WHEN SHOPPING around for her first house in 2017, Susanna Taft Illig didn’t plan on becoming a double homeowner—or a next-door neighbor to her brother.
But that’s exactly what happened when the seller of her early 20th-century house in Mapleton-Fall Creek offered her a deal she couldn’t refuse. He gave her a great price on the house she wanted, but only if she agreed to buy the deteriorating property next door, too. The total cost of both homes? $84,000.
While Susanna’s house needed a lot of work, it retained much of its original character thanks to a previous owner who had started restoring it. The second home, on the other hand, was practically skeletal—vacant for years and needing to be stripped to the studs. So Susanna and her brother, Michael, hatched a plan. She bought the first home, and their dad temporarily purchased the second, giving Michael time to save up, get a mortgage to fund improvements, and make it his own.
Then the real work began. They did the bulk of the renovations themselves. Badly, at first. “Everybody starts out not knowing how to do any of this,” Michael says. “If we needed to fix something, we would look it up on YouTube. Ten minutes later, we sort of knew how to do it, and we would do it poorly. But the next time, we would do slightly better.”
Raised in a renovation-happy family, the siblings were no strangers to DIY home projects. But this was a new level of commitment. Susanna, only a year out of college and without a car, rode her bike from her apartment on 16th Street to her new, mid-renovation house so she could refinish the floors on the second level herself. For big projects, she filled a BlueIndy car with supplies.
Both siblings also relied on a lot of help from their friends to complete larger projects, such as painting and lifting heavy things—like a 500-pound salvaged bowling alley worktable that now serves as Michael’s dining room table. When it came time to hang new cabinets in his kitchen, he hosted a themed house party titled “Boxed,” which wasn’t just a reference to the Ikea boxes awaiting guests. “I had like 12 friends come over, and I had Franzia boxed wine,” he recalls. “We assembled cabinets and drank wine. And you can definitely tell some of the cabinets that were assembled toward the end of the night.”
NEIGHBORHOOD: Mapleton-Fall Creek
SQUARE FOOTAGE: 2,652
BEDROOMS: 4
BATHROOMS: 2.5
PURCHASE PRICE: $72,500
Susanna estimates the renovation of her home amounts to roughly the same as what she paid to buy it. But she has lessened the financial burden by having a series of roommates. “That’s a great piece of advice,” she says. “If you have income from friends who are renting from you, that can go directly back into the house.” After years of replacing rotted floors and joists, installing electrical wiring and plumbing, transforming unfinished attic space into a livable area, replacing doors, and fencing in the yards (with a gate in the middle to connect the two properties for parties, of course), the Tafts’ homes are a testament to sweat equity and the slow joy of fixing something up with care. And many of their former roommates who helped with their renovation projects? They’ve gone on to buy old houses of their own.
NEIGHBORHOOD: Mapleton-Fall Creek
SQUARE FOOTAGE: 1,866
BEDROOMS: 3
BATHROOMS: 2.5
PURCHASE PRICE: $11,500
