While he doesn't explicitly say it, I'm going to bet that the renovation, and likely even just the essential parts (roof, rewiring etc) of the renovation cost considerably more than that.
Only in the most desirable of desirable areas. I live on the east coast (almost literally, only a few blocks from the ocean) and a similar church sold last year in the town next door for just over $300,000.
If you wanted to actually use it day to day though, it would cost so much more. Just the temperature control for such area would be either super expensive or require a complete redesign of the space to split it into lower floors.
It would, but that's partly a matter of size, and a large house will cost a lot to heat or cool as well. I'm in the UK (cool climate), and there are a lot of smaller chapels which have been converted to use as houses quite successfully.
Branford is within 15 minutes of Piqua and Greensville which are both mid-sized towns that have everything you need for everyday life, and a lot of what you'd want. To me that is much more relevant than how far it is to a large city, which you would be visiting much less frequently. 15 minutes is a normal commuting time within a city, so not really the middle of nowhere.
Honestly, Americans are probably more tolerant and accepting of long distances compared to most peer countries. 45 minutes of driving to hit some kind of city is very far most of the time in Japan or most of Europe, where the population density is higher than the states.
Growing up in the UK, 45 minutes was about the ‘if we’re going there in the evening we’re going to need to get a hotel’ boundary. Now I live in the US it’s a short drive.
It’s amazing how perspective changes. If you haven’t experienced it I suspect it’s impossible to understand, because this feels crazy to write. It’s true though.
It is probably true that in a majority of those land areas (Finland, Sweden, Norway) you are more than 45 minutes of driving from the next proper city.
However, the proportion of people who live like that is not very high. People mostly live where other people live.
All a matter of perspective, I suppose. I'd call that the middle of nowhere, but I've always lived either in a medium-sized (>1 million people) city or its suburbs.
In particular it doesn't seem to have public transport at _all_, at least per Google Maps; I'd consider anywhere where your only option to get to a city was to drive to be serious middle of nowhere, though I gather that this is a more common condition in the US.
See, this in and of itself is an interesting perspective. The US only has 9-ish cities with a population over 1 million (according to Wikipedia and going by the population within city limits, if you go by "urban area" it's more like 45), so I would call a city of over a million people to be a large city, pretty definitively. But then, I never spent much time in million-plus-person cities growing up, so I'm just not accustomed to thinking about them that way. To me a medium-sized city starts around 500,000 people.
To provide another possible perspective, this is of course peanuts compared to China, which has 11 cities with populations over 10,000,000 and over 100 cities with populations over 1,000,000 (again, Wikipedia numbers) and a fairly urbanized population as a whole. That's a country where I could see someone calling a 1,000,000-person city "medium-sized," and if anything they might be on the low-end.
I lived in a place that was a 30 min drive from a similar sized place (Cambridge, UK). It totally felt like the middle of nowhere. It's not so much about the numbers but about the feeling of a place:
* No transport links means total dependence on car,
* No natural features of any note, in particular no rivers or hills,
* Unknown to people outside of the very small population that lives there,
* Hard to convince people to come and visit you and when they do they're disappointed.
