
Designing a New Old Home: Part 1 - stepstop
https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/designing-a-new-old-home-part-1-cf298b58ed41
======
WalterBright
My house is a custom one. It's substantially different from the usual pacific
northwest home design. For example, the eaves are about 2 feet deep. This
keeps the walls dry & clean, keeps water from getting in the basement, and
shades the house in summer.

Almost no houses have substantial eaves.

Also, I have too much experience with rotted wood decks, this one is concrete
:-) and it ever so slightly slopes away from the house. All in an effort to
keep the house naturally dry. A damp house is a terrible thing in the PNW.

Don't ever buy a house where the driveway slopes towards the garage. You'll
get a flooded garage/basement at some point guaranteed. Make sure your garage
floor has a slight slope towards the door. It's the little things like this
that count. (You can't even tell there is a slope on mine, except it's much
easier to push the car out of the garage than in.)

Houses around here on the north slope of a hill are cheaper than on the south
slope. There's a good reason for that. Hello mildew!

~~~
WalterBright
About the sloping driveway thing. Yes, I see a number of driveways sloping
towards the house where the builder installed a gutter just before the garage
door. This works most of the time, but then the leaves (or snow & slush) clog
the gutter and the garage floods.

Your garage is _going to flood_ if the driveway slopes towards it.

I've had a flood from a broken washing machine hose before. I had a lot of
water damage to repair. This house has a floor drain under the washing
machine, with (as usual) the floor sloping towards the drain. Ditto for under
the water heater.

In the new house, I've had two gushers in the laundry room and one leaking
water heater. No flood damage! Usually, a leaking water heater is an
emergency. Not here, it could wait until normal business hours.

I have never, ever seen this feature in any other house, and it costs next to
nothing.

~~~
Symbiote
Many bathrooms in Scandinavia are "wet rooms", the floor slopes slightly
towards one (sometimes two) floor drains.

As I understand it, the building regulations say a washing machine must be in
a room with a floor drain. Therefore, most washing machines are in the
bathroom.

~~~
mongol
This used to be true, but today it is allowed to have a washing machine in a
room without a floor drain, under certain conditions. There must be leakage
detectors connected with mechanisms that can cut the water supply.

------
brendoelfrendo
> They seem designed primarily to maximize one thing: the square-footage
> number that will be on the listing when it’s sold.

Say it again for the people in the back! This is probably my biggest complaint
with modern suburban housing/McMansions. You can see it in the exterior design
of the house; you see all kinds of horrendous roof lines, mismatched windows
of all shapes and sizes, odd material choices, etc. The houses suffer because
they're trying to build the most square footage on the smallest possible lot.
I know density is the way to go in urban development, but... I feel like
developers have lost the plot.

~~~
stevesimmons
"More square feet for less dollars"

This was the slogan of a house builder I once analysed for a management
consulting project on the future of the Australian building industry.

After a week touring display homes, and estimating cost (or costs avoided), I
figured out exactly how the market leaders lowered the sticker price while
increasing their margins. No matter that the houses quickly fell apart after
purchase...

The tricks I remember included:

* No plaster on the wall behind the fridge

* Big mirrors in bathrooms, because mirrors cost about the same as tiles but are much quicker to install.

* Eliminate walls on the ground floor, to give the open-plan look. Except that there's no sound insulation, or heat retention. And the new owners need to buy a lot more furniture, otherwise it looks too empty.

* Make the eaves very narrow, to reduce the size of the roof. Even though the walls now have no shade from the sun, the interior heats up more in summer, and you spend much more on air conditioning.

* Build the house like a big box, up close to the boundary line... Looks good on the plan. Less good when your neighbours' bedroom windows look right into yours. And less good when there's no shade or privacy because the builder cut down the established trees...

I remember both feeling in awe at the cost-cutting ingenuity and disgusted at
future problems it would bring the unlucky new owners.

~~~
brendoelfrendo
I've seen just about all of the above, and a few more:

* Cheap out on just about anything that you need a lot of (knobs, drawer pulls, light switches)

* Cut tile or flooring at unusual angles to avoid having to do more complex cuts

* Use the cheapest lighting and plumbing fixtures possible

I've actually had friends buying new construction homes tell me that they've
told the builder NOT to install certain things because they didn't want to be
saddled with whatever "builder grade" materials the contractor was going to
use. Imagine that! Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for a new house,
but you already don't trust the builder not to cut corners! Where's the
craftsmanship?

