Yeah, that's a good question. Curious about that too.
And thanks for the listing, gezzy!!
the roof, the roof, the roof
a flat roof is very very expensive to replace
<sigh>
Maybe someone should invite seattlefriend. I think she's pretty much been through the mill with renovations.
Why a flat roof more than a peaked roof, I wonder? More exacting standards because of, well, flatness? (And whattaya doin' with a flat roof in Toronto, anywho?)
Harder to seal, I would suppose. Hot tar and stuff.
flat roof..bad..EXPECIALLY up Northways...ouch! sorry ehBeth!
Hey, SealPoet should be in this discussion..hes got one monster of an old house to renovate.
My house is half-covered with a flat roof, and half with a peaked roof. If i'd known then what i know now (thank you to taunton.com), I'd have had the flat roof replaced with a peaked roof and saved a ton 'o money (and been able to whack in a bunch of insulation at the same time).
The particular style of flat/peaked roof was very popular here just after the turn of the century.
When it needs to be re-done in 25 years, I'll be ready!
(Turn of the century? I thought we were talking about old houses, not brand new ones...)
grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Soz,
You probably already know this but
Realtor.com is a great website to look at available houses in just about any town.
We bought our old house in 1976...built aound 1935.
It has a steeply sloped tin covered roof that has never leaked. We have to have it repainted every three or four years @ a cost of about $500.
Rewiring wasn't all that expensive, but we had some crawl space that allowed the electricians to get easy access.
Getting central heat and a/c can cost a lot; about $10000 in our case in 1980.
I was told, emphatically, that we had to get the kitchen and bathrooms modernized with new appliances, brighter lighting etc.
Those costs can mount up.
Insulation, it seems to me, is a very critical issue. A drafty house is not only uncomfortable but is costly to maintain.
As energy costs rise, we're considering replacing the windows here.
The cost is about $300 each and we have about 15 of them...a tough decision but, when I put my hand against the window sill next to my desk here, I can feel the draft.
Good luck. -rjb-
i am currently looking at a house built in 1905 which is very old for colorado but was updated for plumbing/ wiring 1985, roof is solid as is foundation, all oak planking floors.
rjb, the cost for central a/c - heat is one I'm particularly interested in. A lot of these old houses don't have it, and are otherwise amazing. $10,000 in 1980 has got to be much more now.
Swimpy, thanks, that one has lots of good info per house but doesn't seem to be as thorough as an MLS database I found.
http://allminneapolishomes.com/Templates/Includes/Frame.asp?Page=/Programs/RealEstateTips/
i.e houses on realtor.com are all on MLS, but many houses on MLS are not on realtor.com.
dys, looks good!!
It'll be interesting if I do wind up back in Minneapolis -- I went to a really fantastic elementary school and was trying to figure out what district it was in so we could live there and send the sozlet when she comes of age. I did a Google search and came up with a professional photographer's site featuring some pictures of that school, "which I attended as a child." Had to figure out if I knew him, went to the home page, and there was one of my best friends from 2nd grade! Hadn't seen him in over 20 years. Sent off an email, he wrote write back, and we've been reminiscing about old acquaintances and he told me to let him know if there was any way he could help out if we do move back.
Interesting.
Nobody seems to know for sure how old Castle Timber is, but Township records indicate a baby was born here in 1897. During a renovation project, we discovered newspapers from 1899 and 1900 used as wallpaper (underneath several other layers of more conventional wallpaper). Its a typical old Upper Midwestern farmhouse, with plenty of additions and modifications of varying vintage ... common to the type.
We have done lots of work, some for convenience, a lot out of necessity. One thing about a charming old house; opening up even the simplest remodeling or renovating project will result in surprises, few if any of which are pleasant. Still, we love it. We knew what we were in for when we bought it.
And its close enough to The Twin Cities to make a lunch meeting emminently doable, once you get settled.
timber
Soz - my first house was old - about 1912. I had it well inspected, and they found all the faults (very few) except for the main crack (houses almost all have at least one main crack where I am - VERY bad soil, and a biggish earthquake in 1954) which was no problem, except cosmetically, and the old termite damage. The termites had eaten away half my bedroom floor, and had made a travesty of part of the jarrah (highly termite resistant timber!) skirtings. My bedroom floor was half old baltic pine, and half particle board! The rest of the lovely baltic was intact, though, except for where they had turned the old back of the house into a lovely garden room - where they turned into cheap pinus radiata, with a rubble divide - as we found when I was considering stripping all the carpets and getting the boards polished.
Drawbacks of the age? I had to replace the roof - which the inspection told me I would - and it was a VERY highly pitched roof!
The high ceilings were beautiful - they give such elegance and grace to a place - BUT they add a lot to heating and cooling bills. Also, when it comes to painting them!!! Oy veh! So high! So MUCH wall! So MUCH paint! Also - I installed ducted reverse-cycle heating/cooling, and the intake - whose filters had to be cleaned regularly - was on the ceiling - at the very tippy-top of my fear level on a ladder - such an adventure whenever I did it. And I flatly wussed out of replacing the batteries in the fire-detectors!
The lovely, solid, uneven and character-full plaster is also very old and crumbly when drilled - as the man who came to install the new telephone line found out when he had to use the biiiiiiiiig cover-plate.
The gutters and so on were so high that, again, I flatly wussed out and paid to have them cleaned - and I had my heart in my mouth whenever they were done. As for PAINTING them - aaaaaarggghhhhhhhh!
