Issues with buying a 1900 colonial home?
 

"Steve" wrote in message
...
My daughter has asked me to look at a house she's considering buying.
An older couple is selling and moving to a retirement home. asking around
$260,000
A couple of things I'm concerned about are the brick foundation with a
dirt floor in the basement.
Someone told her it would be around $5000 to pour cement.
Also two of the room have tin ceilings. anything I should check? I've
never even seen a tin ceiling.

I'll be seeing the house after work this week.

Thanks for any input.

Steve

My advice - don't pour a cement floor in the basement. Some moron poured a
floor in my 200 year old stack-stone, dirt floor basement about 75 years
ago, and all it did was settle, crack (so it's only a partial floor now),
and shift. Makes it much harder for the sump pump to do it's job, and it
made the ceiling even lower. In the cement parts, there's barely 6' of
clearance, so DH has to be very careful doing any work down there. My advice
with an old house - if it ain't broke, don't break it. In this instance,
"fixing" things, or upgrading them, really means breaking them. As always,
however, YMMV.

Issues with buying a 1900 colonial home?
 

On Sun, 29 Apr 2007 09:01:47 -0400, h wrote:


"Steve" wrote in message
...
My daughter has asked me to look at a house she's considering buying.
An older couple is selling and moving to a retirement home. asking around
$260,000
A couple of things I'm concerned about are the brick foundation with a
dirt floor in the basement.
Someone told her it would be around $5000 to pour cement.
Also two of the room have tin ceilings. anything I should check? I've
never even seen a tin ceiling.

I'll be seeing the house after work this week.

Thanks for any input.

Have a septic inspection, look carefully at the roof
and siding, check out the well and the chimney, and look
for rot around the sill. Everything else is cosmetic.

Issues with buying a 1900 colonial home?
 

In article ,
says...

Have a septic inspection, look carefully at the roof
and siding, check out the well and the chimney, and look
for rot around the sill. Everything else is cosmetic.

Almost everything else is cosmetic, but some old construction practices
can cause a bit of stomach-churning when you discover them during a
remodel.

My 1901 Dutch-Colonial Revival has had a few of those. Like no headers
over ground-floor picture windows -- the load from the second floor was
simply spread across the shiplap sheathing to the studs alongside the
windows. And no real rim joists, the floor joists were apparently held
square during construction with more of the same shiplap sheathing on
the ends. Survived a number of earthquakes and a broken foundation
despite these defects. That old shiplap was amazingly versatile
material, no?

--
is Joshua Putnam
http://www.phred.org/~josh/
Updated Infrared Photography Gallery:
http://www.phred.org/~josh/photo/ir.html