Old Houses

lincolnmania · By: **lincolnmania** On: Fri Jan 04, 2008 5:50 pm

i will have to get some pics of my parents house......my father and i remodeled the house and added a large addition......it is a bungalow built sometime during the depression out of salvaged materials.....what a mess.......i had to reinforce the foundation in severla spots.....the concrete was coal, ash, dirt, broken glass, rocks, metal.......they did not know what a tape measure or a level were, the old part of the house was a real challenge.....floors are solid, real 2x8's and real 2/4's in the walls....the orig house was 26'x30'.......in 1960 someone added a bathroom, kitchen, and dining room on a 7x26 porch.......i lived with that till my father came home from operation desert shield......with lots of hazardous duty pay in the bank.......we tore down the tiny kitchen and built a two story 26'x21' addition, then ripped all the old asbestos siding off the orig house and installed vinyl siding on the whole house......everything has been redone.....the old metal septic tank collapsed while my father was overseas.......the metal lid was not rusted but the tree roots collapsed the tank.......the lid of the septic tank said sealtest ice cream! i'm assuming the old tank was an ice cream container of some sort.....it wasnt very large......maybe 150 gallons......clay tile for a drainfield........step forward and i'm living in and old auction house that was built in 1962.....good drains tho hehe

e.alleg · By: **e.alleg** On: Fri Jan 04, 2008 6:18 pm

built 1887, still standing

Wood'nCoal · By: **Wood'nCoal** On: Fri Jan 04, 2008 7:50 pm

pret wrote:Hi, My family has lived in this home for 6.5 years now. It's a 1855 Limestone home in the village of Schaefferstown, Pa. The frame addition was put on in 1917 - that addition was a formal dining room, a 'U-kitchen', and two bedrooms on the second floor. I have totally stripped the exterior of about 3 levels of oil base paint, and replaced it with the colors you see. I have been working on this project for more than 5 years now - a labor of love if you will. I heat with a small Osburn 1800i fireplace insert and a 157K btu oil burner. When the prices jumped 3 years ago, we paid about 3K for the insert and reduced our oil consumption from about 1100 galons to 350-400. We burn about 5 chords of wood a year in that little thing!

The view from the front porch is amazing - something I'm going to miss when we build our new home this summer - complete with coal boiler of course!!

The stone part of the house is outfitted with the old thin oak flooring with wide planks beneath that. The framed part has heart-pine flooring - not a hardwood, but still pretty.

I was going to say WE love the old houses, but my wife would rather have new. I do love this old place - if we'd stay, I'd treat her real nice to a coal boiler!! I guess my heating needs would be somewhere around 5 tons of coal a year... maybe more... it's only 1858 square feet, but the windows, although not too bad, should be replaced.

I do love an old home!

Pret

Very nice place, and I can tell you've done a lot of work on it. I wouldn't be able to sell it.

Wood'nCoal · By: **Wood'nCoal** On: Fri Jan 04, 2008 7:57 pm

e.alleg wrote:built 1887, still standing

I think your house is very nice, and I'm not telling you what to do, but all that lattice work is just begging for Victorian colors!

You and WNY, with those fantastic Victorians. I only could dream. But I love this place anyway, I'll love it more when the last piece of aluminum siding is history.

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e.alleg · By: **e.alleg** On: Fri Jan 04, 2008 10:56 pm

The whole house needs to be painted. I figured a coal boiler was more important than paint so it got put off last year, this summer hopefully I'll get some work done on it. I'd like to paint the house green with various shades of green/gold/maroon trim I think it'll look nice. Vinyl siding would probably be best but I'm not a rich man so I'll keep it all original.

Wood'nCoal · By: **Wood'nCoal** On: Fri Jan 04, 2008 11:22 pm

e.alleg wrote:The whole house needs to be painted. I figured a coal boiler was more important than paint so it got put off last year, this summer hopefully I'll get some work done on it. I'd like to paint the house green with various shades of green/gold/maroon trim I think it'll look nice. Vinyl siding would probably be best but I'm not a rich man so I'll keep it all original.

I am against vinyl siding, esp. on a house like yours. It takes away all of the character. The only siding I dislike more is aluminum. This place has cedar shakes under the aluminum, from the 1930's, it wasn't maintained and would look worse then the aluminum, plus when the aluminum siding was installed the edges of the outside window sills were all cut off to make the siding fit. If there were clapboards on the house the aluminum would all be gone by now. The long term plan is to strip the place to the tar paper and install cedar clapboards (some of it is done already). All I need is time and a lot of $$$!

