CORSICANA – If Jim and Sharon Wade hadn't taken the scenic route to their home in Southlake from Fredericksburg, they might never have spied their dream house.

At first, they could not imagine buying, moving and renovating a 100-year-old structure.

"I could tell it was really neat, but I was afraid to look at it," Mrs. Wade remembers of the dilapidated Queen Anne Victorian that was for sale near Corsicana. "It was a wreck. It needed to be fixed up, and I thought, 'Good luck to the people doing it.' "

Little did Mrs. Wade know that she, her husband and their two children, Spencer, 20, and Lindsay, 15, would be the ones working to restore the home to its original splendor. Mr. Wade couldn't stop thinking about the house and persuaded his wife to take on the challenge, reasoning that a restoration couldn't be more costly than building a house from scratch. He would later eat those words, because the project ended up costing twice as much as the couple originally thought.

It started out reasonably enough: The purchase price was $15,000. But next, they had to move it to their lakeside lot near Corsicana, originally purchased for new construction, 12 miles down the road – or rather, across 12 miles of pasture fenced with barbed wire, with no road access and populated with cows.

The Wades had planned to keep the original second floor, but in the end it would have been too expensive to relocate a house that size. The couple spent $35,000 to demolish the second floor, slice the remaining structure in half, load it onto oversize flat-bed trailers and inch along to its new resting place.

"Our theory was that we already had most of the house there, so it would cost less [to rebuild], which we quickly came to realize was not true," Mrs. Wade says. "But we are both still glad we made the decision to go through with it."

Just as Murphy's law would have it, the day they moved the house was one of the rainiest the area had seen in years. Exposing the original 1 ½ -inch quartersawn oak floors to the elements warped them. Once they got the house to its new site, the rain continued to saturate the floors because there was no roof.

"We would bring tarps and cover the floors up, and then we'd find them blowing into the trees later," she says. "We couldn't protect it." Over the next four years of reconstruction, however, the floors dried and flattened.

The Wades took apart the house board by board, installing air conditioning and insulation, expanding the master bath and kitchen and updating the plumbing. Along the way they hired a carpenter and grabbed friends and family to help rebuild the coffered ceiling, wainscoting and plate rail. Because picture molding isn't available these days, they had it custom milled to recreate the original look. They also added a new second floor to replace the original.

They say they knew they would spend years fixing up their house, and they were pleasantly surprised it only took six of the 10 years they had budgeted.

"My kids have grown up doing this. Lindsay was 9 when we bought it, and now she's 15," Mrs. Wade says.

The family remembers nights, before the roof was rebuilt, when they headed to the lake with sleeping bags and their tools. In the early years, they had a shell of a house and a big job ahead of them.

"We would take baths with no ceiling, just looking up at the stars," says Mrs. Wade.

Progress was slow at first; the family tried to go back and forth from their home in Southlake to be their own general contractor.

"Number one, we had no experience; number two, we lived an hour and a half away," Mrs. Wade says. "To do this, you really have to trust other people to do the work."

They found a carpenter they liked and showed him the house. His first reaction was, "Got a match?" He told them the house was beyond the scope of the work he usually did.

"But I liked him. He was honest and had a good reputation, so I said, 'Look, just come do my kitchen,' and we took it from there," Mrs. Wade remembers.

Proud of her family's hard work, Mrs. Wade decided to send in a few photographs of project to the magazine This Old House. The response surprised her: Editors wanted to see more. Mrs. Wade mailed 186 additional pictures to the magazine.

The 12-foot ceilings, multiple pocket doors, deep wrap-around front porch and other elements of the 100-year-old house charmed the magazine's editors. This Old House chose the Wade home as a contender for its June reader-chosen remodeling contest. The Wades won it, and their home was featured on the cover with an eight-page spread inside.

"I was just hoping for a little bitty picture of the kitchen," says Mrs. Wade of the magazine's feature. "I never thought they'd say, 'wow' and want to see the whole house remodel."

The worst part, Mrs. Wade says, was moving the house. The rest "was just time and money," she says with a laugh. But she and her husband feel that by putting so much effort into the project they made their family stronger in the process.

"I tell people it's kind of like having a baby," Mrs. Wade says. "It's so painful during the process, but then you see the result and you're so happy and you realize it wasn't so bad after all."