When Dani Deering first entered the 1900 Minneapolis house, it looked to her like it hadn’t been updated since the 1970s. But she immediately sensed the home’s potential.
“This house had really good bones and the energy was really good here,” she said. “The moment I walked in, I knew what I wanted it to look like.”
Over the next four years, she updated “literally every single inch” of the nearly 4,100-square-foot house. It got a new kitchen and primary bedroom, as well as a second laundry area upstairs and general updating throughout. Structural problems — the upstairs bathtub leaked through the kitchen ceiling; the only fully functional bathroom was in the basement — were repaired.
Now she’s planning to move in with her partner and has put the house on the market for $1.15 million.
The house is in the Lowry Hill neighborhood, a community with a lot of large, stately homes, many of them built around the turn of the 20th century by prominent milling and lumber families. The area was named for Thomas Lowry (1843-1909), a real estate investor who bought property there.
Deering, an attorney, said she’s also good at decorating and design. After she bought the house in 2015, she and her son, who was then in high school, lived in an apartment while making some improvements. They moved in six months later.
Deering did some of the remodeling work herself, including installing hickory flooring throughout. “I was kind of doing some weekend warrior stuff,” she said.
She also hired professionals, who built a two-story addition. The kitchen is on the ground floor of the addition, below the second-floor primary bedroom. The house’s original “tiny, U-shaped kitchen” became a family room.
