If you have enjoyed the shelter of an old house during a hard rain, a gusting wind, or a driving snowstorm, you know that such a dwelling is like a living thing. A strong wind buffets the structure. Its frame, formerly supporting only the weight of the house and its contents, now creaks and shifts as the stresses build in each timber and the skeleton resists the lateral pressure of the wind. The wind whistles over the roof. The rafters are pressed downward on the windward side and momentarily lifted by the comparative vacuum on the leeward side. The stresses in the collar ties shift and change with each gust, and the joints at the feet of the rafters are tested. The snow adds its weight. The fabric of the house adjusts to the new burden. The turbulent wind rumbles over the chimney tops. The air currents in the flues shift from a moaning suction to a down-draft that puts smoke through the stove doors.

If you have lived long enough in an old house to have heard its groans and snaps on wild nights, you have learned by observation that a dwelling must wrestle with the elements to remain standing. But a house is alive in more subtle ways. It breathes as the smoke rises from its chimneys on cold nights. It sweats as the moisture within pushes out through each crack, condensing as hoarfrost on the storm windows and on the points of every nail in the frigid attic. It expands as each timber and board absorbs humidity from the summer air, swelling with dampness; and it contracts, drying and cracking, as the artificially heated air of autumn desiccates everything it touches. Old fissures in the woodwork and plaster, healed for the summer, reappear to admit the chill air of winter.

A house constantly responds to its environment and, if well maintained, resists for centuries those forces that seek to break down everything in nature. The engineering embodied in an old house is often ancient and intuitive in nature, having evolved from experiments, both successful and unsuccessful, over many generations. What has survived the test of time and nature is a series of craft practices and principles of proven soundness. By understanding these principles, you can glimpse the world and your own house through the mind of the original builder. You can develop sympathy with your dwelling and its era. This sympathetic understanding can provide you with a sound guide to the needs of the house and to the technologies that are appropriate to meet those needs.

What is true of the fabric of the house is also true of its appearance. Each house originally possessed a distinct character. Whether the dwelling started life as a pre-Revolutionary merchant’s mansion on the coast, a farmhouse in a newly settled township, or a contractor’s speculation house of the 1920s, its builder gave it a characteristic floor plan, characteristic proportions, and characteristic detailing. Each house, particularly if it has been treated sympathetically over time, stands as an artifact of its era. If you can see the plan and detailing of a house as they were created by the original builder or owner, you gain an accurate sense of the taste and aspirations of a time other than our own.

Few old houses survive without some alteration. The older the house, the greater the likelihood that it will have needed some major repair or will have come to be seen as hopelessly old-fashioned by some unsympathetic owner. Either circumstance is likely to have led to some change to the original design.

Alterations to an old house can be sympathetic and can even add something to the original character. Alterations can also violate the integrity of an old house, destroying its personality with an agglomeration of jarring and inharmonious elements. Whether an alteration adds to, detracts from, or blends invisibly with the original character of an old house depends entirely upon the thought and sensitivity that are invested in the change.

Like your predecessors, the earlier owners of your old house, you have the right to make changes to your dwelling. This right is yours legally, within broad limits of safety and reason. It remains yours even when your taste and judgment may puzzle or offend your neighbors. It remains yours, though to a more limited extent, even if your house falls within the bounds of a locally established historic district. Both custom and law expect you to make your house a home, and to be free and secure in its enjoyment.

Once you have title to the property, there is usually nothing to prevent your taking even the most ancient house and stripping it to its frame, slashing great holes through its sides to accommodate whatever additions your need or whim may dictate, and substituting the most up-to-date design and materials for whatever had survived of the old fabric. Many owners have done this, or worse. Most houses built before the Civil War have been demolished deliberately to make way for something newer.

It is frequently noted that poverty is the friend of preservation. Where people are too poor to afford the luxury of remodeling or replacing their dwellings, old houses survive, provided that the roof is kept reasonably tight. We owe the survival of some of the most intriguing neighborhoods of our old coastal cities and of some of our most pristine farmhouses to hard times prolonged over several generations. If you can find an old house that has been owned by people of modest means, you stand a good chance of finding a home with architectural integrity. If you are a person of modest means, you could be the ideal custodian of such a house. You will be spared the temptation of making changes that are driven by mere fashion and that could spoil the building for a future owner.

Though you may have the legal right to treat your old house in any way you wish, both prudence and your innate sense of responsibility suggest that you should invest a little time and thought before you begin to rip and remodel. It is prudent, first, to understand what you are dealing with before you invest hard-earned money in it. This book will attempt to provide at least a general understanding of old houses from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.

It is prudent to protect your financial investment. For most of us, buying our home is the single greatest financial transaction of our lives. Unless you live in a changing neighborhood where dwellings are looked upon merely as an obstacle to commercial development, careful preservation of the original qualities of your house will invariably enhance its resale value.