~~~
lotsofpulp
> Imagine that! Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for a new house, but
> you already don't trust the builder not to cut corners! Where's the
> craftsmanship?

The craftsmanship is there, but 95% of people can’t afford it.

It starts all the way from the fact that suppose you and your competitor are
looking to purchase a parcel of land to develop a community. You make a nice
plan that retains nice old growth trees, gives adequate space for eaves,
design better than minimum standards drainage, insulation materials, etc.

Your competitor draws up plans and cuts all of those niceties out, and saves a
few million dollars on costs. Now the competitor can offer to pay a few
million more for the same parcel of land.

Guess who gets to develop it?

~~~
brendoelfrendo
I think this is true, but only part of the equation. I think you certainly
could build a house at average-suburban-prices without cutting corners, but
your profit margins would be lower or you'd have to compromise somewhere else.
For example, the market has optimized around square footage, $/sqft is the
most important metric for many consumers, ergo a smaller but better built
house won't sell (or, at least, won't sell for a price that justifies the
extra expense). Nobody ever got rich by leaving money on the table.

The disadvantage of living in a seller's market is that it's also a builder's
market; when homes sell as fast as they're being built regardless of quality,
there's little pressure on builders to improve quality.

~~~
lotsofpulp
The only solution to that is to raise the minimum standards by making building
codes more strict. But that raises the cost of the housing, and then you have
people claiming the government is restricting housing development and pricing
people out.

It's all a very delicate balance that gets thrown way off especially due to
the securitization of the asset for 30+ years at artificially low future
taxpayer subsidized interest rates.

A lot of the calculations about value of fixtures and finishes in a house in a
high demand area get de-valued by buyers because the land value (and the land
value's increase) is worth so much more than the structure that sits on it,
that as a buyer, you can't afford to value things like proper fit and finish
and materials unless you're looking at very high value homes, otherwise
another buyer will come in and take it.

------
ykl
Last year my wife and I bought out first house. Given our budget, we had the
option of either buying a new big McMansion type home further out from the
city, or buying a smaller older home closer to the city. We wound up buying a
smaller house built in the 1940s and gutting/renovating/modernizing the
interior, and on a whole I'm really happy with the result.

The house itself feels like when it was originally built, more careful thought
was put into where windows are, how rooms are lit, how rooms are ventilated,
how spaces flow into each other, and so on and so forth. After our renovation
work, we now also have all of the modern niceties like ethernet running
through all of the walls and a shiny kitchen and shiny bathrooms and modern
hardwood flooring and whatnot. Every part of the house now feels like it's the
way it is specifically because we wanted it to be that way, and relatively
speaking, it cost less than it would have to get a new cookie-cutter McMansion
type monstrosity around here. As a bonus, the neighborhood feels cozier and
friendlier and less empty compared to newer cookie-cutter type development
tracts too.

The only downside is that the square footage is considerably smaller, but I
have no idea what people are supposed to do with all of the empty space in a
giant house anyway. Oh, I guess another minor downside was discovering that no
two doors in the entire house are exactly the same size, so we wound up having
to get custom doors made.

Of course, your mileage will vary depending on where you are, budget,
contractors, etc; we lucked out and managed to find contractors that cared
about their craft and put a lot of thought into things.

~~~
thomk
> I have no idea what people are supposed to do with all of the empty space in
> a giant house

They fill it with shit they don't need. Kudos to you.

~~~
m463
they're filled with "I might need..." or "maybe I will use..." (eventually
becoming "I forgot I had...")

~~~
blaser-waffle
Honestly, that's a huge advantage of a house: you can keep the stuff you
_might_ use. I'm in a small apartment downtown -- great location -- but if my
wife and I both want to keep a bike then we're out of luck.

Plus well located apartments aren't so great during COVID.

~~~
m463
there's a difference there - that's stuff you will use. It doesn't take all
your garage to hold that.. unless it's say, a car :)

------
war1025
I don't really have anything to contribute to this, but I found the article
super interesting.

Perhaps a thing I could add is that Part 2 [1] is available, which wasn't
immediately obvious to me.

[1] [https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/designing-a-new-old-home-
pa...](https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/designing-a-new-old-home-
part-2-2a5ea1a1b2b3)

~~~
claydavisss
Some very weird choices. No internal ducting for AC? Crazy, its a LOT cheaper
to include that when building. Now in some heat-death future you end up with
ACs hanging out the windows. Wood heating? Wow, thats incredibly polluting.
Indeed, they may find it outlawed eventually, its already illegal in many
places. Heating with wood also means making the room with the stove an inferno
just to make the rest of the house acceptable. No closets? If that's what
you're into...but its going to be hard to sell.

Average home ownership duration is ten years. So yeah, you kinda have to make
some considerations for the next person. No AC and wood heating are going to
be a hard sell.

