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 knock out a wall and remodel their apartment for $7,000 ($73,000 in 2017 dollars). 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 leaning, dilapidated, nearly 200-year old farmhouse on some 35 acres where Horatio Gates stopped to water his horses during the Revolutionary War. The Blandingses purchase the property for 5 times more than the going rate per acre for locals, provoking his friend/lawyer Bill Cole (Melvyn Douglas) to chastise him for following his heart rather than his head.