“We feel like the house found us,” says Tiffany St. John of her 1803 farmhouse in the small community of Landenberg, Pennsylvania. She and her husband, Ryan, had been looking for a home near the area where they grew up when Ryan’s grandfather, a longtime farmer, recommended they view the property of a retired colleague.
However, there was a slight problem: The 3,600-square-foot, three-story house had been abandoned for at least five years. “You couldn’t even see the ‘for sale’ sign,” Tiffany recalls. “The grass was that tall. The bushes had grown over the roof height.” Worse still, vandals had stolen the copper plumbing, and squatters had left behind piles of debris and damaged some of the wood floors. There was no kitchen, no running water and no heat. In…
