How to Live in a 100 Year Old House.
The historic Turlington House has been our labor of love. 18+ years of small, well-managed incremental improvements.
Ever replace deck boards before? Me neither until 2023. But now I know it’s a nuisance, but not that big a deal. Same with a LOT of stuff you run into with old houses. While something is always needing attention, your attention is mostly all that’s needed. YouTube is a wonderous thing.
A little bit goes a long way. We stripped the peeling lead paint off everything, learned how to repair plater wall cracks, how to paint like pros, and transformed each room one at a time. The time span above is to show that even after 18 years, we STILL haven’t gotten to stripping that front door (note the chipped paint).
The Turlington House library, where this article was written.
Town, car, chair, coin, cemetery, baseball card, toy, a photo of a relative.
Now read that list again, but add “100 year old” to the front of each item.
Did that generic list of things become a treasure trove of mental imagery? Think about what touched your imagination and how it made you feel. Nostalgia mixed with romance, adventure, and maybe even a little wistfulness? That’s what it’s like to live in a 100 year old home. You wake up to it every morning. You fall asleep in its warm embrace. Ask anyone who’s lived in a 100 year old home and they’ll tell you the same thing. Only I’ll bet you a 1920 Lincoln Penny they don’t lead with how magical it is, and there’s a really good reason for that – it’s not easy living in a century home.
We were in the just-finished living room having a morning coffee, more than a little sore from caulking and painting all the trim in the room the night before. We’d spent the last few weeks stripping the lead paint off and learning how to seamlessly fill all the cracks in the plaster and lathe walls. With the sun pouring through the windows we restored, my wife asked me, “What’s that smell?”. I said I couldn’t smell it, but secretly hoped it was just the new paint. We both sat trying to ignore it before my wife asked, “Does it smell like poop?”. The smell suddenly became more pronounced. Coffee cups down, play clothes on, crawl into the crawlspace to find that the main sewage pipe, for some reason, had completely fallen apart and relieved itself into a small lake right under the living room.
The reason stories like this come before the magical stuff is because, A: this is really the cost of living in an old house, and B: Living through this and conquering it is a well deserved badge of honor. It takes special stock to not end that story with, “The next day we moved to a subdivision”. You don’t have to be a pro contractor to live in an old home. But you should be somewhat handy, resourceful, and either stubborn, driven, or crazy. Or simply be incredibly wealthy. Since we belong to the former category (and, yes, we think we’re crazy), here are 3 tips to being happy living in an old home.
Choose Good Bones
Get a realtor that knows old homes. Get an inspector that knows old homes and have their report fully vetted by yourself, your realtor, and any contractors/architects/engineers you can wrangle. It sounds scary and immediately like too much work, but it’s actually not as hard as it sounds. Guaranteed there’s going to be all kinds of stuff to fix. You just need to get it all realistically organized by how bad/expensive it is to how fixable over time it is. If there’s a solid foundation and structure (“Good Bones”) you’re already in good shape.
Be Handy (or You’ll Be Broke)
This bears repeating. Our renovation rule is that if it can kill you or your family, hire a professional. Painting, repairing porch boards or railings? Bathroom tile replacement or insulating your crawlspace? Try doing it yourself. Watch/read a bunch of “how to’s” beforehand, give yourself some grace and accept that you’re learning. The more you do yourself, the more money you’ll save for if big problems crop up.
Embrace imperfection
You’re living in history. And history sure ain’t perfect. Having a small crack in the old, wavy glass in your front window is better than having lifeless new glass. Solid wood doors that shut in the winter, but don’t fit the frame in the summer are better than hollow plastic doors from Home Depot. We did a kitchen remodel and added new marble countertops. I almost immediately dropped an iron skillet and chunked out the edging. My wife looked at me, shrugged, and said, “100 year old home!” We laughed and left it. Old homes are special in large part because of tiny bits of character like this.
We’ve lived in our current 1906 home for 18 years and we’re still not even close to finished with it. The front door needs to be stripped and stained, the oak floors need some patching in the main hall, and the upstairs bathroom is long overdue for a remodel and it looks like my fire’s died out here in the library. My wife’s out back reading under the 100 year old willow oak, so I guess I’d better grab a glass from the butler pantry, fill it from the old farm sink in the kitchen, and go wrap this article up in the wide porch swing on the sunny wrap-around porch out front. Wait, I guess maybe it is pretty easy living in a century home.