It is prudent to take advantage of the innate character of a building rather than to work against that character. You may not care to live as did your predecessors of 1850 or even 1920. But if you can appreciate and find enrichment in the comforts and the beauty they provided for themselves, you have gained some measure of contentment in your home without having to resort to extensive and perhaps destructive remodeling.

It is prudent to husband the resources you own. By ripping out the work of earlier generations, you are tossing aside an investment of human energy that may have cost your predecessors months or years of their lives. That investment lies latent in the fabric of your house. It would cost money to undo those months or years of work, and it would cost still more money to replace that work with new work. By accepting and preserving the artifact your predecessors created, you add the value of their labor to your own life, freeing yourself to go about your other business. If, on the other hand, you spend time and money to undo rather than to enhance what others have done, you waste your limited resources on a job that is already finished.

If these arguments make no sense to you, perhaps you should not own an old house. Some people buy old houses because that is all they can afford, not because they wish to live in a building with a history. Such owners may long for a brand-new house, with the freedom from care that new things seem to promise. They may think that a few remodelings and the application of some synthetic coverings will transform their tired old dwelling into the house of their dreams.

This is almost never true. A heavily remodeled old house usually becomes a denatured old house. It never achieves the look or feeling of a new building, because it is the product of a different time and a different vision and cannot be transformed without its virtual destruction. At the same time, a remodeled house loses the integrity of its own period, and so becomes less than it was before the remodeling.

If you yearn for a new house and are condemned to live in an old one, this book may still be of use to you. Bide your time and carry out responsible repairs. Take the time to understand and preserve the characteristic features of your dwelling. If you preserve whatever integrity you find in an old house, a buyer will eventually appear who will be willing to pay a bit extra for this well-maintained character. That is the time to sell and fulfill your dream of buying or building a new house.

Whether you love or merely tolerate your old house, it is well to approach the building with one truth firmly in mind. Human life is short. The life of a house is potentially limitless. Even in the youthful United States, we have houses that have been sheltering families for three hundred years or more.

Barring disaster or imprudent neglect, your house is destined to outlive you. You are but one in a long line of custodians of the property—a line that extends backward through the decades or centuries and forward to an indefinite future. You may have received a deed conveying your house to you and your heirs and assigns forever. But it is your heirs and assigns, not you, who will probably have the property in a few decades. Whatever your legal title, your human mortality guarantees that you are in truth only a temporary custodian of your house.

That being the case, let the changes you make to your property be additive rather than subtractive in nature. If you need a new kitchen or bathroom or furnace, install it. But wherever possible, install it in such a way as to preserve original features or fabric or at least to preserve evidence of original features. Try to make your work add to the legacy of the past so that you can pass a dwelling of even greater value and comfort to the future. Remember that the number of old houses is finite and diminishes each year. It is a privilege and a responsibility to own a piece of the past.

Until very recently, houses were built entirely from natural materials, either organic or mineral. Technology was applied to transform and shape these materials from the raw products of the earth to the finished components of the house, but that technology was relatively simple. While it took years of apprenticeship and hard physical labor to learn to become a joiner, a blacksmith, a mason, or a painter, we of today can understand the basics of those and similar trades even though our hands and brains may lack the ability to practice them.

The first essential product of house building is wood. The forests of New England and the rest of the northeastern United States are typically mixed forests, containing both hardwoods (deciduous trees) and softwoods (conifers), depending on varying conditions of elevation, soil type, prevailing wind, and sunlight. Wood has been used in buildings as logs, as hewn framing members, as sawn boards, planks, and timbers, as shingles, as clapboards, as lath for plaster, as insulation, as planed and molded joiner’s work, and as glued plywood. The means of shaping wood have evolved over the years, beginning with the simplest of hand tools and ending with the factories and mills of the gigantic forest products industry of the twentieth century.

It is striking, however, that in house preservation no techniques of woodworking has become truly obsolete. While the great majority of wooden architectural elements have for a long time been the products of mechanized industry, there is still an important place for hand tools in the maintenance of eighteenth-, nineteenth, and twentieth-century houses. Anyone undertaking the preservation of an old house today has the happy choice of using hand tools, power tools, ready-made elements, or a combination of several or all of these, as circumstances may dictate.

If you take your responsibility seriously, you may find that part of the skill of living happily in an old house lies in adjusting your outlook as to what is desirable or possible in a dwelling. You may have to accommodate yourself to some of the expectations, limitations, or desires of another time—something that human nature is often reluctant to do. Yet the discipline of doing this is usually rich in its return of broadened understanding, of new perspectives on the world, and of the exhilarating ability to move in one’s mind—and one’s dwelling—freely from the present to the past and back again.

(c) copyright 2001 ISBN: 1-58465-095-8

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