W

hile house hunting in East Dallas, the first thing Shannon Green noticed when she opened the front door of the Junius Heights home was the smell.

“It reeked so bad. It was disgusting,” Green remembers. “I had the door open for like 30 seconds. I didn’t even want to walk inside.”

As an interior designer, Green was looking for a fixer-upper, but she quickly determined the house was more work than she wanted — until she couldn’t get it out of her head.

“I kept thinking about it,” she says. “So I went back and walked through it, saw how bad it was and I thought, ‘OK, I really think I can make this place work.’ ”

It wasn’t until the closing that she learned Junius Heights is a historic district with strict codes about what renovations homeowners can and can’t make. She hesitated.