~~~
russellbeattie
I grew up in a 200 year old school house in northern New Hampshire. Let me
tell you from bitter experience that burning wood in a stove for primary
heating is a nightmare on multiple levels.

First you have to chop and stack cords of wood in the fall (a thankless, back-
breaking task), then go out into the snow to bring in loads of wood every
other day all winter to heat the house. You can't store enough wood indoors to
last months, so it's always piled up outside. Dealing with the wood is a never
ending shitty job that nobody likes or wants to do. It's not a "chore", it's
full on work - with cuts, splinters, bruises or worse injuries. Slipping on
the ice with an armload of cordwood is a great way to break a bone or get a
concussion, let me assure you. I cannot tell you how much I hated it, and how
many family arguments were caused as a result.

Since all wood stoves leak, no matter what, you end up smelling like a
campfire all winter. And I still wonder if the secondhand smoke effects will
rear it's ugly head in the future. I've never smoked, but won't be at all
surprised if someday I have lung cancer from years of breathing all that
crappy air filled with soot particles.

Oof. So many horrible memories. Thank heaven I live in California now.

~~~
war1025
My wife's parents built a house out in the country when she was ~10. They put
in a functional wood fireplace and used it as their primary heat source for a
couple years. Her main memory of it was that the living room where the
fireplace was would be really nice. Her parents bedroom up in a loft above the
living room would be too hot. And her bedroom would be super cold because the
furnace never kicked on and the heat from the fireplace never quite made it
over to her room.

But then again, it probably wouldn't win any "new old home" or other design
awards.

Once they stopped homeschooling, the desire to heat the house with wood dried
up pretty quickly. These days I think they have a fire maybe a couple times a
month on Winter evenings.

One great thing her family introduced me to though: The in home sauna. They
are Finnish by way of Northern Minnesota. I dream of one day having a sauna in
my own home.

------
everybodyknows
> (or linoleum) has replaced the rest

We wish. Linoleum is a natural, renewable product, made from linseed oil and
plant fiber. Linoleum was replaced decades ago in commodity construction by
vinyl tile, which is much cheaper to manufacture.

~~~
sarcher
Ya, you won't find it in commodity construction, but just in case anyone is
looking for real linoleum a currently available brand is 'Marmoleum'. It's
nice stuff, I've used it on two projects but it's not every client's favorite.
By the time a client is looking at sheet flooring it's usually due to cost
pressure, and the client ends up going with a vinyl product.

I thought I had notes on a second brand that was more commercially oriented
(maybe started with an 'R'?) but I can't remember the name at the moment.

~~~
everybodyknows
Here you go. Tarkett -- linoleum is well hidden, under the "commercial" branch
of their website only:

[https://commercial.tarkett.com/en_US/category-
tna_C05010-lin...](https://commercial.tarkett.com/en_US/category-
tna_C05010-lino-xf2)

~~~
sarcher
Thanks! I was thinking of 'Roppe' which is the not the right brand at all.

------
CalRobert
Thanks for sharing this - for people who like pictures, the instagram feed
(linked at the bottom of the article) is well worth adding.

"Homes are not built by people intending to live in them." \- this really gets
to the issue, I think. Somewhere along the line we took away most people's
ability to construct their own home (or they just lost it), and of course if
houses are viewed primarily as holding value for equity, you need to consider
resale instead of your own preferences when making decisions.

------
MilesTeg
I just bought an old house(1920s) and so have been doing a lot of thinking
about how much better the layout of surviving old houses are.

1\. Natural lighting. I generally do not need artificial lights in the daytime
in any room and it is amazing.

2\. Ceiling height. Modern constructions have insanely high ceilings. Why? In
my old apartment I had cabinetr y I couldn't reach even with my step ladder.

3\. Old neighborhoods are much more pleasant to live in and are more much
walk-able than post-war cul-de-sac filled developments.

4\. House sizes were smaller back then. Since family sizes have been getting
smaller I think this would be a good thing to return to. I am quite happy that
I don't have to spend a lot extra on furniture just to fill the space. Or pay
more to climate control the extra volume.

