Old home (pre 1940) owners.....a few questions

[TBM]

When you bought your home did you factor future repairs/replacement into the cost? How did you put a monetary value on those?

What unexpected repairs have you come across?

Knowing what you know now, would you buy an old home again?



DH mentioned a house that we have been looking at online to a realtor, (a truly one of a kind house built in the 1920s), and we were warned that it could be a money pit, and that getting financing may be difficult, because of the plumbing and electrical issues.

We had already figured on extensive electrical and probably plumbing, (now confirmed) that we would hire out, but what else would we be up against? Plaster damaged by the other repairs is a given. The roof is fairly new, so that isn't an issue. The rest of the work is diyable, cosmetic stuff.

The price is 2/3 the price of anything else we've come across, maybe less, and honestly, all of the other houses need work too. They may need electrical or plumbing soon enough, floors, etc, and all kitchen will need some upgrading.

[SusanBAnthony]

Well, here is the worst case scenario.

A couple in our town bought a house that needed everything updated, but as far as they knew was fine structurally. walls had some holes, horrid wallpaper, kitchen needed replaced. It was built in the late 1800's or early 1900's. they started ripping out drywall and discovered that the framing in the whole entire house was rotten. They had to basically rebuild the entire house. They went way way way over their renovation budget, and that was with them doing the work with their FIL who works construction. It was a nightmare. They now have a lovely completely new house, but they spent a ton.

I don't know these people, but small town, people talk, and they actually made the front page of our tiny newspaper, lol. We have walked past the house a lot and let me tell you, that Reno was not cheap and not minor. So that is worst case scenario. It is the exception, not the rule, though.

[laceymb]

We previously owned a 1922 craftsman home. We loved the character that it offered and depending on the home I would own one again. I would think about the other mechanicals in the home and what condition they are in. How are the windows and the level of insulation throughout the home?

We didn't run into this buy my inlaws added on a 3 season room to their home and ended up spending a lot more than they bargained for because several other components had to be brought up to current code before the addition could be completed. Something to think about if you plan on doing any major additions.

[tarheels]

(The 5th house I sometimes speak of that was a flip was built in the '20s.)

You can't put a value on them. You can bring in a general contractor for a quote for everything you know about and double it. Really. People scoff when I say double, but good God, what we spent far exceeded anything we imagined.

Windows. Don't forget windows - they cost a fortune and feel like a money suck since they aren't a really visible change.

Be sure the wiring's legit throughout and that the people didn't just fix the first few visible inches, leaving the old, dangerous stuff behind in the walls.

Is it on city sewer and water? Does it have clay pipes in the yard that may have collapsed over time, flooding your ground underneath with waste water?

This is Florida, right, so there's no chance of an old buried oil tank on the land somewhere that'll cost a fortune to have abated?

What's the insulation like? Does it need new in the attic, or does it need all new blown down into the walls as well?

And no, I will never ever ever buy any house that needs work ever again. Good God, what a horrific experience. Will I buy a house that needs decorating? Sure. Will I buy an outdated house that needs cosmetic fixes like updated baths and kitchens? Hm, tough one, maybe. It'd have to be a dream house. Will I buy a house that needs new systems, structural work, walls, flooring, roofing, windows? NO!!! Maybe I'd consider it if I become a billionaire in my old age and have so much money left over after donating to all the deserving charities in the world that I need some way to piss away money, but I don't see that happening, so not no, but hell no.

[magdala9]

When you bought your home did you factor future repairs/replacement into the cost?

How did you put a monetary value on those? FIL is an engineer. We had FIL visit the house and we got numbers from him. We also hired an inspector before putting in an offer so that we could put in an educated number.

What unexpected repairs have you come across? Unexpected-none yet; but we expected a number of repairs. Some of the repairs that we thought we could do ourselves turned out to be 5x the work that we thought. We still did it ourselves, it just took a lot longer.

Knowing what you know now, would you buy an old home again? Yes. We love our older home. It is unique and unlike anyone else's in the area.

To save yourself some grief, get a good inspector. If there is cloth wiring, foundation issues of any kind or asbestos, run. If not work through the numbers and see if you can afford it and still want it. Living in months of sawdust, with electrical issues is not for everyone.

[Deleted]

You don't need to replace the windows if they are original wood. Full stop. Replacing old windows is a huge, expensive mistake that's great for mfgs./contractors, very bad for homeowners. Refurbishing them can be DIY fairly easily and done very cheaply if you don't mind elbow grease and getting dirty. If you hire out the refurbishing, the price can vary drastically.

I disagree with the asbestos comment as well. We have asbestos siding and don't consider it a problem. I don't love it, but I also don't consider it a health risk (and I do have a little knowledge about the issue). Even when we remodeled, we didn't do much to the outside, and the permitted and inspected remediation on the part we did do was simple and not costly. If we ripped it all off, it might have been more trouble/cost. So we didn't disqualify our house because of the asbestos siding. Bonus is that it really is no maintenance, so I'm not in a hurry to get rid of it.

