Northbend British Columbia - Across from Boston Bar and over the mighty Fraser River, a pair of empty, century-old railway houses sit dilapidated in the small canyon community of Northbend.
 
It's been decades since they've been called home by anything other than vermin, but when the Fraser Valley Regional District put them up for sale in early 2014, hundreds of tire kickers announced their hopes of snatching up the two Canadian Pacific Railway relics for a song.
 
Their roofs leak and sag under the weight of moss.
 
Stucco flakes from their exteriors and their walls have been redecorated with graffiti.
 
Some locals even call them the "Ghost Houses".
 
But their foundations are sound and their frames sturdy, and earlier this year, the FVRD finally found a suitable buyer willing to meet the asking price, a dollar each.
 
"I know how to swing a hammer and I'm the eternal optimist, for better or for worse," said Steve Deller, the Vancouver entrepreneur who got the call last winter that it was his $2 the FVRD wanted.
 
Indeed, Deller's already put thousands of hours into restoring a heritage home he owns in Vancouver's Mount Pleasant district, and he seems to have won over both the FVRD and Northbend community with his pitches for a "Highline House Project".
 
The houses, built in 1913 for CPR employees and their families, stand on a quiet street just a two-minute stroll from a view of the Fraser.
 
Across the way, there's a swimming pool and a community centre, which is where Deller met with some of Northbend's 100 or so residents to discuss his plans.
 
He's built a web site where he sums up the four concepts:  a bed and breakfast, owner-occupied housing, an arts collective, and social housing.
 
"There's so many people in this province that have some kind of a connection to these two houses" and their CPR history, Deller said.
 
"I'm very sensitive to what they would like to see in their community, and the bed and breakfast was by far the concept that they liked the most."
 
Deller leans the same way, envisioning one house as being owner-occupied and the other a bed and breakfast decorated with works by Aboriginal artists from the Fraser Canyon, he said.
 
The sale of the houses was subject to the buyer restoring their exteriors to their original state, a condition Deller said he's keen to meet.
 
Inside, however, he's got carte blanche to do as he pleases.
 
The houses' lath and plaster walls, which have stayed intact, will have to come down for rewiring and plumbing.
 
Deller suspects there's been camp-outs in the houses, which are now boarded up with plywood, but no one's ever willingly done any damage, he said.
 
He hopes that with a bit of his own elbow grease, he'll spend less than $200,000 restoring each house.
 
"The bones are good," he said.
 
"They'll be as close as feasible to the original."
 
But before any of this happens, Deller needs to actually buy them.
 
The FVRD still owns both houses because a covenant on the land and its subdivision prevents their immediate transfer.
 
Terry Raymond, director in Boston Bar and Northbend for the FVRD, said the regional district is currently sorting that out with the Ministry of Transportation, which gets final say on partitioning out the two lots where the houses stand.
 
The transfer is stalled, however, because the lots lie within a hazard zone, where a nearby creek was deemed a concern by the province long ago.
 
Deller expects that will be dealt with by next summer, and Raymond hopes so, too.
 
"I think it will be a boost to the economy in the area and I'm quite looking forward to it," Raymond said.
 
Right now, he said, there's a big push for history tourism in the region, which saw big changes in the late 1850s with the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush and again in the 1880s with the construction of the CPR line.
 
Deller's bed and breakfast would give tourists yet another reason to make a stop in the area.
 
"The houses have been sitting there for years and years," Raymond said.
 
"The community wanted something done with them, didn't want to see them just torn down, because of the historic value to the community dating back from when the railroad built them."
 
Deller said he hopes other entrepreneurs look to Northbend, "a gem that people are missing", and tap into a tourism market kept alive by attractions such as the REO Rafting Resort and the Hell's Gate Airtram.
 
When the time comes to make the deal official, Deller said he plans to pay for his houses with two loonies.
 
"I think this should be a ceremony," he said with a chuckle.
 
"It should be a bit of a fuss. Because I cannot tell you how much work has gone into being able to make that possible by the regional district."
 
Nick Eagland.