1914 Montana Bank Still Has the Vault Door — $100,000

The vault door is still there. That's the thing. Someone converted this 1914 bank into a three-bedroom, two-bath house and kept the vault door in place, which tells you a lot about what this building is. You could gut a bank and make it look like any other house. Whoever worked on this one left the bones of the thing alone, and the result is a residence that still reads as a bank in all the ways that make that interesting.

The original teller counter is now part of the living space. Original hardwood floors throughout. The woodwork is historic and the windows are large, which in a building like this means the light comes in the way it was designed to, not as an afterthought. At 1,552 square feet across three bedrooms and two baths, the space is modest for a commercial-to-residential conversion, but that also means it fits together without a lot of wasted room.

Heat comes from a propane furnace and multiple wood stoves. The enclosed porch has a hot tub, which is included in the sale along with the kitchen appliances, washer, and dryer. There's an attached garage and additional outbuildings on a 100 by 140 foot corner lot at Main and Second Streets in Roy.

Roy is a small rural community about 35 miles northeast of Lewistown. The Missouri River is within reach, as are the CM Russell National Wildlife Refuge and the James Kipp Recreation Area, so if hunting or fishing is part of why you'd move somewhere like this, the location works for that.

At $100,000, this comes out to about $64 per square foot. That number doesn't account for whatever the renovation needs, and the agent description does hint that there's room for a new owner's vision, which is honest language for a project. But the vault door is intact. The teller counter is intact. The hardwood floors are intact. The structure of something genuinely old and specific survived the conversion, and that's harder to find than the price suggests.