1906 Stucco and Metal Roof in Glen Ullin, 2880 Square Feet — $100,000

Thirty-five dollars a square foot. That's what this works out to, and the math is hard to ignore when the house is 2,880 square feet and has been standing since 1906. Stucco exterior, metal roof, single-car attached garage. The bones of a century-old North Dakota house that has clearly outlasted most of what got built around it.

The layout spreads across three levels. Main floor has a living room with a bay window, a large dining room, an eat-in kitchen, and a bedroom, plus laundry. That's a functional main level with some real space to it. Four more bedrooms sit upstairs along with a half bath. The full bath is on the main floor. One full bath for a five-bedroom house is the thing to think honestly about before you fall in love with the square footage. It's a real consideration and would be the first place most people would put money.

The basement has a coal and wood supplemental heater, which tells you something about the age of the house and something about North Dakota winters. Whether that heater is a nice backup or a necessity would be worth understanding before closing.

The bay window in the living room is the kind of detail that shows up in houses from this era and stops being standard in houses built after it. Combined with the stucco exterior and the metal roof, the place has a presence that newer construction at this price would never have. Metal roofs on old houses often outlast everything around them, and if this one is original or even reasonably recent, that's a meaningful item.

Glen Ullin sits in Morton County. Lake Tschida is nearby and draws people for fishing and water recreation. The town also has a nine-hole golf course, a motocross track, an archery range, and campgrounds, according to the listing.

At $100,000, you are buying a lot of house with a lot of history and one bathroom. Those two facts belong in the same sentence.