1920 Spickard Home, 2818 Square Feet, Koi Pond, Wood Furnace — $127,500

The number that stops you first is $45 a square foot. That buys you a 1920 house in Spickard, Missouri with 2,818 square feet, 1.5 acres, and a koi pond out back. Take a minute with that.

The house is big. The main level has a large living room, a kitchen, a laundry room, a bedroom that works as an office, a full bathroom, and an attached garage. Upstairs holds four more bedrooms and what the listing calls an enormous bathroom, which is either honest or relative, but the square footage suggests there's room up there. So you're looking at four bedrooms plus a dedicated office space, which is more than most houses at three times the price will give you.

Heating in an old house this size is the first thing you'd worry about, and the outdoor wood furnace addresses that directly. It's not a novelty. Wood heat in a house like this can keep winter electric bills low in a way that gas or electric resistance heat simply cannot at this scale.

Out back is where it gets a little different. There's a covered deck that looks over a koi pond. That's a specific thing to have. It's the kind of backyard that takes some years to build and then someone sells the house and you get to inherit it. Mature trees on the property, too. Shade in summer matters more than people think until they don't have it.

Beyond the attached garage there's a carport, a storage shed, and a dog kennel building with a high fenced enclosure. The listing floats the idea of using it as a protected garden space, which is reasonable. A structure that already has fencing and containment built in can become a lot of things.

The road frontage is paved. The property is 1.5 acres. The house is over a hundred years old, and what condition it's in beyond the surface the listing doesn't say clearly, so that's what you'd want to look at hard before anything else.

But 2,818 square feet for $127,500 in a house with a pond, a wood furnace, and multiple outbuildings is a number worth taking seriously.