Old Houses OT

John B.

Well-known Member
Our parents' house is now empty since Jan 1st of this year. It was built in 1872. Dad inherited it from his parents. All he ever did was fix it up thru the years, making some improvements or repairing what needed repaired. My question is if me and my 3 siblings would decide it's time for it to come down what would you look for? Did they date anything in these old walls? It's a 2 story farm house, dad remembers a stove in every room down stairs. The one front room actually has a fire place that was use to burn coal.
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I've torn down three houses board by board. (Never again) Sometimes a baseboard might have the name of the lumber company stamped on it or someone might put his name on something but you have to look at every single board to find it. The only date I found was on the back of a baseboard. I forget the exact words but it was dated November 1944 and the words said "we removed this board to install a heat pipe. November 1944 to he!! With Hitler". The man's last name was Remilliard and he was from Sioux Rapids Iowa.
 
I live in a 1938 home. If it is sound, leave it stand. If it has fundamental issues, remove the copper, and special features, doors for donation or sale to a resale company. Demand seems high here in MN. Jim
 
Some times the builder would write on the inside of walls. Most of the time you will not find many dates. I hate seeing old house torn down. I would take a old home over a new one any day. The new ones just do not have much character to me. Also will a glued together plywood stress beam hold up for a 100 years??? I really would not think so. The new stuff is built to fall apart in time.

I hope you do not decide to tear it down. There is too much history disappearing from the land. I just was out driving yesterday. A beautiful set of farm buildings where torn down and buried this last spring so the BTO could plant poor growing corn on the building site. My first wife and I tried to buy that place for years as we both loved the BIG beautiful farm house. It was in great shape but the new owner did not want the additional taxes or to rent the place. I tried to buy just the house and five aces off the current owner but he turned down my offer an it was not a low ball offer either.
 
John B.- I you must teat it down, there seems to be a lot of salvageable material in that old home.

Baseboards/trim, transoms, solid wood doors, porcelain door knobs w/plungers, fireplace mantle and cover, even the ash bucket in the lower left of the first pic.

The single pane windows (although very nice, don't want to be used in new structures but, if you can find someone restoring a home in original condition) ...like the National Historic Registry. You could find a buyer

Nice looking home and I hate to see it torn down but, you gotta do what you gotta do,
 
Look through the house really good before you do anything drastic. In my Grandma's house I found one wall of the living room was made of tongue and groove pine boards that had been paneled over. I found out later that the back part of the house was added on, and the boards were originally on the outside of the house.

In my Aunt and Uncle's house we thought we had found everything, until the local VFD burned it for practice. Turns out the carpet in their living room had been laid over multiple layers of old news papers to serve as padding. Most of the papers dated from the mid 50's to the mid 60's. I think the latest I saw a part of was just after Kennedy was shot. The fire missed about a 10x10 section of the floor, and I was able to save the papers out of that section. There was some really interesting reading, as well as adds, in those sections of paper.

I've known others that do demolition and they always check the walls for hidden money, check under and around the house for dropped coins. Basically anywhere things could be hidden, the old timers were apt to hid something.
 
our old house was built in 1886. Look at the ceilings. If they are made of tongue & groove, check for one board that is different from the rest, usually shorter. It may be loose if you get a stool & push up on it. The back part of the groove will be cut off so it can be lifted. They hid the valuables in the space between the ceiling & the upstairs floor.
 
The main part of this house was built in the 1840s while the part behind the tree was built in the late 1940s to early 1950s.
I believe the builder was a poorer farmer as there is no ornate wood work.
Most of the original clap-board siding and windows are still there. Many panes of glass are running.
Only one room (a closet) no longer has the original horse hair plaster.
A few rooms have never had walls painted as there is close to 1/4" of wall paper on them.
Electrical wiring is 1950s style and not nob and tube.
The people we got it from installed running water in the 1970s. Yup, they were still using a outhouse.

Picture was taken in Feb. 2009 and showed my boss why I wasn't gonna make it in.
The bump in front of the truck is my car.
We got about another foot of snow after picture was taken.
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Look for things in the walls, and signed boards.This house is on my place. When carpet was installed about 35 years ago,a threshold was removed between two rooms. The carpenter signed, and dated it. It was around 1890. My Dad knew the carpenter. When the barn roof was removed on the same property. I picked up a shingle, out of the many on the ground, and found my great grand father had signed it. He was also a carpenter. My daughter lives in the house now. The house has no foundation. Just boards on the ground. A house is being put on the same ground next to this house. The city wants 5 inches of concrete for the foundation. Stan
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We remodeled the farmhouse about 12 years ago now- if your foundation and framing are solid, nearly everything else is flexible. I am looking at four different LVL beams we installed to remove load bearing walls to open up the floorplan, not including the basement. We only found my grandmas empty whiskey bottles during demo, tucked between rafters off the floorboards in the attic. I wish I knew where/when the repurposed old lumber in the attic came from when this house was framed- it must have been really old!
 
My great-grandfathers/grandfathers house was post and beam and plank, it had civil war era newspapers under the lathe and plaster on the walls. You could find something anyplace, as a builder I always used to throw a few coins in a wall of the year built or a business card someplace. When I built stonewalls I used to put a tin box with such things in the wall.
 
Location is important. Renting out an old farm house is often more trouble than it's worth. You might be ahead to sell it and save yourself the cost of demolition. Pay a assessor to get an honest valuation.
 
My house was built in 1919. I had the same thing. When I pulled the carpet to lay wood floor the old linseed linoleum was under it. When I pulled that there was a layer of newspaper from 1939-41. Lots of stuff about the war and many Kats drug store ads. I have some framed. There was even a color spread of the comics and one of Popeye talking about having "Injuns" as his friends. Under that they had painted a design on the pine floor boards to make it look like a whole room rug. I guess when the dairy started making some money Mae got some fancy linoleum.
 