We haven't had any unexpected repairs. This was our first house, so we didn't really have any idea what to expect as far as home costs. We just made sure we had our regular e-fund and took a mortgage that left us plenty of wiggle room on a monthly basis. However, we were very lucky that someone else had redone all the electrical. Since we didn't have much in the way of maintenance costs, we were able to save up and do a renovation for around $80K that was purely cosmetic. The house was perfectly livable (with a terrible floorplan) without the reno.

We should redo our attic because the insulation is terrible, and I think it will be costly to rip up the finished space up there, insulate, and re-finish. For now, we just suffer through losing heat through the roof. But we don't have much that has been an emergency. We had some termite damage in our front stairs that had to be treated/rebuilt, but multiple inspectors we hired didn't find it. We only found it when we ripped up the stairs for other reasons. Termites are a difficult issue but aren't limited to old houses.

Absolutely would I buy an old house again. I know we've been lucky, but I do think that with a good inspection you can have an idea of what you're getting into.

[heliocentric]

Lead paint.
Asbestos.
knob and tube wiring.
Old plumbing.
Lack of insulation and weatherproofing.
General "out of code" stuff.
Crappy replacements/renos by previous owners.

For us, we sort of expected the larger things, but not the smaller, annoying things. For instance, many of our lights are installed without those metal boxes (I can't remember the name), so they aren't to code and make it tricky to install new lights.

Our front door is a custom shape. It needs to be replaced and is going to cost a few thousand dollars. It's the kind of thing we never considered and we can't just go out and buy a door because the entryway is stone and curved, so the door must be custom-made.

If the electrical hasn't been replaced, you might be seriously lacking in outlets. One of our bedrooms has ONE outlet.

We also had to spend money to redo the crappy renovations from the previous owners. It would have been better if they left things original. For instance, they replaced all the windows, but bought the crappiest brand and most are broken. We can't repair them, so we'll need to replace the replacements in a few years. I'm not looking forward to that. It would have been better if they didn't touch what was originally there.

All in all, I would buy an old house again. I'd probably budget more for renovations, though. We ended up doing so many repairs that we had to put off our kitchen reno for 10 years! (We want to pay cash.) It really is a love-hate thing, though. We know that every single square inch of this house was touched by us (we did a lot of DIY), so it really feels like our home in a way that a newer home wouldn't. I can totally understand why that doesn't appeal to most people, though.

[TBM]

Thanks everyone... I really appreciate the input. No one has said anything that we hadn't considered already.

Yes, it is in Florida.

We haven't seen it in person yet (DH was hoping to see it this coming Fri, since he is in FL on business and would be free most of the day since his flight home is a late one, but some work thing came up and now he has to leave Tuesday for New Mexico (yeah...he is going to freeze-lol), so he won't have time. We have been obsessed with this house for a very long time, and have trying to talk ourselves out of it, but after exhaustive searches, it is still in our top selections at any given time.

This house has not had much done to it, so that is both good and bad. The worst that has been done to it cosmetically is painted wood (kind of a lot), ugly wallpaper in the kitchen and a bathroom, and electrical updates that are not buried in the walls so they are highly visible. We had already figured that both the plumbing and electrical would need to be completely replaced. There is a crawl space and an attic, so that may help a little.

[Deleted]

Any chance of getting some PIPs? Come on, feed my habit...

[pitterwoo]

When you bought your home did you factor future repairs/replacement into the cost? How did you put a monetary value on those?
We really didn't factor the cost of repairs into the budget beyond a couple things that we planned to do right away (new garage roof and doors).

If we were doing this again we would really look over everything in the house that we possibly could and would figure that unless we can tell something has been renovated/replaced (and done correctly!) we would assume sooner or later we will be dealing with it.

What unexpected repairs have you come across?
Fire damage that was not repaired properly at all. It's added extra steps and expense to several projects. For example when we had the roof redone this summer, several rafters had to be replaced adding a couple hundred dollars onto the total. None of this stuff was caught by the home inspection either, so we feel that didn't help us.

Things previous owners have done are generally baffling. A lot of it is little things, like the time my H was preparing to waterseal the basement wall and found a rag stuffed into a mortar joint. The kitchen floor has a total of 4 floors and 3 layers of plywood laid down. I'm sure that will be a fun project when we get to removing all of it so we can have level floors between the rooms and hopefully restore the wood floor underneath. So many repairs were neglected or just phoned in.

Knowing what you know now, would you buy an old home again?
I would probably not buy a fire damaged home again. So much unseen damage and so much that they were able to hide.

I would buy an old house again. I've always lived in older homes and I wouldn't know what to do with myself in a new home. We've had years of frustrating renovations but we are handy and we like projects so overall it works for us.

