If you’re like me, you have dreams, big dreams. A dishwasher. A surprise inheritance. A six-figure columnist salary. And of course, a house upstate. You have hundreds of homes saved on Zillow in far-flung towns due north with names like Whitekill and Cocksport. But columns don’t pay like they used to. Sex and the City this is not. So you set your price filter to $150,000 max. You’re looking for a fixer-upper. Turns out you’re actually going to need to make money off this property. So you expose a few beams, redo a bathroom, paint it charcoal (or is that trend over?), invite your journalist friends up for the weekend, get an impressionable couple to move in next door, open a coffee shop or a farm-to-table diner or a project space or a farm-to-coffee-table-shop-space-project. Suddenly Whitecock is the new Hudson. Easy, right?
Recently, my forays into Zillownership delusion have been supplemented and reinforced by Cheap Old Houses, a popular Instagram account, subscription newsletter, and now HGTV show. Host Elizabeth Finkelstein, an enthusiastic architectural historia…