1890 Rocky Ford Victorian, Three Fireplaces, Six Bedrooms, Fruit Trees — $99,900

Thirty dollars a square foot. That's what you're paying for 3,276 square feet of 1890 Victorian in Rocky Ford, Colorado. Six bedrooms, three fireplaces, original woodwork still intact. The math is hard to ignore.

The house is two full floors. Three bedrooms up, three on the main level. Three bathrooms total, two and a half upstairs and one down. The fireplaces have tile surrounds, and the woodwork throughout is the kind of thing people pay contractors a lot of money to fake in newer houses. Here it's original. How much of it is in good shape and how much needs work, the listing doesn't say clearly, but the agent's pitch leans hard on vision and rolled-up sleeves, so go in with your eyes open.

Heat is covered three ways: electric, natural gas, and a wood-burning stove off the laundry room. That last one is a nice thing to have in a Colorado winter.

Outside is 1.5 city lots. There's an old well on the property and established peach, mulberry, and plum trees already growing. A yard that produces fruit without you planting anything is a good starting point. The grounds have room to them.

Rocky Ford is a small agricultural town in the Arkansas River Valley, about 60 miles east of Pueblo on Highway 50. It's known for its cantaloupe. The house is on South 11th Street.

What you have here is a big, old house with real period detail, on a larger than usual lot, with fruit trees, in a town where land and square footage are still affordable. The price reflects that this is a project. The fireplaces and the woodwork are the reasons to take it seriously. If those are gone or beyond saving, the calculus changes. If they're solid, you're looking at a house that would cost several times this to build from scratch and probably four or five times this to buy in a market where people already know what they have.

Someone is going to get a lot of house for under a hundred thousand dollars. Whether it's a good deal depends entirely on what's behind the walls.