I would not do this again if we were hiring out all the work. There's no way we would be getting the quality of work that we want and the cost of repairs vs what the home could be sold for would be so unbalanced. Even with DIY I still worry about overspending on this house. That may not be the case where you are looking, but house prices are low here and even fully renovated the homes sell for less than the materials to build them are worth.

[TBM]

juno-ygpm

[Deleted]

back atchya'

[TBM]

Dec 9, 2012 21:17:34 GMT -5 @juno said:

back atchya'

ditto

[amblor]

When you bought your home did you factor future repairs/replacement into the cost? How did you put a monetary value on those?

We really didn't factor costs of repairs/replacements into the budget beyond a couple things that we knew that we would want to do. The house was 100% move in ready, it was just cosmetic and nice-to-have structural updates (second bathroom) that we were thinking of.

We want to add a second bathroom (although I'm not sure if we'll get to that before we want to move), we wanted to replace the carpets (One room left!), and we wanted to gut and redo the first bathroom (done!), and eventually redo some aspects of the kitchen (floor, counters, sink).

What unexpected repairs have you come across?
There are some places on the metal roof that should have been pointed out on the home inspection as needing repair. Almost all of the floor are not level (even one second floor bedroom? We haven't gotten to the other yet) and we had to level them before redoing the floors, but that is expected. Other than that, we really haven't had much. The house had updated electrical, the water heater was replaced 5 years before and the AC/heat was all redone the year before we bought it. Oh and the windows were all updated (but not the window trim).

Oh! We did find one place in one of the walls where an old colony of ants (weirdly, they weren't carpenter ants - we had an inspector out) had made their home in the drywall but they were all dead! Seriously. And in our master bedroom the window sill had rotted and regular black sugar ants were living in there too. Now we have a quarterly pest service to prevent them from coming back.

I agree that things previous owners have done are ridiculous. We too have many, many layers of kitchen flooring. When we removed the carpet upstairs, I was getting excited because there was gorgeous, undamaged wood floor under it! But then we came to the middle where there was a HUGE square cut out filled in with plywood and drywall mud. Granted, the hardwood could have already been damaged there but still.


Knowing what you know now, would you buy an old home again?
I would probably buy an old home again if it was well maintained and updated. Mine wasn't nearly as in need of updates as others (sans the sea foam green bathroom that we had to gut). Although, I would definitely not buy one with only one bathroom again and I would probably try to find one with bigger bedrooms. Basically, I wouldn't write off a home due to the date of build, but some typical things that come with old houses could cause me to say no: small/awkward rooms with no closets, limited bathrooms, etc. But we're pregnant with baby #1 and plan to have two more, so we're looking at needing room and not having a whole lot of time for big renos.

[barefootcontessa]

We are doing a complete reno on the house and also adding an addition. The cost of all this is more than the house itself. We have pretty much replaced everything in the house except the oak floors and the plumbing that goes to the street. What we did is have a general contractor come out to the house with all his trade partners and they gave us an estimate of the cost (which has been pretty accurate and we are 3/4 complete). Then we had a structural engineer and inspector look at the property. This alerted us to some water damage that the contractor has addressed with regrading the yard.

The key for us has been having an excellent GC. I have heard all these stories about things costing way more than the estimate. That has not been our experience, but we also live in a fairly small town and were able to talk to various people who have used this contractor.

The only unexpected issue is that we need to put in additional insulation in one small part of the house to bring it up to code. It was like $1K.

[bunnymendelbaum]

When you bought your home did you factor future repairs/replacement into the cost? How did you put a monetary value on those?

-Yes, but we should have done stricter budget. (Not that it mattered because the sh*t hit the fan when my DHs job went cold.)

What unexpected repairs have you come across?

-Nothing really unexpected but things just take honestly 10x's longer than we estimated. Cost 3x's as much too.

Knowing what you know now, would you buy an old home again?

-Hmmm, we will make a fair amount of money on this house when we sell (mostly because we DIY'd so much). Honestly, if post-repairs the house wasn't worth a ton more $$ (even if I had no plans to sell) I would not do it.
For me, it was and is just SUCH an exhausting pain in the ass not not be rewarded.
Maybe it would be a different story if I was going to hire out all the work and get it done in a timely manner leaving some of the headache details for someone else to deal with...

You are saying the house doesn't need THAT much, but what about mechanical systems? windows? painting? brick repointing? insulation? termites? water drainage on property? site walls? tree

Are there a historic district or any guidelines you have to adhere to?

[bunnymendelbaum]

Sbp- I agree with almost all of what you said. Boom houses scare me.

But I did want to say that IMO just because something was build 90+ years ago doesn't mean it was done correctly or to so e higher standard. We've found plenty of cut corners, bad craftsmanship and improperly done work in our 1922 house.

[pitterwoo]

sbp, sorry you've had to deal with all that. It's shameful.