List Price: $975,000
Sale Price: $915,000

The Property: Built as a butter factory in the early decades of the 20th century, this old commercial structure on a wide lot in Edgewater Glen (a subneighborhood of Edgewater) underwent a thorough transition into a single-family home beginning in 2005. It was being used as a plumbing supplies warehouse when Ginger Bonneau first spotted it. “I thought it would make an awesome house,” she recalled. “It looked south onto a yard that’s 50 feet wide, so you’d get a lot of sun.”

Bonneau, a real-estate agent, covered the face of the building with a Tuscan-style irregular stone and spread a broad living space across the front of the interior, with a pair of doors opening onto a terrace and a big lawn. Atop the roof she created a deck that is about 1,500 square feet and concealed from the street and alley by parapets. “You can do a lot of outdoor entertaining with all that room,” she said.

The 4,200-square-foot interior has four bedrooms, a large kitchen, and stylish bathrooms, as seen in this video that Bonneau posted when she first put the property on the market in 2008. She said that the building had been a factory for churning milk, brought by train from Wisconsin, into butter. Old photographs showed the butter being delivered around the city by horse and buggy, she added. The sale closed November 19; the buyers are not yet identified in public records.

Price Points: According to the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, Bonneau bought the property in 2005 for $562,000. She says she spent a similar amount to turn the disheveled old structure into a single-family home for herself, with hopes of selling it for $1.5 million at the height of the market. (You might even say she expected it to sell “like buttah.”) I could not determine what Bonneau was asking for the property in 2008, and she declined to say. She took it off the market later in 2008 and listed it again this past July at $999,000. Less than two weeks after a mid-October price cut to $975,000, she had it under contract for $915,000. That’s about 91 percent of her July asking price and 61 percent of what Bonneau once envisioned getting for the place.

Listing Agent: Ginger Bonneau of @Properties; 312-254-0200 or gingerbonneau@atproperties.com