67-year-old buys Illinois Victorian for $97,500, spends $85,000 on 1,000 sq ft

Rebecca Roucloux Avery, 67, had already done the thing most people aspire to: she owned a brand-new home in Austin, a city people pay premiums to move to. She was retired, financially stable, and living in a modern construction built to last. But then she left it all for a 132-year-old Victorian home in Vermont, a small town in Illinois, according to a report by Realtor.com. Worse, she spent nearly as much money fixing the place as she'd paid for it in the first place.For Avery, leaving Austin wasn't about the house. It was about the people in it. She wanted to be closer to her family. So the proximity to progress really mattered less. And that’s exactly when she stumbled onto something that felt like destiny wrapped in red brick and a mansard roof. Along with her partner, she is renovating the Victorian home built in 1894.