Speaking of the old lath-and -plaster walls: in my house, we began by stripping the old wallpaper. Guess what-the old plaster was mixed with horsehair-the stuff was crumbling!
We were faces with-either remove the old plaster from the laths and replaster (expensive and a horrible job), or blueboard over the old plaster.
We chose the latter course. Just the thought of removing old plaster makes me gag-and of course, it is hard to find a plasterer who can cover lathwork professionally today.
Again, I say, MODERN is best!Besides being quick, blueboard is much flatter.
I think that Victorian houses are fine-if you like living in a museum! I’d much rather we lived in houses like were exhibited at the 1960s NY World Fair-completely made of plastic, glass, and steel!
I’ll have to offer a dissenting point of view. In my neck of the woods, home construction has been improving steadily. Houses today are built to higher standards than they were 10 years ago, and those ones are built to higher standards than the ones 10 years before that.
Most new homes around here now are built with 2x6 construction. Ten years ago, the standard was 2x4 construction.
Most new homes use engineered, composite floor joists that resist warping and are extremely stiff. This means the floors don’t creak, and you don’t need as many teleposts in the basement.
Most new homes in the area now have weeping tiles around the foundation connected to redundant sump pumps. The foundation stays dry all the time. This was not the norm 10 years ago, and was uncommon 20 years ago.
Most roof trusses now are pre-fab, with webbing in all joints for strength. Years ago, they were nailed in place, which was very inconsistent.
The R-value of the insulation in modern houses is much higher than it was 10 or 20 years ago.
Modern houses have low or zero maintenance exteriors, with vinyl siding, metal cladding on soffits, metal cladding on doorframes, etc. Houses 10 or 20 years ago typically had poor stucco jobs or wood siding that weathered badly.
Modern houses have Low-E windows, which is more energy efficient and keeps interior surfaces from being sun damaged.
Modern houses have much better wiring. They typically have bigger fuse boxes, they often use CAT-5 for all phones, etc.
I’ve noticed the standard in most new houses now calls for 50 gal water tanks, when older houses had 30 or maybe 40 gallon tanks. When I was a kid, you couldn’t get a deep tub full of hot water because our tank was so small. Now I can fill our 6-ft jacuzzi up to my armpits if I want to.
A lot really depends on the price break. The cheap ‘starter’ homes have a lot of short cuts. Cheap lino, thin carpets, etc. But move up to the next price point, and you start seeing features that were unheard of a few years ago in moderately priced houses, like Ceramic tile floors with in-floor heating, zoned heating and cooling, etc.
Sure, there is shoddy workmanship out there. But there always have been. You’re being unfair to new houses by comparing them to 100 year old Victorian mansions. You can’t compare them to the AVERAGE house built 100 years ago, because most of them were torn down after they became unlivable. The fact that the houses you’re talking about survived for 100 years means you’re comparing average houses today to the absolute cream of the crop of yesterday.
We had an example of a standard 100 year old house on the farm I used to live on - it was leaning heavily to one side, the floors were covered in some gawdawful yellowed linoleum-type stuff that was cracked (big pieces were missing, exposing the bare wood underneath).
The wall insulation was whatever random material the builders had on hand (newspapers, old rags, sawdust, whatever), the electrical system was exposed copper wiring running down to cheap switches, most of which stopped working years and years ago. Heat was provided by a giant cast-iron stove - if you cooked a big supper, the stove would keep the house fairly warm for the rest of the night. But god help you if you slept in the bedrooms farthest away, because you’d freeze. And mornings were always icy cold until we got the stove fired up.
The stairs would creak and moan when you climbed them, as did the upstairs floors. The ceilings were low, the lighting was poor, and ventilation was bad.
I lived there in 1970, when the house was only 60-70 years old, and this was the condition it was in.
This was what the *average person lived in at the turn of the century. Give me modern houses any day.
Well, we got some new wiring so we have three prong outlets. But still the wiring is on the wall because of single walls
Question:
How many of you have ever been in an old house and seen twin wires running across the wall, bare, held apart by little ceramic clips, going to switches?
Know what they are?
I never thought about it, until one day, watching an old movie, I realized what they were and was stunned that back then no one had to brains to realize how dangerous they were.
Some years back, in a city, I stumbled across a large wooded lot that used to be a farm. The house and shed were up for sail and looked old, so I stopped. After a bit I spotted bare copper wires strung through the trees going to the shed and some going off into the overgrowth. I followed and found in the middle of the growth, an old well run by an electric pump. I traced the wires back to the shed (a small flat roofed barn) and found them running to the biggest mass of rusted, oily steel and copper that I’d ever seen up close before. A huge old diesel generator!
The place used to generate it’s own power! From the size of the generator, I figure they had enough left over to light up a small town.