It`s a mistake to assume that an older house, just because it is older, is somehow sturdier than a newer house.
True, they don`t build them like they used to, but that can mean many things, not all of them negative for the newer structures.
Today`s home-engineering technology can fulfill a dream of domestic comfort that the greatest builders of the past could hardly imagine. On the other hand, some modern contractors may be more willing to use lesser-quality materials and to take unsound shortcuts with their work than were their Victorian counterparts.
The point is that you have to make judgments about soundness on a house-by-house basis.
So what should you look for?
The structure
Stand outside by each corner of the house and look down the line where the framework meets the foundation to see if it`s straight. If it`s an older house that already has seen weather and has had a few years to settle and there`s no apparent sign of structural deformation, then that`s a good sign. Foundation problems are hard to conceal, simply because they affect the very shape of the house itself.
Every house has a frame. The frame is usually made of large timbers that support the building and that the foundation, siding, roofing and sheathing are attached to. Some of the earliest American houses were framed with the post (vertical member) and beam (horizontal member) construction favored for centuries by barn builders.
An alternative method introduced late in the last century is called balloon frame because carpenters who were accustomed to post and beam construction thought of houses built in this way as being held up by nothing but air.
A friend of mine lived happily for years in such a house, however, and thousands of balloon-frame houses are still standing despite the fact that they often have insufficient timbering to meet today`s building codes.
How do you tell if your prospective dream house is in this category?
A building with too little wood in it will have bouncy floors. Go to the middle of the room and jump up and down. If the floor moves appreciably, chances are that either a wall is missing underneath it or the joists are undersized.
The most obvious symptom of weak structure is the ridge of the roof. It should be perfectly straight; if it isn`t, make sure to have an inspector find the cause.
A third construction method is the platform or ”Western frame” method, in which a deck is built and rests on the foundation. From there up to the second floor, stud walls are built, then another deck is added for the second floor. Another stud wall carries to the roof level, and then the roof rafters are added. Most homes built today use this method, which results in a good, strong frame.
What do you do if a house you`re interested in shows signs of structural weakness?
Don`t walk away from it. You may be surprised to learn that structural problems can often be corrected in straightforward, effective and relatively inexpensive ways. Often the problem can be fixed by simply placing floor jacks where the added support is needed. Bouncy second-story floors are harder to deal with because no one wants floor jacks in their living room, so the added strength has to come by adding thicker and wider timbers alongside the originals. This ”sistering” technique works fine as long as there is enough space for the new lumber.
The sills
Sills are the wooden members attached directly to the foundation walls upon which the rest of the building sits.
The sills of today`s homes are nearly always built with pressure-treated lumber-that is, lumber treated chemically to repel moisture. This keeps the sills nice and dry, unaffected by the moisture that inevitably migrates up the concrete foundation. But pressure-treated lumber has come into general use only in the last 15 years; so if you`re looking at a house older than that, you should pay special attention to the sills.
The problem is that if sills are too close to the ground or exposed to frequent drenching by improperly installed rain gutters or clogged drainage pipes, they rot. When they rot, they lose their load-bearing ability, compress under the weight of the house and cause many problems.
The list of symptoms of rotted sills is as long as your arm: sagging floors, windows that won`t open or close smoothly because their frames are out of square, porches that have slipped away from horizontal.
Carpenters generally love the problems posed by rotted sills and are astonishingly skillful at fixing even the most hopeless-seeming cases, but it`s major surgery. Normally, the exterior siding will have to be removed and replaced because it, too, has rotted. Then the sheathing will also need to be removed, exposing the studs.
If the damage isn`t too severe, the studs can be saved and nailed back to the new sill, but occasionally the rot is so extensive that the studs themselves have to be cut back and bolted to new stud ends.
Besides removing the rot and replacing the sills, studs, sheathing and siding, the carpenter must also, of course, diagnose and correct the cause of the problem.
Was it a leaking roof? Was it the grade around the house? It doesn`t make much sense to go to the expense of repairing the sill problem if you`re not going to take steps to prevent a recurrence.
The altered house
I have learned the hard way to go very slowly in making irreversible decisions about modifying the original materials in houses, or the spaces themselves.
It used to be that whenever you bought an old house, the first thing you did was tear down as many interior walls as possible and paint the whole space flat white. tHen the energy crisis made heating such spaces more expensive-and perhaps, too, people began to miss the privacy and isolation that are so difficult to find in most settings today.
Apart from design considerations, substantial alterations in a house also raise the question of craftsmanship.
The important question for you is not whether the remodeler should have done what he did, but whether he did the job well. Did he even know how to do it well? Remodelers whose trails I have come across have too often cut short the steps that can`t be seen-as though that made them less important.
I recall one house I saw that had been remodeled several times; someone had even torn out the front yard to make a parking space. One owner was a mason who knew a lot about bricks. He had built a huge hearth in a tiny kitchen and set a lovely wood stove on it. His problem was that he hadn`t bothered to leave enough room between the stove and the door, so that while the stove was cranking, the door was blistering.
Beware the house that has had too much creativity lavished upon it, and not enough consideration and craftsmanship. If you have the soul of a remodeler yourself, hold out for an original.
