2nd Trimester
Sequoyah Shoars
member
don't EVER buy a really old house.
Sequoyah Shoars
member
unless you want to be surprised and disgusted everytime you make a small renovation.
example?
house built in 1936... i could go on and on... tonight we found out 2 things.
1) when you water the front yard the water seeps into the basement... which is the nursery. which is supposed to be carpeted in the morning. which has already been painted. we know there's no mold, but now dh has to sop up all the water and caulk everything shut before the carpet guys get here at 8am.
2) he's pulling up the old carpet on the stairs. they insulated the walls with NEWSPAPER. and the carpet pad has to be asbestos. he is wearing a mask and i am not allowed in that general area of the house.
this shiit never ceases to amaze me.
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Re: don't EVER buy a really old house.
OMG I am so sorry. That uber sucks.
I would be scared of getting mold, though. And mold can be deadly to even an adult. =
renovations in general are a PITA but when surprises are involved it gets even worse.
After DH and I renovated our first house I said "never again!" Now we just update when necessary.
GL w/ your projects!!
First House - 1937 build
That house doesn't have a flat floor in the entire place. On the plus side - it is SOLID redwood. Now if the foundation could only hold it up...
Second House - 1905 build (DH was renovating when we met)
Dead petrified rats in the walls, a floor downstairs that was 4 inches lower on one side than the other, black widow spiders in the attic which will hopefully be eaten by the birds living up there, mold, leaky tub pipe upstairs which filled up the floor and then dropped with sheet rock and everything on to the bed downstairs, brick foundation (not good in Earthquake country but since this house already survived the big one in 06 I think we'll be ok as the rest of the town was leveled in that quake) ... I could go on. This place is amazing.
Ours was built in 1964 and has asbestos popcorn ceilings and tile in the bathrooms. Nasty as$ed shiz I tell ya!
Our next house is definitely going to be newer.
PS - The newspaper on the walls is totally standard.
Have you replaced your wiring? A friend of mine down the street had a house that was also built in the depression. They had found lots of little pieces of wire, twisted it together and insulated it with wadded up newspaper. The fact that it hadn't burnt down the day after it was installed was a miracle. The fact that it lasted 70 years was amazing.
I replaced my wiring as soon as I could. It was the best investment I made. There are a lot of out of work electricians out there right now...
omg, whyyyy did you tell me this? i haven't had our wiring checked... maybe i should get on that, like now. i do know that most of the wires our lights run on are fairly new, dh has replaced almost all the lights in the house and he had to look at the wiring before he did it. now the outlets... i dunno about that. and most of the house is newer than '36, just the basement and the front room are original. it used to be an army barracks.
but yeah, i know what you mean about flat surfaces. i don't think levels existed then?
I hear ya! I have a victorian built in 1892. The "little finds" as we went through the renovations never ceased to surprise me. The house was supposed to just need cosmetic updating when we bought it, but 9 years later we have wound up spending more on renovations than we did on the house! Nothing is simple. Take the nursery for example. All we needed was wallpaper removed and paint. For any other house this would be a simple/cheap job. Well, apparantly the nursery was, years ago, shoddily converted into a second floor makeshift kitchen. The gas lines and plumbing lines in the walls were removed and the holes in the paster were... surprise... filled with newspaper! What a disaster. A job that should have cost us a few hundred cost us $2500. We can't handle these big issues ourselves so we are always stuck using contractors.
That said I LOVE my house! We are mostly done renovations and it really is my dream house now, so much character and charm. Yes we spent alot on renovations but I still paid much less than a comparable newer house plus even in this market the renovations gave us a HUGE appreciation in value. Totally worth it.
Ahh! What a pain! I'm so sorry you're having to deal w/ that. Thats the problem w/ buying a house, you have to fix everything & you don't notice these problems until you move in!
Our nursery discovery in our house built in 1980 (not very old but still) was LOTS of termite damage that was supposed to be "repaired." At least thats what it said in the CONTRACT! If by repair you mean they painted over it & put a border over the crack in the wall, then sure, they repaired it. We were so disgusted when we started taking that border down & noticed it! So DH had to replace a whole wall & a half & what should have been a weekend of painting turned in to a month of renovations!
Mine was built around this time too (1850's). We completely gutted it, re-wired, insolated, drywalled, piped etc. You'd be amazed by the things and old house has in it behind the walls (OLD dead mice/rat/bat, wood damage, fire damage, etc). They cut some of the beams for "new piping" back in the 50's which made the floors uneven and sagged because they cut to much of the beam and left maybe a 1/2 inch for support. There were also a few spots where nails were hammered into the floor then you can see it went into the old wiring (not a good thing). The most amazing thing I found when gutting the house was an old door to a fireplace in the upstairs bathroom. We redid all of it and it's so beautiful! Old houses really are nice once you have them fixed up. And for some reason seem to last longer??
that's why bums insulate their clothes with newspaper when they sleep outside.
One of the houses my family renovated (we've done a few) was built in the 50's. Every. Single. Floor. in the house had multiple layers of flooring underneath it. The kitchen had 8 layers, laminate wood on top, a few layers of linoleum, and some stick on square tiles, and the last layer was carpet squares. in the kitchen.
The 1900's era house was the grossest, by far, though.