Sharon

It’s cheap enough to add some more insulation & replace a roof. Plus, with a 40-50 yr old house you are bound to have had someone live there who was a gardner at some point. The hydrangeas or azaleas might be overgrown, but they are there & they’re beautiful. Personally I don’t have enough sun in my backyard to grow many veggies right now … but I love the giant oak trees that let me play hide-and-seek with our dog. If a tree is so large that my (oversized) butt can hide behind it, it deserves to stay.

And yes, ideally we’d all rent for a couple years before living somewhere. But if you have pets, livestock, or kids who NEED outside playspace sometimes that isn’t possible. If you’re in that situation, know that you are making a choice that could cost you $10k – $20k down the line. For me, I’d take that financial risk over euthanizing old animals and rehoming younger ones.

My house is a 300 year old farmhouse. It had exactly one rotten sill beam, but otherwise structurally sound. Modern plumbing, new electrical box, new wiring (although seemingly installed by crazed monkeys), new septic in good working order. Roof would last perhaps another five years before requiring repair or replacement. Inspector said the sill was not all that difficult to replace, and we negotiated the price down accordingly.

We called something like 25 contractors who advertised that they worked with old buildings. Many refused to return our phone calls after we explained how old the house was and that we wanted a sill replaced with a historical variance, others came by once to reckon an estimate but never returned. Exactly three deigned to take the job, and out of those three, only one gave us an estimate: the other two said that the project would start out requiring a $15k initial payment, and they would just keep asking for more money until it was done–with no upper limit. “Projects like this, you can’t estimate, because you always find something else that you have to fix, and you won’t know what it is till you get the house ripped up,” they explained.

We went with the guy who gave an actual estimate. It turns out you can indeed estimate these projects, if you spend a lot of time inspecting the timbers in many places with a borescope and measuring the relative sinkage of the frame to guess how bad the damage might be. And if you personally know a wholesale custom sawmill with good turnaround times. Total cost about $12k, but took about seven times longer than expected and material costs were 2X more than initially planned. We did indeed find some unexpected horrors (old termite damage poorly repaired, not rot, was the cause of the sill’s demise), but jacking the house was not the nightmare many proposed.

In comparison, cost of sill replacement on a modern, stick-built house: $1000. In my defense, the house is drop-dead gorgeous and makes visitors go “aaaaawwwwwww”.

Next house is going to be earth-sheltered passive-solar with a geothermal pump and a cutesy facade to make it look homey. Between the heating bills and the structural thing, I’m just DONE with it.

We think about moving from our big, old, drafty house in a few years. It is not in great cosmetic shape to re sell & would be difficult to find a comparable home in the same price range.

We are deeply rooted here with parents next door so that keeps us from thinking too much from leaving here. Not having to walk up stairs when I’m older & not having to heat a big place keep us thinking about a smaller home. Wanting goats keeps me thinking about more property.

However, to do it, we had to be willing to learn new skills, think creatively about how to do things and scounge materials when we could. I have a beautiful bow window that was a picture window my husband got a thrift sale for $20 dollar because the owner didnt like the color of the sashes. He took it apart, refitted it and made it into a three part window in our living room. We scrounged some amazing walnut lumber from the town dump for cabinets in my sewing room. We took out the old and very tired kitchen cabinets and put them in the basement for storage space. We bought a manually operated cement mixer at an estate sale for $40 and spent a summer mixing cement and repairing our foundation, putting in a new sidewalk and back stoop.

It’s true that there was a heavy initial investment in time and cash but old houses arent necessarily a money pit. Except for paint and basic maintenance that any house requires, we havent done anything to it for 10 years.