The Globe and Mail

Deborah Scott and daughter Cayley Lambur were heading out on a shopping spree when they stopped at a nearby open house to check it out. Ms. Scott's curiosity had been piqued by a newspaper advertisement for the three-storey midtown stucco structure, circa 1921. They both were smitten. "I jokingly told my mom she should buy it," Ms. Lambur recalls. The two never made it to the stores that fateful day just over two years ago. Instead, they huddled around a table in a coffee shop, trying to make the math work on the back of paper napkins. The house, originally built for a judge, "needed a ton of work," as Ms. Scott puts it. It was well designed and soundly built, but had been neglected for more than three decades.