The joys of an 80+ year old house..

This is going to be an epistle. Sorry in advance.

My house is for sale. It needed work. 25 years of deferred maintenance and 15 year old colors had made it less than desirable. It was time to fix everything.

In the past three months we have renovated the bathroom and two bedrooms, rebuilt three windows, replaced the fascia on the front of the house, painted the exterior and replaced the 30+ year old roof plus an multitude of other small projects. The only thing I hired out was the roof. Needless to say, no car fun around here in a long time.

The latest step on the house saga was the kitchen.

The vinyl flooring was glued to dust board. Due to a water heater explosion years ago, it was returning to dust. The plan yesterday morning was to pull up the dust board and install some laminate. Not that big of a deal. Yeah right.

At 9:00 this morning I was standing, in the kitchen, on the ground , in a hole four feet by ten feet, repairing the water pipe to the dishwasher. The dust board had held enough water over the years to rot out a large portion of the original oak floor and the sub floor. Not what I wanted to find this weekend, but par for the course around here. It did make repairing the pipe I broke the night before a lot easier though.

Another interesting find. Lumber has changed a lot in the last 80+ years. 80 years ago, 1 inch was just that 1 inch, not 3/4, or 23/32, 1 inch. The sub floor was 1X8s which you can't buy anymore. The floor joists in this house are 3 X 12. I could park a car in the living room. Unfortunately when you need to replace the sub floor and the original hardwood floor, nothing you buy at Lowes Depot is the right thickness. 3/4 Plywood is now 23/32. It was a lot of fun trying to shim everything so it was level.

So as of this evening, the sub floor is replaced and I'm back up to even with the original oak flooring. I still have to demo the rest of the dust board and install the laminate. At the rate I'm going, it shouldn't take more than a month.

Y'all go back to playing with you cars. I think I'll go paint something.

In the future just go to an actual lumber mill and have the pieces you need cut to size. They will do it for you not a problem. Well maybe on Sunday its a problem.

We went through the same thing about 6 years ago with our house. It seems like every time you start an easy project, it ends up uncovering more work that you didn't realize needed to be done. I went to fix a bad section of floor in the back porch that was added on years ago, and discovered that all the floor joists were rotten.

...thinking my $600+/month for apartment maintenance/taxes isn't that bad after all.

I feel for you.

Subtract 16 years, and my wife (then future) worked on my house for 3 months solid before we got married. Tough work.

And I'm glad I had someone else re-do the floor, as they had the same problem- their solution was a lucky find of thin plywood to add the proper thickness.

I still have areas where you can see the difference- mostly in dumb drywall installation. Really dumb. I know better now, and will hire it out.... The mistakes I made. But love the house.

The super hard part that I do need to do, eventually, is a foundation replacement. Spend something like $30k for a no real cost improvement....

alfadriver wrote: The super hard part that I do need to do, eventually, is a foundation replacement. Spend something like $30k for a no real cost improvement....

I imagine step 1 is to jack up the house?

If so, could you make that $50k and get a full basement out of the deal? Might be worth it if the lot and house are conducive. I will never not have a basement...

I feel for you. We bought our first home a couple months ago, built in 1915. Everything looked very solid and reasonably updated. We went to change the linoleum and fixtures in the bathroom and discovered the floor was pretty off-kilter, this is on the second floor. Turns out someone had cut through about 70% of all the top of the floor joists in that floor section, causing quite the sag. So now I have to jack up the floor and install sister joists. Heck while I'm in there why not replace the galvanized plumbing with copper. Hell, replumb the whole house while I'm at it.

So here we are 2 months later and the grout has just dried on the new tile, and we will finally own a house with a complete bathroom on Tuesday if all else goes well.

I can't wait to dig into the roof next year. Oh boy.

DILYSI Dave wrote:

alfadriver wrote: The super hard part that I do need to do, eventually, is a foundation replacement. Spend something like $30k for a no real cost improvement....

I imagine step 1 is to jack up the house? If so, could you make that $50k and get a full basement out of the deal? Might be worth it if the lot and house are conducive. I will never not have a basement...

Michigan pretty much forces owners to have basements- the foundation has to be so deep that 99% of homes have basements here. So I have one. (my garage's foundation is 42" deep.... darned frost)

Thanks for the idea, though.

At least I don't have to have to pay for too much stuff to be dug out.

I feel your pain. My place is over 100 years old, was originally a 1 1/2 story farm house but morphed into a full 2 stories in the early 60's. The 82 year old russian that I bought it from owned it since 1959 and did a LOT of work. The guy had an unbelievable amount of energy, but a very limited skill set. I shake my head every time I have to repair one of his "retrofits".

In reply to bastomatic:

It's amazing what you find when you cut into an old house.

When we bought this one, one of the ceiling fans was run off of a piece of lamp cord. It was run through the attic and plugged into a receptacle in the laundry room.

In reply to Dave:

Around here basements are called in door swimming pools.

My insulation is old newspapers including a copy advising of the shooting of President McKinley.

Ironwood is hard

When i did my kitchen reno, I found a receptacle connected to one side of the stove plug. That's right. A 120V receptacle fused at 45 amps.

He upgraded the electrical to 100 amps just before I bought it. Everything was done to code, but he installed a used fuse panel from 1974. If you have to do any repair, you need every screwdriver in your box. It's expected to find something screwed on with the 3 different size/type screws

Aye Carumba, misery loves company. Mine was built in 1913. Over the years I've ripped up miles of nasty particle board subfloor, replaced kitchen, bathroom, roof, some windows, 2 furnaces and the plumbing. Been putting the attic off because it's filled with filthy blown in insulation infused with years of bat and squirrel E36 M3.

