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Yeah you have to be committed to buy an old house. It's fun but can be a lot of work. I was selling the home I grew up in after my mom passed, so getting it s
by rootusrootus 1mo ago
Yeah you have to be committed to buy an old house. It's fun but can be a lot of work. I was selling the home I grew up in after my mom passed, so getting it sold was my only priority. We ended up not doing anything but refinish some old floors (not because they really needed fixing per se, but because an original doug fir floor in good condition here brings way more in value than it costs to have done). The electrical was a mix of modern and knob & tube. Buyer didn't bat an eye, they knew the score. They also wanted the house so bad they agreed to eat the cost of the sewer line replacement that was basically mandatory (good old terracotta & rotted out cast iron, I wonder what we will think of PVC/ABS/HPDE in a hundred years).
Speaking of lead ... I was surprised we didn't get any pushback from the floor guys on that. Someone had painted parts of the floors, then laid linoleum in the middle, and my mom had a lot of it covered in carpet that was really in rough shape at this point. I couldn't get a positive test on the paint for lead with an inexpensive test kit but I really would be surprised if there wasn't any. But the guys doing the floor didn't even bring it up. And this is work they specialize in, so they deal with a lot of floors this vintage.
- ghaff 1mo ago>The electrical was a mix of modern and knob & tube. Buyer didn't bat an eye, they knew the score. That's sort of the key. If you have your eye on a >100 year old home, love on unless you're OK with a lot of what probably comes with that.