When You Tour a House Just for Fun… and Then, Whoops! You Buy It.
“I pull up the house. I literally lose my mind,” says Paige.
Sometimes we will ask a fellow old house lover whom we admire to tour an old house that we want to share with our audience purely in the interest of finding a new human to save it. In the spring of 2023, one special house came to our attention: a circa 1895 Queen Anne Victorian in Waynesville, North Carolina.
With its fairytale turret, one of a kind red roof and amazing original woodwork, it’s a stunner. Original listing price: admittedly not cheap (at $965,000, it was featured as part of our Save This House series), but oh my goodness, this thing was really loved by its owners and had so much charm and beautiful detail. Also: 3 acres! We reached out to a couple of old house lovers, Paige Baratta-Simmons and her husband Tripp Simmons, and asked them to give a video of the home in the hopes of finding someone who had the means to save it. We had no idea that the stars would align in the way that they did. “I pull up the house. I literally lose my mind,” says Paige. “It is the coolest house ever. It’s a time capsule. It has a turret and a red roof. It is so stately.” As they toured the house…they fell for it. HARD. Paige says she and Tripp were in shock the entire tour. “None of the woodwork is painted. Every light fixture is like a hundred years old. The wallpaper is a hundred years old. It’s huge. It’s on three acres. It has an original barn. It’s just the coolest house ever.”
The sticker shock was real. “When they told us the list price, we were like, it’s nice for somebody else. That’s great. We hope it gets in the right hands.” But as time passed and some price cuts happened, they started imagining.
Paige and Tripp were already in a historic foursquare in downtown Asheville, and they knew what it took to properly restore an old house. “We called (the house we were living in) the Mahogany Mansion, or MM, because its woodwork was really dark and it was all exposed. Though it was not a mansion we felt like it was because of how compartmentalized four squares are. Everybody on social media knew it as MM. It was a beloved house. It was the cutest little house that we made our own.”
When the Queen Anne in Waynesville had a major price reduction, Paige and Tripp took the leap and made an offer. “We felt it was still a huge stretch, but we had a case for ourselves. We were like, we are the right people for this house, and we know that.” The owner, a direct descendant of the previous owners, remembered them, and their excitement from the tour. Paige and Tripp sold MM, packed up and closed on their new old house. They paid $800,000 and closed on the house in the fall of 2023.
“It took major star alignment. Yes, we ended up with the house after doing the Cheap Old Houses Save This House tour. So it ended up in the right hands. It was an epic plot twist.”
Welcome to the world of Cheap Old Houses, Paige + Tripp! We’re so glad you’re here!
If you’ve ever dreamed of saving an old house—or just need a little inspiration—pick up a copy of the Cheap Old Houses book and dive in. I promise, stories like this will remind you that sometimes, the biggest adventures come in the most unexpected (and affordable) packages.
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