5\. A matter of personal preference but I think the older houses are just
prettier.

I think it would be great if developers took a look at the older house designs
and tweaked them for the modern world.

~~~
brendoelfrendo
>Old neighborhoods are much more pleasant to live in and are more much walk-
able than post-war cul-de-sac filled developments.

I'll say this for my post-war-but-still-old development, it's nice having
trees and birds. Looking at new construction, you realize that there's very
little shade or natural life because it all gets clear cut for construction.
Any trees that get added back in have a long way to go before they actually
provide shade (and a barrier to hide the ugly front facades that modern
construction requires).

>House sizes were smaller back then. Since family sizes have been getting
smaller I think this would be a good thing to return to.

I agree, and I like the size of my smaller house. That said, there are some
ways that I think the space could be better utilized... for example, we have 4
bedrooms and 1.5 baths, all of which are smaller than you'd see in a modern
home. It was definitely designed with a large, baby booming family in mind.

~~~
MilesTeg
>I agree, and I like the size of my smaller house. That said, there are some
ways that I think the space could be better utilized... for example, we have 4
bedrooms and 1.5 baths, all of which are smaller than you'd see in a modern
home. It was definitely designed with a large, baby booming family in mind.

4 bed 1.5 bath does not sound great. I don't think I have ever seen that one
but I know it is a staple for comedy where everyone is trying to use the same
bathroom at the same time. That might be less bad now than in the baby boom
days. I would not want to share a bathroom with a bunch of kids. But, for a
DINK family, a master bedroom, his office, her office, and a guest bedroom
with 1.5 baths sounds reasonable.

------
TYPE_FASTER
Downside in having an old (1890s for us) home: nothing is the same size, and
none of them are the same.

Upside in having an old home: you get to go to a restoration/recycling center,
wander through the vast sections of hanging doors until you find the section
that fits what you need, and find an interesting one you like.

Our home was a hobby for a while. Now I have different priorities for time.
But that was an awesome learning experience, and I feel lucky I went through
it.

My dad drafted a house at night at work (he was a mechanical engineer prior to
retirement). Then he built it, subcontracting out parts like some of the
framing, drywall, etc. My parents ended up with exactly the house they wanted.
It was really cool to see happen, made anything seem possible.

~~~
rustybelt
Don't forget settling foundations. I'd be amazed if someone could find a
single perfect right angle anywhere in my 1880's victorian.

~~~
pantaloony
Don’t worry, every time we’ve had to or chosen to do anything to the newer
houses we’ve owned it’s been a constant series of discoveries about how out-
of-square everydamnthing is. We level something perfectly and... it’s nowhere
near matching what’s already there. Even the doorways go out of alignment in a
just a few years, if they don’t start that way.

~~~
Gibbon1
When you realize the laser level and plum bobs aren't really very useful
because anything made square looks off. As in reframing a closet door plumb
and finding the floor isn't level. So now it looks crooked.

------
iramiller
In all this discussion of the art of design in old houses I am surprised to
see no one has mentioned “A Pattern Language” [1] yet. This is truly a must
read book for anyone considering the design and building of their own house.

Interesting topics such as the design of a front door viewed from a street
have stuck with me and is something I reflect on when walking through an old
neighborhood. Infallibly the most appealing houses match up well to the
principals outlined in the book.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language)

~~~
pjmorris
The article's author mentions Alexanders 'Timeless Way of Building', the first
book in the series of which 'A Pattern Language' is a part. I agree, it's a
wonderful book.

------
contingencies
For anyone embarking on a similar project, check out
[http://osarch.org/](http://osarch.org/)

I was amazed to come from no background in architecture to getting a land
survey converted in to Blender 3D model and having accurate sun simulations
running on architectural concepts within a week or two. Seems like Sketchup
dying has gifted a lot of momentum to the open source space. Use it! It's
pretty capable stuff.

Also, plant trees. Trees last a long time (longer than many houses), cost
nearly nothing and provide excellent psychological and physical features which
built environment cannot match.

------
everybodyknows
>you should read two books. The first is Get Your House Right: Architectural
Elements to Use & Avoid

I own and have read a copy, excellent. Note however that it's entirely
oriented toward traditional design: Deco, Streamline Moderne, and Mid-Mod are
terra incognita. Eichler fans, you have been warned.

~~~
pstuart
Having lived in an Eichler house, I don't understand how there can be Eichler
fans.

