She Used Her Gut Instincts Bruce Buck for The New York Times It took $400,000 and thousands of hours of labor to make the house habitable. For 12 years, Nicole Juday and her family lived across the street from a derelict 19th-century house that was the despair of the neighborhood. It wasn't abandoned, but it may as well have been. A fire had destroyed much of the second floor, and raccoons were living in the attic. In the backyard was the marshy remains of what had once been a swimming pool, a cesspool that parents worried their children might fall into. As for Ms. Juday, she thought that the house would be turned into a residential mental health center, like so many of the other large homes in the Germantown neighborhood here, or that a developer would buy it and raze it, putting up a concrete-block apartment tower. "More than wanting to save the house," she said, "I wanted to save the neighborhood." So in 2010, she and her husband bought the seven-bedroom house and all of its contents from the elderly owner for $125,000. Even at that price, it was no bargain. "I think the house was possibly condemnable," said Ms. Juday, 43. It took another $400,000 and thousands of hours of labor to make it habitable. That included rebuilding it from the studs out, with new wiring, plumbing, roofing and plaster, and installing historically accurate windows and millwork. Beams were added to shore up the structure, and the brick exterior was repointed. The swimming pool was filled in, and an old caved-in Chevy was hauled out of the side yard. Then, a year ago, about halfway through the renovation, Ms. Juday's husband moved out. She has since finished the renovation on her own and started a new job running the horticultural education program for the Barnes Foundation art collection. Ms. Juday's mother, Lisa Montserat, now occupies a suite on the second floor, and Ms. Juday's daughter, Rive, 17, and son, Asa, 14, have their own rooms, which they decorated themselves. Throughout the rest of the house, though, Ms. Juday's eclectic taste is on display. In general, she said, she prefers modern design, but she doesn't like ultramodern style in an older home. "If something doesn't have patina and you're putting it into a place that has a lot of patina," she said, "it can look too anachronistic." On the other hand, she said, "We're not trying to reinterpret some kind of golden age of anything here." She tried to salvage what she could. The round table that sits in the entry hall she found broken in the house, but a local furniture maker refurbished it and covered the top with sheets of zinc punctuated by rivets. The 19th-century dining chairs also came with the house, although one had been thrown out a window and was in pieces on the ground. Ms. Juday had the chairs restored and reupholstered in vintage Scalamandré fabric. The wall dividing the kitchen and the old butler's pantry was removed to create a larger space. New appliances were installed, the original cupboards were restored and rearranged, and the original brick chimney was exposed, creating a textured backdrop for the butcher-block island and a rack of hanging pots. What has such an extensive renovation and the accompanying upheaval taught her? Most of all, Ms. Juday said, she has learned to trust herself. These days, "I don't overthink things," she said. Usually I go with my first instinct.