It’s a true island treasure, carefully protected and preserved for over eight decades. The “Morning Glories” home was first delivered to Sanibel back in 1926, straight from a Sears Roebuck catalogue.

“This one is our pride and joy. It was lived in as a winter residence for a good part of the time from 1926 until 2001,” Sanibel Museum & Village President Alex Werner said Friday.

The “Morning Glories” house was delivered to Sanibel by barge in 30,000 pieces and assembled in a matter of months entirely by hand.

Despite 85 years of wear-and-tear and over half a dozen hurricanes, the home is still standing.

“Charlie came in in 2004, took four shingles off the roof,” Werner said.

But “Morning Glories” paint job was a different story. Historians suspect the home’s interior had gone untended for over ten years.

John Grey spent weeks researching the job.

“You could probably come in and there just paint it. But it would just be another paint job. A building like this deserves and requires something more than that,” John Grey of John Grey Painting said Friday.

Instead, Grey developed the colors, paying tribute to the home’s rich heritage. A job well done, in painting history the perfect shade.

“History’s kind of put off to the side. This is one way of showing history, living history, to a lot of the kids, and a lot of the people in their 30′s and 40′s who never knew about this,” Werner said.

The Sanibel Historical Museum & Village is closed to the public until November. For more information, visit their website at www.sanibelmuseum.org.

Article first appeared on WinkNews.com.

Home prices spiked up 17 percent in Lee County in September compared to a year earlier, even as the flood of distressed sales ebbed.

The median price of an existing single-family home sold in Lee County in September jumped to $110,600, according to statistics released Thursday by Florida Realtors.

There were 1,127 single-family homes sold in September, up 2 percent from 1,102 a year earlier, said the group’s report, which counts sales completed with the assistance of a Realtor.

The Naples Area Board of Realtors provides its data to the Florida Realtors, but doesn’t allow them to be publicly available. A separate release issued by the board said the median price in September was $169,000, up from $161,000 a year earlier. There were 491 sales in September, compared to 513 in September 2010.

In another report also released Thursday by the National Association of Realtors, the number of Americans who bought previously occupied homes fell in September. Home sales are on pace to match last year’s dismal figures — the worst in 13 years.

Denny Grimes of Denny Grimes & Co. at Royal Shell in Fort Myers said the significance of Lee’s statistics in September is that things are going well even as the number of short sales and foreclosure sales has fallen off.

Traditional sales “are picking up the slack,” he said. “Our market has almost flip-flopped” since 2008 when 70 percent of sales were distressed. Now only 20 percent are — 13 percent short sales and 7 percent sales by banks that took a property back in foreclosure.

In a short sale, the bank agrees to reduce the amount of its loan so a home can be sold at current market value.

The inventory of unsold homes has also contributed to a stronger market, Grimes said: only 800 houses under $100,000 are available for sale now, down from 4,200 three years ago.

Real estate agent Cheryl Turner of John R. Wood Realtors in Naples said the stronger prices there are due to an increased confidence by would-be retirees that the worst is over for the national economy and the local real estate market.

“What I’m seeing is people in their 50s, but thinking when they’re ready to retire the markets going to have recovered,” she said. “They’re still in a position to pay for it while the market is down. They can get a foot in the door before the market recovers.”

Even so, Turner said, “They’re buying a little less.”

Statewide, the median price was down 1 percent from $135,000 to $133,900 and the number of sales was up 10 percent from 132,723 to 15,036.

The national association said that home sales fell 3 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.91 million homes. That’s below the 6 million that economists say is consistent with a healthy housing market.

The housing market has been hobbled by foreclosures, weak demand and falling home prices.

Last year 4.91 million previously occupied homes were sold, the lowest level since 1997.

— The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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