See how a couple transformed a $95,000 haunted Victorian mansion in Michigan into a colorful, maximalist wonderland

• Michelle Carder and Michael Ochs moved into a century-old Victorian home in Michigan in May 2016.
• Carder has transformed the home with bright colors and murals that captivate her Instagram audience.
• Over 126,000 people follow her renovation, which has cost $250,000 to date.

Victorian homes are an alluring, lifelong love affair for Michelle Carder, who's fascinated with the era's grandeur and history.

"I love the fanciful and eccentric architecture," Carder, a lawyer, told Insider. "The Victorian era was the first time in history that average people could afford to decorate their homes beautifully. That makes me happy."

In May 2016, Carder, 58, and her husband, Michael Ochs, 63, bought their first Victorian property: a 5,200-square-foot home built in the early 1900s in Cadillac, Michigan, a small city about 95 miles north of Grand Rapids.

The couple purchased the four-bedroom, three-bathroom home for $95,000 from an investment group that was "desperate to get rid of this thing," Carder said. The purchase price was a fraction of the $1.3 million they received from the sale of their Orange County, California, home.

Much of those funds — $250,000, to be exact — have been poured into transforming the ho-hum Victorian home into a maximalist wonderland. Aside from gut renovations in the kitchen and attic, Carder has also purchased thousands of dollars of distinctive and whimsical art and furniture pieces that captivate the 126,000 Instagram followers who watch her renovate the home room-by-room.

Carder's love of maximalism has evolved over time

Carder said she hasn't always been a maximalist, but the home's architecture seemed to call for the over-the-top interior design.

"Victorians were true maximalists as they mixed pattern and color and were connoisseurs of curiosities, which they collected and displayed en masse without regard for what the upper crust deemed to be in good taste," she said.

In the same vein, Carder has spent the past several years scouring Facebook Marketplace and antique shops to decorate her home. One of her more stand-out finds is an alligator head that "came basically from a gas station" in Florida, she said.

Carder's even become a muralist, a skill that she developed designing and painting the attic's flora and fauna-inspired ceiling.

Apart from colorfully painted walls and lush pillows, the attic comes with an extra flourish: a resident ghost. Carder said it may not be the only one residing in the home.

"The people who moved in the home behind us said they saw a little girl in the attic bathroom window," she said. "We've also been told that there's a man in the attic that likes to look around and observe people."

Carder said she's "not willing to engage" with the supernatural presence. "I just block it out," she said.

The ghosts, however, remain mostly upstairs. Downstairs, Carder has indulged in more earthy delights like a bar constructed from an antique parlor organ that she and her husband bought for $800 in 2021. It cost an additional $200 to transform the organ into a fully functioning wet bar.

Carder said the parlor organ was "on a riverboat that washed ashore on some farmland sometime in the 1920s. It was salvaged and then ended up in the hands of an elderly couple."

There's still lots of work to do on their 'forever home'

One of the largest projects Carder and Ochs undertook was the kitchen remodel. The couple removed everything except the room's original wood floors, which got a fresh coat of harlequin-pattern paint. The couple purchased the retro appliances that harken back to the 1950s from Ebay for just $1,000 total.

"They had literally just been listed and we snapped them up," Carder said. "We had no idea that any of it was going to fit, but I knew that the stove alone would typically be priced around $1,000."

She added, "It was kind of a no brainer."

The home's second-floor bathroom is designed around an Alphonse Mucha reproduction. The renowned Art Nouveau artist came into prominence towards the end of the Victotrian era. Carder chose the pink and red work to give her bathroom a romantic ambiance.

"I love Mucha," she said. "I really found out about him as an artist when we bought the shower mural."

The couple plans to spend an additional $50,000 renovating the home. Some of the projects on their list are improving the exterior of the home and amping up its landscaping. While the work may be costly, she still loves designing her "forever home."

"I feel gratitude that I have the time and the resources to be able to do it," she said.