A couple of weeks ago, Lisa and I received an email from a reader that enjoyed our site, but wanted to learn more about our first house. They had just bought their first home and were looking to learn something about rehabbing a very old house, since they didn’t have much experience with it themselves. About one hundred times a day, I slap myself on the forehead for not taking enough any pictures of our first home as we renovated it. There are a few photos here and there, but there aren’t many that I can use to generously illustrate a proper post on rehabbing older homes. I’ll give it a shot though!
As much as I’d love to impart all my knowledge about renovating a 100 year old Philadelphia row home in one post, I think it’d be best if I just break this up into a series. Oh, and I know our blog primarily focuses on projects for our new home, generally speaking, most of them can be applied to a home of any age, at least that’s our intention.
Since this is the first post on this topic, I’m going to start with the most important lesson I’ve learned: Deciding what stays and what gets thrown out. If you’ve just purchased an older home and you’re trying to develop a strategy for the renovation, you’re probably thinking…”well, I want to try to keep the woodwork, or the windows, do minimal damage to the plaster” etc. There are things worth keeping, and things that aren’t worth your time.
Here are my tips for remodeling old homes:
1. Keep the features that attracted you to the house and make it unique. Why did you buy the place? Did you like the original built-ins in the kitchen? How about the stained glass windows? This is usually a no-brainer. You want to keep the big items that you love that would be really, really difficult to replace. For our first house, that was the stained glass front door and the stained glass transom above the front bay window.
When we bought our house, this window was cracked and in rough shape. I hired a stained glass company to restore it to it’s original glory and it only set me back around $800. Is that a lot of money for a dang window? You bet. Does it add more than $800 to the value of the home? Absolutely. It would have been a lot easier to just replace it with some modern Pella window, but I would’ve lost all of that 100 year old charm. I never got around to restoring the front door. I replaced it with a Home Depot basic wood front door and kept the stained glass door in the basement. We sold the house before I could get back to it. We did leave it with the new owners and they were appreciative that I kept it
2. Demo the things that are between you and your dream home. Once you’ve identified what you absolutely must keep, now it’s time to start planning the demise of everything else. Don’t waste time trying to salvage deteriorating plaster walls and beat up, painted woodwork (stained woodwork is another story). It’s tempting to try and save some money and perhaps some of the home’s character and attempt to scrape, sand and maybe strip down those old painted baseboards, trim work and bruised door jams. You’re dreaming! If you need to rewire your home because it’s knob and tube throughout and you’re trying to save the plaster, you’re wasting your time. If you’re plaster is crumbling and you’re making repairs, you’re wasting your time. Your best bet is to DEMO the plaster on the entire wall, do your wiring or plumbing or whatever and then drywall it. You’ll end up with a perfectly smooth, clean wall. In older homes, the plaster can be rough to the touch. Smooth Walls = Modern Walls. Same goes for the trim. Yes, older homes have non standard trim that adds a lot of character to a home, like 10″ tall baseboards for example. Well, guess what? You can have that same trim look by combining two separate pieces of trim from Home Depot or Lowes and get the EXACT same look. The only difference is your new trim won’t have any dings in it and it won’t be covered in 37 coats of lead paint. It will look 1000 times better and it won’t subtract from the character of the home.
Often times when you’re hiring an electrician or a plumber, it’s immensely cheaper for them to do their work with a wide open wall then trying to work around a touchy plaster wall. Plus, when they’re done, you can either use your savings to hire a drywall pro or do it yourself and save even more money. Most important thing about dealing with contractors: time is money. If you can make their job faster and easier, you’re going to save big money.
3. Plan on renovating the entire house at one. I’m not saying you need to finish every room in the house at once, but if you’re having the house rewired or replumbed, it doesn’t make economic sense to do one room at a time. You certainly can take your time with painting and decorating on a room to room basis, but you get more bang for your buck if you do as many rooms as possible if you’re installing new utilities or hanging drywall. Suck it up and do it all at once.
If I had to renovate my first house all over again, I would have done things much differently. I would have gutted all the plaster in every room immediately. I could’ve wired the entire house more easily and all the doors, drywall and trim would’ve been replaced at once instead of piecemeal. BTW, by the time I figured out all of this, I was knee deep in my third overhaul because I had left some rooms out of the original upgrade. Generally, this kind of renovation talk doesn’t apply to homes that are younger than 30 years. Most of these younger homes have modern wiring and plumbing, so generally speaking these types of upgrades are cosmetic in nature.
So that’s my two cents on starting a renovation on an old home. Next time I post on this topic, I’ll talk strategies for making your demo go smoothly. Are any of our readers in the process of buying a really old home??