My home was in what we call federation style - though mine was a beautifully simple and elegant example - nonetheless, all those elegant verandah posts, and the lovely wooden decorative work on the wood supports - and the lovely finials soooooo verry far away, up there, on top of the highest points of the very high and interestingly arranged roof - all these had to be painted and maintained.
One day, the house decided to lean on the telephone wire that was oddly arranged and came from my partner maisonette (duplex?) through the dividing wall and down to my place. It cut it. Old houses have these whims...
When next door built on - very well and neatly done - the house also decided to do some odd settling, which meant the roof at the back no longer drained properly, which meant, in turn, that despite numerous attempts to fix the previously perfectly happy system, that I often had rain watering the INDOOR potplants! Old houses get ornery about changes...
I moved to a seventies government building, made over into apartments.
The crackless walls are lovely - but, of course, lack the character of the old ones. However - I can paint them easily. I haven't, yet, cos I can't decide what to do. When the ceilings need painting, it will be pretty easy. The windows are steel - well the glass isn't, but you know what I mean - THEY WILL NEVER NEED PAINTING!!!!!
I am not surrounded with paint-thirsty and complicated bits of wood.
I think old and new are both lovely, if the quality and design is good and what you like.
I think I can say that we have one of the oldest house youll hear of (unless you live in a Norman castle) Our place is an old Federalist style (center hall and stairway with rooms off the main hallways all very symmetrical)
It was built in the mid 1700s.When we bought it 1979, it was in need of major rebuild and repair. We lived in a trailer that we bought and moved to the property and gradually moved to the house as we got rooms and heating and electricity re done. I had all the major stuff like masonry, structural carpentry, plumbing electricity, done by contractors so I didnt have to worry about making a living and working on the house. It was murder. We felt, alternatively ,moments of great pride , punctuated by extended times of great depression when we discovered something like an entire inside wall of the house had been in a fire sometime in the 1800s and the walls needed total structural rebuilding. we have the requisite 8 fireplaces, all of which work now , and most of which,when we first broke into them, contained all kinds of dead wild things and disgusting corpses and skeletons of deceased habitues of chimneys. There was a clinging of about 150 Myotis bats living in one fireplace. we had a family discussion as to the most humane way of evicting them. We wound up with a large mist net borrowed from Penn State and we caught most of the bats in one evening.
The house came with a slate roof that was LAST installed in 1812 (there were slates with names and dates on various roof sections).This roof age was unacceptable, since slate nails were eroding and during wind storms wed have slates blowing about. This condition had led to the deterioration of the top courses of the stone wall mortar . SO We , had the entire roof and upper floor of the place just about rebuilt from the last courses of Quoins to the roof peaks. Then we rebuilt the roof and put on a rolled seam metal roof (this is a landmark now cuz people stop in and ask "who did the roof?"
We love it now. The house sits in the corner of our farm , so when we bought it , we paid under 60K and got over 130 acres. Weve purchased more land like a woods and wetland area that someone wanted to put a vacation camp.
Would, you ask? would we do this again??-----
HELL NO!!!!!!!!. Its been a money pit that can only be appreciated when done. Its got all the things we like, small human sized rooms where we can reach the ceiling beams.Huge beams in the ceilings to hang stuff from
(modern houses have given up on the extra space you derive from a good ceiling beam. House trends now seem to prefer homes built by the cubic , rather than square foot). The rooms in this place are smaller than most modern homes and we had to engage in a project that allowed us to air condition and add things like cable TV in rooms that were originally used to store foods or be a post office or dining rooms and keeping rooms. We have a post office as one of the rooms and this one we left as is , we only cleaned and decrittered it. Theres a cage and a high postal desk and letter boxes with the names of the area farmers still there. as in 1845.
The house has been a cache of archeological treasures. Everything from a 10 dollar gold piece found in the dirt of the basement to a tin box of personal letters written by a soldier who passed through during the Civil War and was apparently deserting (I used an EM and a Magnetometer to search the basement before we had it further dug and cemented. I actually spent 2 weeks seiving all the dirt from the basement to find any artifacts.
Most artifacts were found in spaces behind walls and on smoke shelves of the fireplaces. There were little secret storage areas under floor boards in some of the rooms. Weve catalogued them and havent taken time to study what the heck some of this stuff even is.(thatll come later)
We just built 2 small additions to give us a series of rooms that use the sides of the house (like a telescope design)
My advice to anyone studying a really old house,If you have the opportunity to invest in an old house that you can proudly restore and live with as you find more and more about your houses personal history,consider your entire life span and think about how many years of vacations youll miss because youre in the middle of a major project. My suggestion is to quietly check yourself into a local mental institution until the feeling passes. For, as much money you will undoubtedly piss away onm the project, you will expend an even greater time of your life and if you are gifted with a borderline ADD like I am, you will constantly be going nutz with boredom.
thats all I can think of right now, Im late for therapy.
diowan-Cool, different ages of house but very similar probllems(and joys). i dont wanna sound like a complete kvetch , weve been looking at this Old Mill on the shenandoah Valley. Its about 10000 square feet and has huuuge open entire floors. The beams are gonna need work but , wow whata neat project this would be. Buildings got great bones and probably goes back to the early 1800s
Wow! The thing with REALLY old houses is the smallness of the rooms, is it not? Of course, people were smaller than - and more accustomed to sharing space...
I want it I want it I want it
(Edited a bit)
