POST MODERN

AN INDIANA DIY'ER STUMBLES INTO SOCIAL MEDIA STARDOM BY SHARING HER HOME'S EVER-CHANGING STYLE.

- GARY THOMPSON

How sweet would it be if Brit Arnesen channeled Linus from A Charlie Brown Christmas and said of her home in Kokomo, Indiana: "I never thought it was such a bad little house." Truth is, she always did. "I used to ride past it on my bike when I was little-my best friend at the time lived down the road-and I remember thinking it was the ugliest house I'd ever seen," Brit says.

When she and her husband, Derek, a manufacturing engineer, bought the 1960s ranch in 2015, it was even worse off: foreclosed, forlorn (uninhabited for five years), and lacking the prerequisite good bones, charm, architectural details and "potential" that buyers often claim to see through their rose-colored remodeling glasses.

But the home was in a nice neighborhood with good schools. And having flipped one foreclosure already, the couple could sense more tangible potential in this one-income for their growing family if they fixed up the place to resell at a profit. So they gutted the house and worked on it themselves for a year before moving in. "Everything that I did to the house, I had selling it in mind," Brit says.