Does the house have 9' ceilings? For heavens sake don't tear it down. There are fewer and fewrer of these old houses still standing.
 
Are the foundation and frame work solid? Is there any particular reason it needs to be torn down instead being of sold to someone who might treasure an old home like this? Do you have Amish in the area, or someone else who might tear it down and rebuild it on another location?
 
John my wife and I just bought a old farm house that was built in 1873 ,2 story with 4 fire places.
Sold our son our house on the lake and moving into this old house. It has been kept up and somewhat updated but not much. Things i have noticed of coarse the floors are not level not bad though but you do notice. I have a company called drypro that came out and did some work underneath the house. They are building 5 additional piers under the house with a steel beam and there will be screw jacks. Thats just to stabilize whats there and it want settle anymore in the future. All the beams under the house are hand hewn and sitting on rock piers. Its a awesome house. We are building a 2 car garage 28X30 with a attached enclosed breezeway onto the house.That work starts within the next 3 weeks. I would say save it you can if its within reason of coarse. Ours we cant wait to move into.
 
It's a shame to see an old house come down, but sometimes you have no choice.

When my cousins, who were also our neighbors, tore their old house down, we found a pile of old letters in the wreckage. Not sure where they were in the house - I think maybe in the basement near the sill of the house. Very interesting reading. There was a lot about having to ride a carriage down to washington dc, and what a long trip it was (from mass.) Just a slice of some unknown person's life 150 years ago.

In our own house, that my grandfather built and I grew up in - my grandfather had hidden a bunch of stuff that we as kids found decades later (without tearing the house down).

Way back in a crawl space under the house behind some rocks was a large metal chest. My older brother was the only one brave enough to shimmy way in through a little crack in a hole in the foundation wall down in the basement to get in there to explore, he found the box. I think my grandfather had probably put it under the floor when he built the room it was under - I doubt he shimmied in there to hide it.

I went halfway in after my brother and held the light. My other brothers were further back peeking in.

It was literally like finding buried treasure.

I was probably about 8 or 9 at the time, and I'll never forget how amazing that moment was.

The metal box (the size of a large suitcase) was fastened with one screw. We dispatched a little brother for tools.

The screw came out easily enough -

We opened it and it was full of old balled up newspapers... All yellowed.

Kind of a let down.

Then my brother reached in an unballed one of them.

I'll never forget his yell "it's A GUN".

It turned out to be my great grandfather's collection of antique pistols and other items that he had accumulated during his time as Sheriff of Worcester county where he ran the jail.

There were about 6 matched pairs of of beautiful old percussion cap pistols, and a bunch of individual ones. A really cool variety of odd guns. There were some knives, some of them apparently made by prisoners. Lots of old coins and buttons, pictures, even the old newspaper that every gun was wrapped in was interesting. There were huge old padlocks, big jail keys, bullet molds, horse teeth for some reason - I assume it must have been a favorite horse.

A real time capsule. And to find something like that at that young age was better than winning the lottery to us. It just blew us all away. I'll never forget the old musty smell of that box, and that feeling of looking through it once our father came in and dragged it upstairs.

He had never seen any of it before either.

I doubt you'll find something that unique, but having experienced it - any time I see an old building coming down - I've always got my eyes open!
 
up to you of course, but I hope you save it.
My house is older than that and I like it (lots of work though)
Sturdy, thick walls...howling blizzard outside...don't even know till I look out.....
Like said, lots of treasures. lots of little board cut-outs between floors...old time safe deposit boxes I guess.
Original part had very old newspapers against outside wall cracks before the lath and plaster went up.
Later done re-modeling...yep, lots of later newspapers under linoleum.
And in every undisturbed space, lots of artifacts, bottles, cans etc.
In one very small attic crawlspace between additions, I found an ancient pair of women's shoes.....some history..I don't want to know!
 
New houses, just like new vehicles, are much better built than old ones were.
They are safer with standardized dimensions on steps and stairways.
Plywood and sheet rock do much to keep the building upright and square.
Pressure treated sills prevent rot.
Bolts to the foundation and rafter ties better control damage in catastrophic weather.
I joists or truss joists prevent sagging of floors for tile and the like.
Roof trusses are much stronger than stick framed roofs.
New construction techniques prevent air, insect and rodent infiltration.
Modern framing techniques, plywood or osb better use forest resources.
New homes have less hazardous materials like lead and asbestos and radon in them.
Old houses have zero or negligible insulation, no vapor barrier, no house wrap.
Remodeling is much easier on newer houses because of standardization.
Modern windows and doors are hugely more energy efficient than old ones.
Modern basements are usually taller than old ones giving you more living space.
Modern plumbing and electrical systems are much improved.
Modern homes have better, more refined layouts and better use of space.
Modern houses are less labor intensive to build and give you much more bang for your buck.
People say that new houses lack character or class.
Well yeah, if you use crappie masonite lap siding, plastic tubs and surrounds, cheap colonial casing and trim work and crummy carpet through out you won't have character or class.
But don't be so stingy when you build or remodel, build a smaller home with more attention to detail, fit and finish and you won't have a cheap looking house.
 
... A beautiful set of farm buildings where torn down and buried this last spring...

JD, If that's the place on Higgensport, I agree it was a real shame. I drive past there most weekdays.
 
I live in the third home on my property, first was 1833 log cabin, second was 1850s post and beam home. I ended up tearing down the second home, it was totally riddled with termites and built new.
 

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