the work. There is an emotional attachment that gets developed,” he says.

“The house has all the original, like, wavy glass windows from 1830. At first, I was, like, ‘These need to be replaced right away.’ Now, I love these windows. They’re so unique and beautiful. I’ll never replace them. I don’t know when that shift happened, but there’s, there’s a lot of things like that. That’s the broad benefits of doing a project like this.”