In 2022, Julie Flores, 32, a part-time accountant and stay-at-home mom from Kansas City, Missouri, received the call of a lifetime: She and her husband, Eddie, had won a 20th-century home in Lincoln, Kansas, a small Midwestern town of about 1,000 residents in the Smoky Hills region of the Great Plains.
While the couple didn't get a mortgage, they have spent $105,000 renovating the home so far, which includes a $45,000 fee for the physical relocation of the home to another Lincoln lot that cost them nearly $3,000. To control costs, they set a strict budget of $250,000 and plan on doing a majority of the work by themselves.
Flores, who is originally from Lincoln, initially heard about the historic home while visiting the town in January of last year. The over-100-year-old home gained notoriety after local residents created a special committee tasked with the salvation of the decaying house.
It was a community-wide effort to prevent its demolition by the owner, the Lincoln County Hospital & Health Care Foundation, which was planning a hospital expansion.
After applying and facing stiff competition for the home — partially due to a social-media campaign by a member of the city's economic committee — Flores and her husband were selected as its new owners in April 2022.
The family moved to Lincoln in January as they've continued their renovations, an experience they write about on the blog Nursing Back to Life. Until they can move into the house, they are renting one about ten miles away and still own their home in Kansas City, which they periodically rent out through Airbnb.
"We haven't looked back," Flores told Insider. "We're just fixing the house and getting involved in the community," adding that the family hopes to be fully moved in by the end of 2023.
Flores explained what the family has accomplished so far with the renovation.