Old house bought: check. Now what?
Oh man, that’s a beautiful house! I’ve day dreamed about getting a house like this and renovating it. Please do blog about it as you renovate. From my experiences renovating my current 1920s house: Fixing plaster on ceilings sucks and it seems like problems cracking reoccur. Don’t be afraid to sheetrock & skim coat your ceilings. Invest in a couple of really good respirators for anyone who is working on sanding or getting down underneath floor boards or creepy crawly spaces. Those little dust masks are mostly useless for this kind of work. Also, you will need a good quality shop vacuum that can take a lot of abuse. Selectively hire people to help you do stuff. It goes faster and is totally worth it for stuff you aren’t experienced doing. We just paid a guy to do the tile work in our bathroom. It took him 3 days and it’s beautiful. It would have taken us much longer and a lot of swearing and wouldn’t have looked as professional. Heating an old house is a brutal. A lot of old houses have
I’d N’th working on the house systems before you start looking at specific rooms. Electric (including updating service if necessary to accommodate the variety of modern appliances we now have and removing ALL knob & tube/1960’s aluminum wiring, they are EVIL), plumbing, HVAC, insulation, etc. It sounds and looks like these are definitely the priority–even though they’re not as apparent as say, chintzy 80s wallpaper. It’s also so much easier to deal with these projects when you can make a mess. (Read: take some of the walls down to the studs.) Since you got the place for a song, you might also consider seriously upgrading some of your systems–installing things like a tankless water heater, for example. You’d come out that much further ahead in terms of dollars and comfort. I’d also consider scaling back what you consider livable, at least for the first 6 months or so. Make one or two rooms cozy (draft-free and decently warm in the winter) and camp out in them. You’d be surprised how l
