Caleb Bauer pleaded his case using the Internet. It was a giant case to plead. In question was a Millstadt, Ill., hillside with a steep, 65-foot drop from the house his clients were building to a lovely, cypress-encircled, 3-acre lake at the bottom of the hill. The clients wanted access to the lake to fish and enjoy the beauty of the shimmering, mirror-like surface of the water. They also wanted a natural looking stream and waterfall like the one Caleb and his brothers Josh and David had constructed and maintained at their home in St. Albans on the Missouri side of the river.

John and Kim McCurdy were lucky to even catch a glimpse of their Ladue home from the road prior to purchasing it in November 2013. “It’s a 25-year-old home,” Kim says, “it was so overgrown that people drive by and ask if it’s a new house.” But despite the ‘mind-boggling’ masses of invasive honeysuckle, the puddles of standing water, and the “deferred maintenance issues,” as Kim gingerly understates, they saw the house and they saw the potential.  “We knew what we were in for,” she says.