chunk: Jim Blandings (Cary Grant), a bright account executive in the advertising business, lives with his wife Muriel (Myrna Loy) and two daughters, Betsy (Connie Marshall) and Joan (Sharyn Moffett), in a cramped New York apartment. Muriel secretly plans to remodel their apartment. After rejecting this idea, Jim Blandings comes across an ad for new homes in Connecticut and they get excited about moving. Planning to purchase and "fix up" an old home, the couple contact a real estate agent, who uses them to unload "The Old Hackett Place" in fictional Lansdale County, Connecticut. It is a dilapidated, two-hundred-year-old farmhouse. Blandings purchases the property for more than the going rate for land in the area, provoking his friend/lawyer Bill Cole (Melvyn Douglas) to chastise him for following his heart rather than his head.