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fixer-upper

fixer-upper

11 4.5
A house or other home that needs repairs and is sold for a low price
  • noun
  • /ˈfɪkərˌʌpər/
  • Informal
translation icon : casa para reformar
  • After a few months of hard work, they turned the old fixer-upper into a beautiful home.
  • buy a fixer-upper
  • bedroom fixer-upper
  • fixer-upper house

It was either cheap fixer uppers or high end.

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Examples

  • This lovely fixer-upper has great potential once it's been renovated.

  • My husband and I got a fixer-upper for our first home to save money.

    Blog text (29)
  • See we created value in the house by buying a fixer upper, buying something that needed some love.

  • This what they call a real fixer upper, huh?

  • Yeah, it's really just a weekend fixer-upper for us right now.

  • Cozy and affordable, this lovely fixer-upper is the perfect place for a dynamic couple like you.

  • If you're considering buying a fixer-upper, as mine is, be honest with yourself: do you like fixing things? Doing projects?

    Blog text (29)
  • We live in a rural community and bought a decently sized fixer-upper with a huge yard for fairly cheap.

    Blog text (29)
  • The two bought a fixer-upper home in Phoenix, AZ, for what seemed to be a steal—$1.8 million.

    Blog text (13)
  • In five years, they'd converted their large Spanish stucco house from the dark "needs a little TLC" fixer-upper that the broker had sold them into an elegant home.

    Fiction book (1998)

Synonyms

handyman's special
vsfixer-upper
  • US
6.7

A house sold cheaply because it needs a lot of repair

has the same meaning but is the more common everyday term
landlord special
vsfixer-upper
  • Jargon
8.1

A cheaper apartment with few repairs or updates

refers to a property sold cheaply because it needs repair rather than a rental

How Run-down

dilapidated
18 6.2
fixer-upper
  • Informal
11 4.5
well-kept
7 1.8

Surface Forms

fixer-upper singular
fixer-uppers plural

Morphology

fixer-upper = fixer + upper (semi-transparent) = up + fix + er + er

The compound is broadly interpretable as something that needs to be 'fixed up', but the real-estate sense is conventional rather than fully predictable from the parts.

Etymology

Fixer-upper comes from the idea of something you 'fix up'; it combines fix ('to repair') and up ('make better'), so a fixer-upper is a house sold cheaply because it needs repair and you can improve it.