If a house is 300 years old it does not have
power
running water
central heat/ air (this may not be upgraded)
So when they put this stuff in , how do they do it? Do they run it all outside of walls rather than tear up the walls ?
They’re not 300 years old, only about 120-130, but at the museum where I volunteer we have some restored houses where all that stuff is run inside the walls. If the house was electified during the late 19th century/early 20th they can pull modern up-to-code wiring through the existing nooks and crannies. In one of our houses the conduits and wiring are being installed in the studs and floor joists, but the walls and plaster-and-lath was pretty torn up and damaged already.
Whenever I see people “renovating” old houses, they’ve torn the walls down to bare studs and pulled up a fair amount of flooring, so that’s going to make it a lot easier to run fresh pipe and wiring everywhere they go. Granted, we don’t have many 300 year old houses in the Bay Area… the only ones around here that old would have been adobe, built by the Spanish, and they’re mostly long gone, except for a dozen missions.
I’ve renovated 3 old houses in my day. For the ductwork I used the five chimneys in the oldest one to run the ducts. Seemed to work.
As for tearing out the walls? The damn things we solid wood and plaster with giant beams in them (trust! Some of the Dopers were in that house) so tearing them out was a non-starter. We had to operate within what we had.
In cases where running such things through the walls is impracticable (such as adobe) pipes and conduit can be run along the existing walls, perhaps in corners or along baseboards and where the ceiling and wall meet, in as unobtrusive manner as possible. Strategic placement of furniture can also help disguise the additions. In some cases, molding can be fit over the new pipes/conduit to hide it.
And, as noted, old chimneys and the like can also be used.
In a lot of older places around here where they have solid plaster walls (no lathe) you’ll see service chases in the corner. Basically, a small corner of the room notched out to make room for some pipes and/or wiring, then drywalled. So a rectangular room ends up looking like this:
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It’s usually pretty unobtrusive and you don’t notice it unless you’re looking for history.
I know this one because I have done it myself. My ex-wife and I restored a circe 1760 colonial over 7 years (she still has it). The main part of the house is still almost completely original except for a few superficial upgrades and retrofitted modern windows of period style for efficiency.
Most modern retrofits and conveniences don’t require any substantial changes to the house itself. Colonial houses ere built with gaps in the walls so you can run electricity, cable, and telephone lines the same way you can you would in a modern house. Sometimes it requires careful snaking of wires but the idea and the challenge are the same. In some ways, it it easier because they also typically have a large basement below grade where you can locate any electrical boxes and bring lines in from the outside and straight up through any walls from below. That may require pouring a concrete floor in the basement and installing automatic pumps so that nothing ever gets wet but that doesn’t affect the main living space at all.
Plumbing is the truly hard thing unless you want to start destroying and rebuilding walls. We didn’t want to do that and there was already some plumbing in the house when we bought it so the choice was easy. We just ran water lines into the kitchen and built a modern master bathroom directly above it and expanded the 1st floor bathroom so that all the lines ran straight into it from the kitchen right next to it.
It does take special consideration to do work on houses like that especially if you want to keep it intact but it also isn’t as hard or invasive as it sounds. We were lucky that there are enough houses of that age or older in our area that there are specialty contractors that can work on them without destroying them in the process. It is fairly routine as long as you are responsible and careful.
1800 granite house all the wires go through the floors or chased into the plaster. The pipes for central heating run on the walls, looks rather Steam punk i think.
In addition to this strategy, sometimes baseboards, wainscoting or crown molding can be used to hide the renovations. For example, one house I know of has a four-inch ledge running around the room, with wainscoting below that. This was done to provide room for electrical outlets in a room where running wire and placing outlets in the original walls wasn’t an option.
When I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, they were renovating a 100+ year old duplex. The house had a half basement which had once held a coal burning furnace. A friend and I got the job of digging a trench in the dirt floor under the crawlspace in the back half of the house to make room for the ductwork for the new furnace that was being installed in the front basement. Not a fun job, btw.
The house interior was torn down to the studs so that modern wiring and plumbing could be installed. I never got to see the completed project.
If I came into owning a untouched 300 year old house I think I’d be considered a fool not to leave it in as close to original condition if possible. It’d be a historically significant building in most parts of the country; and much cheaper and easier to build a new home if all I needed was shelter. Unless of course you live near Shagnasty where 300 year old homes are considered ye olde fixer uppers.
My house was built without plumbing, HVAC or electricity. It isn’t 300 years old, though, it’s from roughly 1900.
There is a cellar under the kitchen which has been turned into a utility closet. That’s where the furnace, pipes, water heater and electrical service panel are installed. There is a crawlspace under the rest of the house, and that’s where the wires and duct work go.
I’m not sure but I think the wires are all snaked up through the walls from under the house. The electric was recently redone. The previous wires were the braided kind from the 1920s, complete with Edison Electric push button light switches. So I think the presence of the previous wires made it easier to snake the new wires through. Outlets and switches were installed by just cutting holes in the plaster.
The plumbing is a special case, because it doesn’t go to the rest of the house. The kitchen was originally much bigger, but they walled off a quarter of it and made that the bathroom. So the plumbing doesn’t really have to go to the rest of the house, just under the kitchen where the basement/cellar is.
When I was in London (England) I saw a lot of older houses (1800’s brick) with the plumbing stack running down the outside of the wall - I assume the WC’s were against the outer wall and they just chipped a small hole through the brick to push the drainpipe through. I suppose the cold spells are not long and hard enough to worry about a vertical, usually empty, pipe freezing solid.
I recall an old log cabin being restored for a museum village (Canada, from 1800’s) and the owners in the 1930’s or 50’s had chopped little square recesses in the logs to seat the electrical boxes. I assume they ran the cable conduit in the grooves between the logs. (Unlike Lincoln et al, these logs were quite large and squared off so there was none of that rustic round to the sides) The original logs were covered with siding outside and plaster walls inside, several different times over the years, so I assume the electrical was buried the same as mentioned above - walls ripped off where applicable and replaced. Very nice old buildings with fancy wood paneling, the walls are even more easily opened and restored with minimal damage or rework.
Also, some historical buildings they have surface run conduit, but painted the same colour as the wall so it is very unobtrusive.
A friend mentioned in Montreal, for his turn-of-the-century brick building, the cable TV people ran the wires along the outside and drilled through the brick where they needed to provide service in living rooms or bedroom. For single floors nad main floors, never underestimate the ability to feed from below, since finished basements are a relatively new affectation. Ditto for 2-story houses running wiring under the eaves. One old house I lived in had a “laundry chute” to send laundry from the second floor to the basement washing area; a nice useful place to install piping to the second floor. The fancier old mansions might have a dumbwaiter for the same purpose, a much bigger shaft.
I’m living in a Victorian (c. 1880) terrace house - double-brick walls with no cavity and no gyprock sheeting (which I think is what Americans call ‘drywall’). Although the only parts of the house with water are lean-tos built-on in the 1930s (the kitchen) and 1970s (bathroom/laundry), the electricity, gas and antenna all extend to the main house.
In my case they all distribute under the floor to the ground floor, then up the (now bricked up) chimney to the first-storey floor, where they run under the floorboards to the points and the electricity continues up into the roof cavity to run the lights. Although the gas bayonets are at floor level, in order to reach the powerpoints and light switches the cable runs from the floor/ceiling through square, plastic conduits affixed to the outside of the walls.
The antenna cable runs through a similar conduit down the outside of the building to ground level, then enters underneath the internal floor level.
This Old House on PBS show this kinda stuff. It’s pretty interesting if that’s your thing.
They have several years of TOH available on YouTube now. I’ve lost several weekends that way. 