1900 Caney Bungalow with Hardwood Floors and a Big Backyard — $115,000

This house is 124 years old and it's still standing on East Church Street in Caney, Kansas. That's the first thing worth saying. Built in 1900, it's a three-bedroom bungalow with one bath, 1,280 square feet, and hardwood floors throughout. At $89 a square foot, you're buying a lot of old house for the money.

The kitchen has good cabinet space, which matters in a house this size. You work with what you have, and the layout sounds functional. The agent description calls it cozy, which in real estate language usually means tight, but 1,280 square feet for three bedrooms is a reasonable amount of space. Nothing oversized, nothing you'd have to heat unnecessarily in a Kansas winter.

The hardwood floors are the thing here. A house built in 1900 that still has its original wood floors has been taken care of at some level, or at least not destroyed. That's meaningful. You'd want to see the condition in person, look for soft spots near windows and doors, check whether anyone sanded them down to nothing at some point. But floors that have lasted this long tend to last longer.

Out back there's a deck and a yard the agent describes as generous. Caney lots tend to have room to them, so that tracks. A deck with actual yard behind it in a small Kansas town is a straightforward good thing. You can sit outside, you have grass, you have space.

Caney itself is a small town in Montgomery County in southeast Kansas, about ten miles from the Oklahoma border. It has a downtown. It has a Main Street. It's the kind of town where you know your neighbors and the commute is short if you work locally. If you need Wichita regularly, that's a different conversation. It's about two hours north.

The listing is thin on specifics. No mention of when the roof was last done, nothing about the mechanicals, no window ages. For a house this old, those are the questions you'd bring to a showing.