Historic Details

The good, the bad, and the just plain silly.

All new systems, all new insulation, all new siding, all new roof framing, mostly new plaster to repair the water damage... It's time to chronicle some of the historic details of this house before we forget this used to be an old house.

"They don't make them like they used to... thankfully." Through experimentation, disastrous failures, and the constant reminder of persistent repairs, we have all learned a lot about structure in the last 120 years. But really, most of the structural problems we've found in this house were well within the structural understanding of 19th-century carpenters. For one thing, even if you can get your entire porch to stand up just by building it out of empty trim instead of using posts, you can't then add another porch on top in the 80's by randomly cutting into that trim wherever it needs to fit. Talk about cutting corners.

Then there's the masonry. Bricks are not the best material for a foundation, but if you go ahead and use them, you really need to tie your rows together so they don't bend like this wall in the photo! Good thing that's not the stack (or wythe) that's carrying our new posts all the way from the roof. The structural side is now beautifully rebuilt by the mason. Years of ignored maintenance had degraded the mortar so completely that we were able to poke a stick all the way through from the inside to the outside at this spot!

At least those original carpenters cared enough to add some nice touches like the brackets at the top of the bay windows. And the demo guys kindly even saved them for us, in case we can get them to fit again despite all the extra foam. Here is one in purgatory on the porch.

One thing that is amazing about old houses is the quality of the wood. The board sheathing is never visible except during construction and repairs, and it seems criminal to cover up this incredible surface.

The last photo is from our third floor, which is entirely new from the floor surface up. We're starting to see the views our new windows will be framing, looking onto the historic fabric of our beautiful street.