NORWAY – A new buyer has swooped in to grab the Odd Fellows Hall after the young couple who originally planned to buy it backed down this week.

As soon as they bowed out, the president of Dennwood Builders Inc. of Gorham offered $150,000 for the dilapidated Main Street building, Marcy Boughter of the Growth Council of Oxford Hills said. The sale was made official Thursday.

“Welcome to Norway,” Selectman Les Flanders told Rick Lockwood, the company’s owner, at Thursday night’s selectmen’s meeting.

“It’s a nice project, a beautiful building and Norway does continue to grow,” Lockwood said. The three-story brick building at 201 Main St. overlooks Pennesseewassee Stream in the back.

After the meeting, Lockwood briefly described his business. He has developed residential and commercial buildings in southern and western Maine, as well as in New Hampshire, he said. He had initially been attracted to the Odd Fellows Hall because of the state grant money still attached to it from the days when the Growth Council had attempted to restore it, he explained.

That grant money – about $268,000 from a Municipal Investment Trust Fund – was lost because of a missed deadline due to a last-minute scramble to find an owner for the hall. The state’s Department of Economic and Community Development wanted the money back to put toward another state project.

But of the original $500,000 grant, about $95,000 has been salvaged for Lockwood to use without having to match it, Boughter said.

Boughter said the first couple, a woman based in Massachusetts, and a local man, told her that the project was too much for them to handle. So she called the next prospective buyer on the list: Lockwood.

Originally, when the Growth Council put the building up for sale last summer after deciding it could not afford to rehabilitate it, five interested parties made bids on the project.

Lockwood said he will likely invest around $800,000 in the building, which dates back to the late 1800s. It has been empty since the Growth Council bought it from the Odd Fellows Lodge 16 for $68,000 in 2002.

The developer said he envisions putting retail space on the first floor and offices in the second and third floors.

And for the basement, he said he would like to attract a four-star restaurant, with views of the stream and the new townhouses and office development being built across it on the former C.B. Cummings & Sons dowel mill site.