~~~
rusteh1
Curious about this comment? Why? I've never lived in one, nor even been in
one. But they look beautiful. What are the draw backs?

~~~
pstuart
Cheaply made, nothing all that special except floor to ceiling windows.

------
hoorayimhelping
For the folks who check the comments first, this is worth reading:

> _But then something happened: the average knob with a lock has a fair amount
> of internal complexity, but the beauty has been completely stripped out. We
> no longer think of knobs, hinges, latches, or locks as things worth making
> beautiful, and we think this at a time when it should be easier and cheaper
> than ever to make such things beautiful. When they were difficult to make,
> iron latches and handles resembled hands, lions, flowers, gargoyles, etc.
> Now that a latch is easy to make, they look like nothing. It is worth
> carefully pondering this, I think, beyond the words of this article and well
> beyond door knobs._

This is from part 2 [https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/designing-a-new-old-
home-pa...](https://medium.com/@simon.sarris/designing-a-new-old-home-
part-2-2a5ea1a1b2b3), linked here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901248](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23901248)

------
yingw787
...do you have a GitHub repo for checklisting items for building a custom
house like this? I'm nowhere near financially secure enough to even begin
planning for something like this. But it'd be cool to look through the
checklist and have people contribute things you might forget, and it might be
useful for others.

------
sarcher
As someone who works in residential construction, this is one of the better
looks at what a 'good' process looks like from the homeowner side of the
equation. The only places where my advice would differ:

\- They finished the floors instead of having a subcontractor do it.
Everyone's comfort for various home improvements tasks differs, but this is
one that I typically see farmed out. The people who do it everyday are very
fast and competent - as a first timer it's hard to avoid making mistakes. I
also advise people to avoid floor stains. One advantage to a real wood floor
is it's easy to repair and refinish in the future, but this gets a lot harder
when you start needing to stain match. Floor stain also kind of violates the
tenants of 'honest materials' that the author discusses.

\- To build on their point about veneer plaster walls, cost really comes down
to subcontractor comfort with that detail. It's only 'slightly more expensive'
if you have a contractor that does it all the time. If you live in an area
with a lot of plaster homes, you'll have more luck finding someone who can do
this work affordably. For example, I once had an architect specify a
particular plaster finish ('venetian plaster') where we could not find someone
comfortable doing the work within a two hour drive.

\- They discuss the slow drying of the floor finish they used as a negative
(true). A good place to use slow-drying finishing techniques is the exterior,
as you can leave it alone for a lot longer as compared to a floor you want to
walk on immediately. For example, pine tar exterior finishing materials take
weeks to dry, but you don't NEED to touch the siding during that period.

\- In the second part they show a north and south elevation of the finished
home. The north elevation really doesn't reflect the historic character they
succeeded so hard to emulate and/or build from in other aspects of their home.
Comparing these two elevations is very instructive.

I hope their next published section addresses energy efficiency and adjacent
topics (like window selection). It's a huge part of building a modern home
that doesn't always get the attention it should. I did appreciate the time
spent discussing air flow in part 2.

Building on their reading list, if you like older/vernacular homes start with:

"House" by Tracy Kidder

"A Field Guide to American Houses" by Virginia Savage McAlester

"American Shelter" by Lester Walker

"The American House" by Mary Mix Foley

And maybe move on to:

"A Concise History of American Architecture" by Leland Roth

"American Vernacular: Buildings and Interiors, 1870-1960" by Herbert Gottfried

"Norwegian Wood: The Thoughtful Architecture of Wenche Selmer" by Elisabeth
Tostrup

"Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn" by Thomas Hubka

And then maybe:

"The Well-Built House" by Jim Locke

"The colonial House Then and Now" by Francis Underwood

"Little House on a Small Planet" by Shay Salomon

~~~
blueatlas
I might add one more - Norm Abrams of This Old House wrote a book about the
construction of his home - "Norm Abram's New House"

~~~
sarcher
Yes, good choice. I didn't include it mostly because I find that Norm's
compromises on a few design elements/material selections may guide someone in
the 'wrong' direction - but that's a huge value judgement on a book that is a
quarter century old.

Another book he was involved with is "This Old House" (technically by Bob Vila
I think) which is also good, but suffers again from the march of time. There
are just certain things they show that wouldn't be done the same way today.

------
rhaps0dy
Isn't this a _lot_ of work? I suppose it's perhaps worth it if you plan to
live in a place for a long time, but surely there are specialists that do this
for a living? Like, can't you just pay an architect to design the thing?

