So, how did I talk Cody into turning a 90-year-old historic gem into our forever home? Is he just a glutton for punishment, or deep down, was this something he was also born to do? In pure Cody Arnold fashion, there was a healthy amount of overthinking, so he wasn’t exactly on board immediately, per se. I think he was just humoring me with our first trip to Palestine one very early Saturday morning. Am I right, Brad Pace?
Let me just start by showing you the prize my eyes were first set on when this little journey began…
Her name is Elmwood, and she was built in 1911. She has seven bedrooms, four and a half baths, and is 6,465 square feet on almost three and a half acres. She is magnificent. Walking through the front door for the first time immediately transported me back to my grandmother’s house. From the familiar “old house smell” to the tiniest details in the woodwork and the endless number of fireplaces, it was as if I was a child again, dreaming of my very own life-size Victorian dollhouse.
I fell in love with the idea of walking those wood floors barefoot, playing hide and seek with my grandkids, and getting lost in all the rooms. The thought of spending years planning and designing each space to meticulously honor her history—but also make her ours, and one day theirs—was magical to me.
Needless to say, even after visiting her three different times, her size and the amount of work required to become what we needed was just too enormous of a task for Cody to envision. And let’s be honest, my “go big or go home” drive to make her as fabulous as she once was would’ve sent us into financial ruin.
My brain, however, never stopped dreaming of what she could be. To this day, I am still in awe! Praise Jesus she was purchased during our hunt and is being restored—I believe—as I write this. I would LOVE to go back and see the future Elmwood one day. I just love her so!
The gift our short time with Elmwood gave us was a starting point—a vision for what we could do—and it was there I believe Cody remembered he also had a deep love for old houses. Maybe just not one quite so grand.
The truth is, we are no strangers to renovation. After all, we’ve done a lot of work on several of the houses we’ve called home during our twenty-four years of marriage. I believe this is the seventh house we’ve bought since getting married, and not one of them stayed as it was the day we moved in.
We’ve tackled small projects like installing laminate flooring and a whole lot of painting, to a complete renovation of a 1960s Colonial. With a lot of help from our co-owners and friends, we even remodeled a commercial space for our take-and-bake pizza restaurant. Did I mention we’ve done a LOOOOOTTTT of painting?
That being said, taking on a historic home can still be intimidating—but Cody Arnold was made for this, and I knew it.
From the day he took his first steps, Cody grew up around residential construction. His dad was a Dallas Fireman for 36 years. Working a twenty-four-hours-on, forty-eight-hours-off schedule allowed time to do other things—like make more money for their family. Early in his career, he met a contractor in East Texas and began working as an apprentice. Over the years, he developed his craft into a framing and finish carpentry specialist.
That experience came in handy for Cody’s family as they built or renovated multiple homes while he was growing up. One of those homes was also historic—built in the early 1900s. Little did he know that one day, he’d take on a similar project.
Once he was old enough to help, Cody started going to job sites with his dad. During the summers when school was out, he’d be put to work cleaning up scrap wood, collecting unused nails, or sweeping to keep the job sites tidy. As he got older, he graduated to paint scraping on remodel projects, then to painting exterior trim and fascia boards. All the while, he was getting hands-on experience learning the trade that helped support their family.
With that experience under his (tool)belt, a little nudge from Elmwood, and the help of our amazing realtor Brad Pace, we expanded our search and began touring nearly every historic home with Bed and Breakfast potential in East Texas.
My parameters were that we had to be within one hour of an airport—since Cody travels often—and close enough to our parents who lived in East Texas. This made the search tricky, as not many East Texas towns were actively preserving their historic properties. And the ones that were? Well, they knew what they had—and turnover was rare.
During that time, we saw some major fixer-uppers and even some that were move-in ready. It was definitely a process of finding the right combination of size, layout, and the amount of work we wanted to do—balanced with future Bed and Breakfast or Airbnb potential. Most of our searches landed us in Palestine and Tyler, two cities that clearly take pride in their history and preservation—reminding me of my love for Savannah and the charm it offers both tourists and residents.
In early November, we thought we’d found our place—on the brick streets of the Azalea District in Tyler, Texas. A fully operational Craftsman-style Bed and Breakfast was for sale, and it had all the space, location, and charm we were looking for. It had been recently renovated, so even though I had a full Pinterest board of ideas to make it ours, it was move-in ready—which was a huge plus.
The only problem? Our home in Longview had just gone on the market, and we weren’t interested in owning two houses. We decided to take a chance with a contingent offer, and because the sellers weren’t in a rush, they accepted it! We moved forward with plans to make her our new home as soon as ours sold.
This is when we first learned that an inspection on a historic home is very different from one on a newer home. They’re expensive, and they come with many pages and interesting findings. But it was such a cool process nonetheless. The company we used (twice) was phenomenal.
Our home at the time was in a slower-moving price range for Longview, so it took a few months to find the right buyer. During that time, the sellers of the Bed and Breakfast accepted another offer, releasing us from our contract. For a few minutes, I was pretty disappointed—thinking our historic home dreams weren’t going to happen the way I had planned. But by the end of the same day, I found another house that had just gone on the market—only a few streets away, in an even more desirable part of the Azalea District. It was a beautiful little Tudor home with a finished garage apartment that was just as lovely.
We made an offer that evening, but this time the contingency wasn’t ideal. A non-contingent offer came in the same day, and the sellers chose that one. So, we kept searching.
It wasn’t a total loss, though. Although the Greek Revival style of Elmwood still had my heart, I was becoming very drawn to the asymmetrical design, rounded doors, and classic lines of the Tudor style. It reminded me of the grand European architecture I’d admired over the years—blended with cottage charm. Which, of course, made the search even more difficult. I felt a bit all over the place… as did my Pinterest board.
With our daughter moving fifteen hours away for college and our empty nest approaching, we shifted our focus to getting our house sold and getting Ava ready for the big move. I still kept my eye on Zillow (as did our realtor), but the priority became settling her into life in Savannah and making our move (when it did happen) a little smoother.
Weeks passed with no luck selling our house or finding our future home. I guess timing really is everything. It wasn’t until months after we dropped Ava off and drove away a crying mess, that we received a text from our other daughter Bailey (she’s not really ours—but we claim her) saying: “Also, just stay in Longview and do this house!”