A fixer-upper that is also a dream home

(Mark Wilson/Globe Staff Photo) The coachman's house and two associated buildings are up for grabs.

A state program will offer some lucky person the chance to live rent-free in a beautiful home on a lush four-acre estate overlooking the Merrimack River in Newburyport. There's only one catch: the home's not so beautiful. Not yet, anyways.

The state Department of Conservation and Recreation said today it has issued a request for proposals from the public for the rehabilitation of the dilapidated coachman's house complex at Maudslay State Park.

Under the department's Historic Curatorship program, in exchange for rehabilitating and maintaining the property, the people who submit the winning proposal will get to live there rent-free.

The 1903 coachman's house features crossed gambrel gables, built-in hutches, and diamond pane windows. Nestled among hardwood trees, mountain laurel, and rhododendrons, the house, a barn, and a teahouse, once were part of the 480-acre Moseley Estate. In a Globe photo gallery, it looks like a romantic ruin.

But the house is the ultimate fixer-upper: the roof needs to be replaced, as well as the septic, electrical, heating, and plumbing systems.

A Globe reporter on a visit in November saw the sun shining through a hole in the ceiling of the kitchen pantry, mushrooms growing on the ceiling on the second floor, and the boarded-up holes of a 100-year-old latrine.

So far, nine properties have been rehabilitated under the program, which DCR Commissioner Richard K. Sullivan Jr. said was "an innovative and entrepreneurial approach to preserving the history and culture of our park system."

This article originally appeared in the Local News Updates blog on Boston.com