~~~
ip26
It definitely feels like there ought to be architects who can do this- with
your input of course. Learning all the nuance and getting it all right the
first time would be such a colossal job. I can spend a month or two per medium
sized house project, learning all the details- forget about the whole house.

Of course, all this comes very naturally & easily to some people. (Mainly,
I've noticed, when their parents are in construction, remodeling, or real
estate)

~~~
rhaps0dy
> It definitely feels like there ought to be architects who can do this- with
> your input of course.

To be fair, the article does mention that: if you commission an architect to
do this, you should show them your Pinterest boards. Or at least get an idea
of what you like.

> Learning all the nuance and getting it all right the first time would be
> such a colossal job.

I imagine it's akin to getting to the level of a working architect yourself.
Which is a huge time investment. The article mentions it taking years for
them.

> I can spend a month or two per medium sized house project, learning all the
> details- forget about the whole house.

That's much less than I'd expect it to take me. I'm curious: are you an
architect, or designer, yourself?

------
MH15
A lot of commenters are suffering from the bias we suffer from every time we
discuss issues of the past: the "old homes" are good in party because they
have passed the test of generations. The bad designs from those generations
have largely been torn down. Just because something is old does not make it
good.

It is another question entirely why we continue to fall for the same poor
designs.

------
evandev
Another great book is "How to Build in the Country: Good Advice from the Past
on how to Choose a Site, Plan, Design, Build, Decorate & Landscape Your
Country Home"[0]

0:
[https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0966307518/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_...](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0966307518/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_ImGfFb8DE7Z2S)

------
zrail
We just bought a mid-century modern house originally built in 1955 and
completely redone in 2009. Some of the choices are extremely questionable and
some of them are obviously dated, but in general I like living here much more
than our 2004-vintage tract house. The light and layout are just so much
better.

------
j_m_b
Living in the Chicago area suburbs (think John Hughes), I developed a fondness
for the Frank Lloyd Wright prairie style homes. Is it possible to get
blueprints for actual FLW homes that you could give to a builder... even
perhaps yourself?

~~~
madhadron
Except that FLW homes tend to have serious deficiencies as houses. Their roofs
leak. Their interiors often use natural light poorly and are cavernous and
dark. Admire them as works of sculpture, but don't live in one.

------
everybodyknows
My go-to technical encyclopedia for getting a house right:

www.finehomebuilding.com/

~~~
sarcher
Journal of Light Construction is pretty good as well:
[https://www.jlconline.com/](https://www.jlconline.com/)

And, online only, Green Building Advisor:
[https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/](https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/)

------
vmurthy
Love the amount of details that has gone into this. Truly is a work of
passion. I am waiting for a part-3 which should hopefully cover some of the
"techy" stuff that can be built into the home. For e.g., Ethernet cables all
over? USB ports in the wall itself in addition to switches? Speaking of which,
what tech stuff would _you_ build into your homes?

------
aimor
> With some careful choices and by doing some of the finishing ourselves, we
> thought we could make it relatively inexpensively, too.

What was the cost?

------
DanCarvajal
We just bought out first house, it's a super basic 1930s "Traditional
Minimal". Funny enough this home is actually the youngest of the twenty or so
homes we looked at. We only passed on some 1880s homes because of location
issues.

------
867-5309
you should add "in America" to the title

~~~
bonzini
Indeed. While some ideas are the same everywhere, the maximum size of a house
in Europe will probably be under 2000 sqft, the fixtures will be very
different (e.g. door knobs or handles?), the technologies will be different
(heating for example: floor pipes vs. radiators vs. air ducts) and so on.

~~~
weego
Also:

Plots of land with services and outline planning permission are super
expensive if not just unavailable in most places.

You can't get a mortgage on a self build so you best have a couple of hundred
thousand lying around or risk taking a bridge loan from a bank which puts
enormous pressure on you to finish as soon as possible as that interest is
eating up your capital.

You have to have somewhere else to live in the mean time, which combined with
possible interest or just delays due to weather etc constantly puts cost
pressures on you.

It's an unbelievably impractical dream for mostly everyone.

~~~
FireBeyond
> You can't get a mortgage on a self build so you best have a couple of
> hundred thousand lying around

True, though there _are_ options. A family friend added 2000 sq ft to his
family home (which had been 800 - and not excessive, they had three kids in a
2br home). He is a general contractor and works for a home construction
company.

