I recently wrote that we have been living in our “new” old house for nearly 30 years. How is this possible? It seems like yesterday we were moving into this house full of hopes, dreams and big ideas. It’s trite but true.
It is fortunate we had no idea how much work actually awaited us. One thing no one warns buyers of “used” houses about is this: the former owner(s) may just become mortal enemies never met.
In a nutshell, owning an old home is great because you get to overhaul half-century old prior repairs. So you want to replace a light fixture? Great! You get to work around the fact that 66 years ago some guy named “Phil” (who should never have been allowed inside a hardware store) used an old cookie tin as a junction box, screwed it to the joist with 14 4-inch screws and stuffed it with asbestos for good measure.
BoyWonder’s home features a former owner so inept at DIY of any kind that we have turned his name into a verb. When BoyWonder says, exasperated, “it’s a typical Justin job” we know that is NOT a compliment to Justin or his skills. His brand of DIY was less “do it yourself” and more “destroy it yourself.”
Not to be outdone, our previous homeowner had “a friend who did roofing on the side” replace the roof a year before selling the house. Accordingly, when we purchased it in 1996, we thought we had a good 25 years on the “new” roof. Within eight years, it needed to be replaced.
In the words of OUR roofer, who did roofs like it was his JOB (because it was) “There is nothing really holding your shingles on except force of habit.” The prior roofer had used one or two nails per shingle — if that. On the bright side, they had the old roof stripped off in record time.
“We mostly just flapped our hands and the light breeze blew it off,” I was told.
Working on our old houses, I have heard the phrase “I’ve never seen it done that way before” way too many times from my father-in-law who is a gifted contractor with 60-plus years of experience.
BoyWonder is an electrical engineer. Suffice to say that his mind is routinely blown when he works on these houses. That’s okay, mine is blown that a human I once had to protect with toddler locks on all the cabinets and outlets is now working with power tools. As for what he finds here, for all I know Thomas Edison himself ran the electric.
I am always immediately angry when I see spray foam. You should have to have a license and a note from a contractor to buy that product.
“Why on Bob’s green earth would anyone do it like this?” we often ask.
If, when unearthing prior projects, you find cast-off beer bottle caps and the occasional liquor bottle, you may have your answer.
I feel like before 1975 nobody ever thought they would ever have to revisit any part of anything. Example: Bathroom medicine cabinets had a slot in the bottom to throw used razor blades. So if you ever have to open up the wall, at the floor joist there’s a century’s worth of rusty razor blades waiting for you.
Honestly though, if we ever have to go into the walls of any room for any reason, we all regret that decision. I’m always hoping to find stacks of cash in the walls given it was built before the depression, but no, just some crazy wiring, false ceilings, and the occasional mummified rodent.
It’s either bizarre fixes that seem inspired by the engineering designs of a Tom and Jerry cartoon, or complex over-engineering that requires a day just to remove a 4-foot-square of flooring. Pro tip: be like GirlWonder and her husband and buy a house that was owned by a meticulous family for over a century. Her former owners? We love them. Anything they did was done well and done to LAST. They had a tile floor over hardwood in one room that was installed so well it might have survived a direct nuclear strike. The news helicopter would be going over the destruction and see an untouched perfect tile floor still intact.
We learned valuable lessons and created life memories throughout the process that are priceless to us even if every strange noise makes us pray for a haunting instead of something expensive to fix.
To be fair to former owners the world over, the next owners of our house may be justified in hating me if only for my love of really bold wallpaper patterns. Someday, maybe I’ll be the villain in someone’s home remodeling story.
(Kymberly Foster Seabolt welcomes comments in care of FosterSeabolt@gmail.com; P.O. Box 38, Salem, OH 44460; or KymberlyFosterSeabolt.com.)