LW3 · By: **LW3** On: Tue Jan 22, 2008 1:30 am

built in 1887 will never be finished :shock:

Matthaus · By: **Matthaus** On: Tue Jan 22, 2008 11:46 am

LW that is gorgeous!!!!!

Wood'nCoal · By: **Wood'nCoal** On: Tue Jan 22, 2008 1:44 pm

LW, Really nice! I know what you mean when you say it will never be finished.

It that your Buick in the avatar? A GS?

Check out this thread:

Antique, Old, or Special Interest Cars/Trucks

ken · By: **ken** On: Tue Jan 22, 2008 2:56 pm

heres my project. built in 1862 , they spared no cost on the lumber. the framing is red oak ,ruff cut sizes. flooring is inch quarter hard maple. been working on her for 15 years. had to jack up the house in 2 places. one area 24' and one l shape 10' x 8' to replace the 8" x 5" sill that had rotted any from the porchs they had. they put the sandstone porch slabs above the sill board. over the years they rotted out. i gutted the whole house to the exterior studs. i mean everything was gone , inside walls included. put a nice wide set of steps going upstairs. they have real steep and narrow. 23 high performace Anderson windows. was 30 windows , so i got ride of some. all new electric , plumbing and heat. now they are siding her and it breaks my heart i'm not doing it.

LW3 · By: **LW3** On: Tue Jan 22, 2008 4:21 pm

Wood'nCoal wrote:LW, Really nice! I know what you mean when you say it will never be finished.

It that your Buick in the avatar? A GS?

Thanks Wood'nCoal and Matthaus. Yeah that is my 69 Gs 400 I will put some full sized pics and info in thread about3193.html

Wood'nCoal · By: **Wood'nCoal** On: Tue Jan 22, 2008 5:43 pm

Hey Ken, your place is huge! How many square feet?

daveuz · By: **daveuz** On: Tue Jan 22, 2008 6:03 pm

You guys have some terrific homes! http://memory.loc.gov/pp/hhquery.html. when You go to this link type in "fireplaces" in the search. That will take you to about 1800 different homes photographed for historic purposes. There are many in PA NY and NJ and will be interested to see if any of you guys are near these places. I am working on a pre 1820 post and beam house in Alexander NY. I was able to finish the double fireplace and bake oven that was removed in the 1920's. The house is a small modest house and is a pretty early structure for the area. The house is not livable and at the rate I am going it never will be. I have been able to collect most of the period 9 over 6 and 6 over 6 windows for the house plus the correct period mantels and doors plus other misc. items. Around this area of Western NY almost no one has any respect for real early homes.

Wood'nCoal · By: **Wood'nCoal** On: Tue Jan 22, 2008 7:00 pm

daveuz wrote:You guys have some terrific homes! http://memory.loc.gov/pp/hhquery.html. when You go to this link type in "fireplaces" in the search. That will take you to about 1800 different homes photographed for historic purposes. There are many in PA NY and NJ and will be interested to see if any of you guys are near these places. I am working on a pre 1820 post and beam house in Alexander NY. I was able to finish the double fireplace and bake oven that was removed in the 1920's. The house is a small modest house and is a pretty early structure for the area. The house is not livable and at the rate I am going it never will be. I have been able to collect most of the period 9 over 6 and 6 over 6 windows for the house plus the correct period mantels and doors plus other misc. items. Around this area of Western NY almost no one has any respect for real early homes.

It's not just where you are, hack remodeling occurs everywhere. I guess people think they are "updating" these places, but after it's done, it's just another house. I pay close attention to the older houses when traveling around, it's nice to find a restored gem in the middle of the mess.
With this place it's just a plain farm house, very simple. So I am more or less "creating" the look. I have very little original work to rely on, since the renovation in the late 1930's. The only original room is the one I am in now, there is old, old plaster over lath boards covered with furring strips and fiber board walls. The ceiling is lower then the other rooms, it's squared timbers with interlocking joints. The house is not quite 2 full stories, the part of the ceiling is pitched in the upstairs rooms. On the pitched part of the ceiling in here the beams of the original roof are still intact, just sawed off, so the plaster just kind of hangs in the air under the current roof. I'll try to get a photo.
I've been through Allentown many times, where you take the city streets to get to the area to the south. I am always amazed at all the old buildings that still have the iron coal doors on the front foundations. I wonder if anyone would notice if some of them suddenly were missing?

Pictures of your place???

coaledsweat · By: **coaledsweat** On: Tue Jan 22, 2008 7:10 pm

Wood'nCoal wrote:It's not just where you are, hack remodeling occurs everywhere.

Even worse is when they hack it from the ground up.

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