Toyman and I commiserated earlier today, poor bastard. Over where he lives, the water table is like .005 inches below ground level. Some houses have pontoons.

It's not just older stuff; I added an upstairs office in the last house I had before this one, that one was built in 1994. I was the first owner and watched it go up. I discovered that the attic joists were about 1/8" shorter where I needed to put the subfloor in when compared to the other floor which would adjoin. That's too much, so I had to drop my carefully made plans, go hunt lath, staple it to the joists, etc. Talk about a pain in the ass... we won't even discuss the ceiling sheetrock work.

zomby, I once had a house which belonged to a carpenter. The guy did great woodwork, but he must have been 4 feet tall because every countertop and sink was at 30". The norm is 36". The water heater also was in the middle of a wall. No, really. 1/2 was in the kitchen and 1/2 was in the dining room. Then there was the 2 car garage behind it with a second story which leaned about 5 degrees to the left because the bottom wasn't sheathed or reinforced.

Feel your pain. It probably took me close to a year to get the kitchen floor in my 70s rancher all torn out and then replaced with cementboard and tile. 3 layers of vinyl, each with the attendant luan or the original chipboard underlayment (which was likewise deteriorated after years of exposure to water).

No fun- no fun at all. I didn't have to replace the entire subfloor due to rot, though, so I guess that's something.

I'm about to have to do it AGAIN in the second bathroom I have to redo. :|

In the middle or remodeling two houses right now. Luckily I have help. Three guys that work for me and I spent two whole days ripping out wallpaper last week. Now we will be fixing drywall holes and floating cracks in the next few days in preparation for painting. Once painted I will move on to another house. I wish it had rained this year because I would be mowing lawns and installing landscapes instead of taking on jobs like this.

I feel your pain in the worst way. We just started demo on the g/f's house, tearing apart the kitchen and relocating the functional minimum to the front rooms. This required me rewiring one of the receptacles so a breaker wouldn't be over loaded.

Armored, cloth insulated wiring. My favorite....

1915 3,000 sq. ft. 4 bdrm 1 bath bought 18 mos. ago. We got lucky good solid German construction. We painted 2 rooms and refinished the floors. Oh, and we paid our friend, a certified journeyman electrician, who at the time was unemployed, to rewire the house and bring it up to code with a 100A box. Some of the wiring was okay. Some of the knob and tube is still hanging in the basement, it's just all disconnected now. Next I presume will be the hot water heater, which I kid you not was manufactured in the late 50's.

Our's is near 100. We do one room per year. Bathroom was last year. Kitchen is at least 4 years out but still functional after rewire on Thanksgiving day/weekend 5 year ago. Small electric issue with everyone decending upon our house for the big dinner. We learned not to do more at once in our old house. It was 130 years old at the time. Hang in there.

griffin729 wrote: 1915 3,000 sq. ft. 4 bdrm 1 bath bought 18 mos. ago. We got lucky good solid German construction. We painted 2 rooms and refinished the floors. Oh, and we paid our friend, a certified journeyman electrician, who at the time was unemployed, to rewire the house and bring it up to code with a 100A box. Some of the wiring was okay. Some of the knob and tube is still hanging in the basement, it's just all disconnected now. Next I presume will be the hot water heater, which I kid you not was manufactured in the late 50's.

Yeah, our 1910 house had an electric water heater that had belt-style heating elements that wrapped around the tank rather than the screw-in type used now. The elements had a 1957 date code stamped into them. It still worked, but it was soooooo sloooooow.

Mine's 117 years old. No such thing as a 2X4, it's all 3X8 rough cut, plaster and lath walls, BX cable and wavy hardwood floors. Someone cut notches in the 4X10 joices between the 1st and 2nd floors to accomodate a bathtub. Over the years the entire upstairs dropped 15 inches. Lotsa work, 6 hydraulic jacks, some friends and now it's not level but better and stable.

Brandy new homes never really interested me, but they're starting to turn my head.

xd wrote: In the future just go to an actual lumber mill and have the pieces you need cut to size. They will do it for you not a problem. Well maybe on Sunday its a problem.

Ya know... I have had the same problem as toyman and this never actually occurred to me. I table-saw'd the crap out of "one size too big" of almost everything for an entire living room. DOH.

alfadriver wrote:

DILYSI Dave wrote:

alfadriver wrote: The super hard part that I do need to do, eventually, is a foundation replacement. Spend something like $30k for a no real cost improvement....

I imagine step 1 is to jack up the house? If so, could you make that $50k and get a full basement out of the deal? Might be worth it if the lot and house are conducive. I will never not have a basement...

Michigan pretty much forces owners to have basements- the foundation has to be so deep that 99% of homes have basements here. So I have one. (my garage's foundation is 42" deep.... darned frost) Thanks for the idea, though. At least I don't have to have to pay for *too* much stuff to be dug out.

Oh yeah - frost. Forgot about that.

Down here, nothing that old has a basement.

In reply to DILYSI Dave:

I'd make fun of the stifling heat down there, but when it hit 100 last week after a week of high 90's, the joke was well lost....

So we get the best of both worlds- 100 deg and +90% humidity AND -10F and wind. yay.

I had to have blown in insulation, but I think it's settled a bit much. Plus, my house didn't have roof ventalation. I can't really fathom not having a/c anymore- or how the house was survivable for 70 odd years w/o it.

Jeez, I'm gonna stop complaining about my 60 year old house. I admit, even with its quirks I'd rather have my old house than a new one. My floors are almost 2" thick solid wood. We are planning a major renovation to finish the basement. I am dreading the electrical work to undo all of the "upgrades" that various owners have done over the years. The best was an orange extension cord used to run a new circuit to the washer.