1940 Willow City Home with Steel Roof and 2-Stall Garage — $139,900

Almost 1,800 square feet in a small North Dakota town for under $140,000, and the major work is already done.

This is a 1940 house, so there is real age to it. But someone has gone through and addressed the things that make older homes expensive to own. The roof is steel. The windows are newer. The siding is vinyl. These are not cosmetic updates. They are the expensive ones, the ones that protect everything underneath, and they are already handled.

The layout puts most of your daily living on the main floor. Two bedrooms are down there, along with a full bathroom, the kitchen, a dining area, a living room, and the laundry. The staircase takes you up to a third bedroom and a second bathroom. The concrete crawl space underneath runs four feet deep, which is more usable storage than most basements in houses twice this price.

Outside you have just under half an acre. The yard is kept up. The 2-stall garage has extra storage space beyond the two bays, which matters in North Dakota winters when you need somewhere to put the gear that does not fit in the house.

Willow City is a small town in Bottineau County, about 15 miles south of the Canadian border. The surrounding area is farmland and prairie, and the county itself is known for the Turtle Mountains to the north and Bottineau Winter Park nearby. This is not a suburb. It is a quiet place with a lot of open land around it, and the town itself is the kind that still has a grain elevator on the main road.

At $139,900 for 1,764 square feet, you are paying roughly $79 a square foot. That includes a detached garage with storage, nearly half an acre, and a roof that will not need replacing for decades.