WHEN I was a child, there was a running joke in our family about someday buying a fixer-upper. Whenever we took car trips, my mother would point out the window to long abandoned houses and say, “There’s a real fixer-upper for us!” And we’d all chuckle. It wasn’t just a joke: part of us wanted to believe that we, the Shetterlys, were capable of swooping in and bringing a collapsed pile of wood, glass and shingles back to life.

So when, in mid-September, a friend invited my husband, Dan, and me to take over his vacant house in rural Maine, we ignored any alarms that might have been associated with the word “vacant.” Dan and I should have pictured squirrels in the attic and old corroded pipes. But all we could see was the word “house.”

“Go try it out for a few months,” our friend, Chrisso, said. “Maybe you’ll want to buy it from me, which would make things mighty easy.”

Easy sounded wonderful to us. We’d been going through a lot. Our lease was up in our rental apartment on the third floor of a Mansard-style building in the East End of Portland, Me., and we were in an uncomfortable tussle with our landlady because the ceiling had caved in on our 3-year-old son’s room and we’d found friable asbestos dusting our belongings in the basement. We needed to move, but rental prices had ballooned. More than anything we wanted a house, a patch of yard and maybe a tree or two, but we couldn’t get a loan big enough. I worried we had nowhere to go.