Granted that was a "renovation" \- well, almost all new construction. He
planned on doing almost all of it himself, except for plumbing/electrical, so
anticipated very little labor costs. The bank made them take a loan for the
market value of the work including labor, on the guise of "if you get injured,
you need to be able to pay to complete it", but allowed the setting of
milestones where they could repay labor costs out of the loan.

------
StillBored
I agree with much of the general take of this article, but having remodeled,
or helped remodel houses, or just plain lived in/repaired over the past couple
decades I've got my own set of opinions about this.

Starting with, never mistake style for long lasting quality. For example, wood
floors are very poor flooring material unless you don't mind living in a house
where the floors look like a barn after a decade or two. Tile, concrete, will
unless abused, out last just about every other flooring choice while generally
remaining quite nice if installed well. There is a reason the mosaics in high
end roman houses are still in place two thousand years after they were built.

Also, to add to the general take of the article. Nothing you buy from the big
box home improvement stores will last more than 10 years. I would qualify this
with their lumber/etc is fine, but I've seen cases where the lumber was
incorrectly pressure treated(!) and they replaced it after it rotted in 5
years. Which is great, except for the fact that the lumber was like 1/100th of
the job cost. Frankly, its not even the big box suppliers, its just about
everything they sell seems to have declined in quality. Until a couple years
ago, I had never seen a light switch fail, my current house (built in the
early 2000's) has had about 1/2 of the light switches literally fall apart in
the walls.

So, while somethings are probably acceptable quality (indoor door
handles/locks) for the most part, the exterior ones with their faux aged
finishes and the like will despite their 30 year guarantees break, or the
finishes will crack in the sun, or rust. And on and on...

My general take is some of it might be ok, but keep the receipt for that $300
facet somewhere you will be able to find it in 8 years, because its quite
likely something will go wrong. Pay the extra for the one from the
plumbing/etc supply house, because the worthwhile plumbers/etc will offer
matching labor guarantees and they don't like coming back to fix something
under warantee.

I could write a book about this... but one last thing. Ive spoken to a lot of
people in the know, and the general take on appliances is that a good high end
one from the mid 1990's will likely outlast anything built in the last 20
years. If you have an old fridge/dishwasher/etc take care of it, polish it up,
treasure it. Most importantly, buy a part off ebay when it fails and fix it.
Enjoy it for what it is, a quality piece of machinery that probably uses a bit
more electricity, or water, but actually cleans your cloths/dishes/etc or the
ice maker doesn't jam or clog, or need DRM'ed water filters. And if you really
want filtered Ice buy a inline water filter and plug it into the ice line and
enjoy the $5 filters and think about the fact that your saving $30+ dollars
each time you change it.

~~~
alkonaut
Hardwood floors will look great for 20 years or more, just follow one simple
rule: don’t wear (outdoor) shoes inside. That’s going to be a tough tradition
to break in the US though.

~~~
StillBored
No matter how hard you try stuff will happen. One of my kids tiny glass
diamonds (not even really sure where it came from) somehow managed to get
underneath one of the felt pads on the legs of our couch. I discovered it
recently when someone moved the couch and left a three foot fairly deep
scratch across the floor. That paled in comparison to what was actually going
on under the couch leg.

I'm pretty good at matching/refinishing, and i'm going to tell you, our floor
has a bit of built in stylistic distressing, but the filler+ careful
matching/etc I did in that area is never going to match the rest of the floor
sufficiently that if you look at it you won't see the scratch. Replacing 5-6
boards in the middle of the floor is really the only choice to make it look
like new, but that would use up a good number of the spare pieces I have.

I guess at this point its "character", but in another decade or two the 2->3
major scratch issues a year + likely the high traffic areas will start to add
up, and the floors will look like many of the houses I've seen with older wood
floors. Worn out.

~~~
alkonaut
Sand the floors every 5-10 years should help. The worst dents and scratches
might not sand out but that’s inevitable. It won’t look like new after 10
years but that’s probably acceptable.

~~~
StillBored
Have you done this? Where I live its cheaper to rip it out and replace it with
new wood flooring. Plus, the factory finishes are considerably harder and more
scratch resistant than what you can get put down in place. I've actually
wondered if a better plan for wood flooring is to treat it like my deck, a
simple yearly oil based coating vs a hard finish.

Of course the out gassing from something like that is probably a health
hazard.

