This Farmhouse Was Listed for $15,000 on Facebook Marketplace—You Won't Believe the Before!

“I always thought I’d just put a yurt here,” Claire Zinnecker says of the five-acre vacant slice of land she bought in 2018 along the San Gabriel River in Georgetown, Texas. The interior designer (clairezinnickerdesign.com) already had a home just 35 miles south in Austin and wasn’t planning to move anytime soon. But six months later, when her aunt showed her an old house on Facebook Marketplace that a developer wanted off his property, Claire couldn’t resist the 1898 Folk Victorian’s inherent charm. She put down $15,000 to buy the house, then another $34,000 to have Brown & Sons House Movers transport it from downtown Austin to her land. “They put the house back together better than it was when they took it apart,” says Claire, who named the house Ida in honor of the Swedish immigrants, Gus and Ida Anderson, who first lived there.

But that’s not the only thing she relocated to Georgetown. Soon after she bought Ida, she fell in love again, with Adam Mink, whom she met during a therapy retreat in Colorado. “We became really good friends that week and he was in a place where he didn’t know what his next steps were,” Claire says. “Somehow, I convinced him to move here from Colorado and help me fix up the house. We fell in love, moved in, and got married last spring.”

Together, the couple brought Ida back to life—one board at a time. “The style inspiration was the house itself,” Claire says. “I thought of her as a character and worked really hard to make this house become what I thought the best [version] of her was. Part of the process was deciding what to do to make it ours and what to keep there so the house could keep telling its original story.”

Keep reading to see how she tackled the transformation.