a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by WanderingEng
WanderingEng  ·  2372 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How much work is home ownership?

How old is your house? The area I like, both for location and price, has a lot of homes built in the '30s through the '50s. That doesn't necessarily turn me off, but it's one more thing to gauge.





kleinbl00  ·  2372 days ago  ·  link  ·  

We have a good'n'proper mid-century modern built in '59. Teak ceiling, mahogany trim, oak floors, whole nine yards. I can fault nothing about its construction; the idiosyncrasies of the house are wholly related to relocating the hot water heater to where the furnace lives so that we could have a dishwasher (it used to be under the counter next to the stove) and then converting that furnace from fuel oil to natural gas.

Having been an architectural consultant for half a decade, having contractors in the family and having a sister who used to be a buyer for Quadrant Homes, I can say that I would happily buy anything built from 1900 to about '93. '94 or so they started cutting corners like crazy. New-built tract homes are junk. Buddy of mine rehabbed through the '90s and quit about '06; he said back in '09 that it was silly to worry about all the excess inventory created prior to the last bust because if you don't maintain all those modern houses they'll sink back into the mud within six months.