Instead, I treat it more like carpet, aka I figure every decade or two it
needs to be replaced. In my rentals I've been using an engineered laminate
which is extremely robust. I picked it because I got a whole bunch of samples,
took them home and then took a screw driver and started scratching the heck
out of them until I found one that I couldn't scratch. I think its far
superior and looks nearly as good as the real wood in the house I live in. I
install it floating, but pull up the baseboards and replace them at the same
time so it looks original. It has a bit of a hollow noise if you knock on it
(despite being 3/4"), but I don't think there is a way to avoid that without
glueing it down, which just adds cost when it needs to be replaced.

~~~
alkonaut
Yes. What do you pay for the flooring vs the work? I pay $100+ per square
meter for the floor (aroud $10 per sq foot) and sanding is 1/10th to 1/5 that
($10 to $20 per square meter or $1-2 per sq foot) with the costlier ones
having a better finish that more resembles the factory one.

~~~
StillBored
It depends... IIRC, It seems i'm probably paying a lot less than you are for
the flooring/install. OTOH, the two times I've gotten quotes to sand and
finish a floor its been more than just ripping out and putting in something
else.

I guess it would be pretty inexpensive to rent a sander and do it myself (or
hire unskilled labor) but i'm not sure I trust the latter, and the former
sounds like the kind of frustration I don't need more of. I've tangentially
helped people sand their decks and its was a PITA.

In Austin, there are a lot of people who can install wood flooring, and they
are crazy fast, and it turns out that makes them pretty inexpensive. That is
part of the reason I do floating floors in the rentals. The removal costs for
a glued down floor, or "well installed" linoleum, is many multiples what it
costs to put the new flooring in.

------
justicezyx
That door knob is well crafted. A modern production with similar quality
probably will take upwards to $400 based on my recent research on front door
locks...

------
cactus2093
This is wild to me, I can't follow the author's logic here really at all. It
reads like a borderline-satirical example of nostalgia for nostalgia's sake.
They make such obnoxious claims like "I think most people have an intuitive
sense that older homes are often special, and newer ones are often not".

Then they go on to list things that I associate much more with modern homes -
not wasting floor space, and paying attention to the elements and light. A
modern, open-concept design is optimizing much better for this than an old
farmhouse where, for instance, the kitchen and formal dining room and living
room are all closed off from each other. Modern homes often have floor to
ceiling windows and sliding glass doors, old homes have tiny closed off
windows. And old homes like the author uses as an example here are often just
simple rectangles, so all the design decisions are constrained to be small
square rooms. At least the "mcmansion" example in this post of a terrible new
home has more interesting, non-perpendicular details and layout.

Maybe I just have an anti-nostalgia for this type of home, and maybe that
makes me just as biased as the author in the opposite direction. I've never
lived in a home like this but have been inside of a few of them, and they're
often dark and closed in and kind of creepy. But I don't think I'm completely
alone in feeling this way, there must be a reason so many horror movies are
set in old farmhouses. To each their own, I guess.

(And on top of all this, I would argue that this kind of permeating attitude
about new homes just not being special like old homes are plays a huge part in
the current housing shortage crisis that much of the US faces, but I won't
even go into that).

~~~
simonsarris
> I've never lived in a home like this but have been inside of a few of them,
> they're often dark and closed in and kind of creepy

I'm the author. I designed my house to have the enormous amounts of light that
I found in older homes, that are often totally absent from new ones because of
a reliance on electricity. You should see more of the "Colonials" that get
built today. Many of them have _zero_ windows on two sides (one side has the
garage, the other merely has zero windows). There are numerous examples near
me, this is right down the road:
[https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8408959,-71.6385114,3a,49y,3...](https://www.google.com/maps/@42.8408959,-71.6385114,3a,49y,326.88h,86.24t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sJhaHjeU9PqhFJwTE25dYww!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

 _Those_ are dark and closed in. Many of the new homes I've been in, I had to
turn on the light in the kitchen in the morning because they're so dark.

I have posted other examples before to Twitter, eg:
[https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1225243964237807616](https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1225243964237807616)

~~~
alkonaut
So this cheap-but-large construction is that mostly a US thing? I recognize
very little of it from Sweden.

If I were to build somtething new it would have be much better planned space
than older homes, and if I buy something built in the last 10 years it would
be designed to be open, bright, clever, environmentally friendly, and with
expensive lasting materials. Very old homes (100+ years) have a selection bias
where the worst are torn down. Homes from 1940-1980 usually have terrible
planning, cheap materials and so on, simply because people were poorer and
prirorities were different (closed off kitchen, narrow hallways,...).

