I’ve had my house since August and I’m curious if there is some kind of way to tell how old it is. The inspector wasn’t sure and the original deed is missing.
The house is a “Dutch Colonial” style cottage (Fisher Price barn-ish) and the original interior walls are plaster and lathe. The baseboards are about 8" wide and there are some elaborate mouldings throughout the house. I know the mouldings could be later remodels; is there some way to estimate the era of the house?
Oh, and some of the interior walls are curved – someone told me that this could signify an 1890-1900 house because of certain Victorian beliefs about ghosts :dubious: <----- Me
You could go through census records for that address. At some point there’s not going to be an address there for them to have census records for. That would get you within 10 years of the home’s age.
I don’t think the plaster and lathe narrows it down very much. Materials might have changed, but drywall didn’t come along until fairly late. If you can get a glimpse of the framing, that might help. Post and beam was succeeded by balloon framing, and nicely dimensioned lumber didn’t come along until steam power and sawmills made it easy. My neighbors have a house with curved walls and I believe it dates back to 1860 or so. (Their house and mine are contemporaries, more or less, but whoever built their house had money so they got all the cool molding and curved walls. I got a Colonial box.)
Can you give us a little more information on your house and surrounding area? Are we talking about a house in a city, town, or a farm house in the middle of nowhere?
How old do you think it is? I mean, can you narrow it down to a fifty year period or so?
Is there any evidence of knob-and-tube wiring in the ceiling or underneath the floor? According to Wikipedia they stopped using that stuff around the 1930s, although it may be obviously older than that already.
I second the local tax records. The assessor’s office should know; mine’s even available on the internet, along with a nifty floor plan and GIS data, satellite photos, and all sorts of other crap that are really none of the neighbors’ business.
Same here. Google for your counties property tax information. They may have a website that allows you too look up the information.
Some counties are different. I know ours allows you to look by owners last name, street address or parcel number. I can even put just a street name within the city of our county and it will give me every house on that street and the name of the owner with a link to the detail of each home.
The detail shows who owns it, year built, square feet, total amount of rooms and bathrooms. What type of foundation it has, type of roof etc., along with the value of that home and the taxes of the property. It also shows previous owners and the year the property changed hands.
We also have a property deed search that gives the same type of info but has PDFs available for download of the actual deed and the mortage papers.
I know some other counties require that you have a parcel number so you may want to start there. It should be listed somewhere on the mortage.
How about a local title company? A title search should go all the way back to the house’s construction and the cost should be minimal.
Also, there should be some sort of local analog to our Portland Maps page, which gives some pretty detailed information regarding the properties. Example address. Check your local county website and look for “GIS” or check for a link to the assessor’s office. Check with the planning office or the building permits department to see if there have been any zoning change applications or permits for renovation or expansion–somewhere in there the age of the house ought to be recorded. When you bought the house, did you get a copy of the appraisal? That would have the year built in it.
Dendochronology or carbon dating isn’t necessarily a great indicator of the age of the house.
My grandfather died in 2005. This year I was lucky enough to be given a tour of his house by the new owners, who are restoring it faithfully.
We “knew” the house was 16th century. Turns out, though, it is actually 15th century in origin (started off as an animal barn, which, about 50 years later, had a chimney built in it to allow people to live in it, and then got added onto from thereon, adding a second chimney, another room, then a front, then a second floor). The restoration company took a core sample of one of the major beams in the house, and dated it by dendochronology.
It turns out that the beam holding up the second storey in my granddad’s old house is a thousand years old. Possibly taken from a Viking longship burial.
Some think that Newport Tower in Rhode Island was built by the Vikings. Of course, it’s not quite the same as finding something like that in an inhabited residential home.
Your best bet is to have a realtor, appraiser or builder do a walk-through. They can tell, through a combination of construction methods and materials, when an American mass-produced house was built within a few years.
You know how some people can tell when a photograph was taken by looking at the clothing and hairstyles of the people it? Same principle.
We restored a 1926 craftsman a couple of years ago. The bottoms of all the sinks and toilets had 1926 stamped on them, so if you have an original plumbing fixtures, you might check them carefully. You might also post pictures here, or e-mail me some. I have a good friend who’s has a masters in architectural preservation, and she could tell you within a few years. Plus, we’d like to see
