age and maintenance

As I was remarking to someone the other day, the wonderful thing about old houses — and mine is almost 200 years old — is that they are old and solid and you know full well that they've been through pretty much every kind of thing that a house can go through and have come out intact enough to survive to the present day.

And the not-so-wonderful thing about old houses is that when you buy an old house, or live in one, you are buying (and/or living with) every maintenance decision that anyone who has ever owned or lived in it has ever made, whether those decisions were good or bad.

This doesn't just mean the decorative ones, although I have some choice words for whoever thought it was a good idea to coat the walls of one of the rooms in this house with a cobalt blue paint so dark and so ineptly applied that it took two coats of primer and two coats of paint to cover it and still in some lights you can tell it's there.

No, it means the ones that go to the heart and the bones of a house as well: the decision to sister a joist with improperly-sized lumber, the decision to just keep adding more layers of roofing material rather than tearing off the old stuff first like you're supposed to, the decision to use materials that were not quite to code when running an extension to a gas line, the decision to put drywall instead of waterproof backer board up in a corner where a shower will be installed.

I confess that I would rather deal with these kinds of problems than the problems of new construction.  The shoddy materials and bad engineering, huge amounts of plastic and outgassing and lightweight, flimsy stuff in new construction gives me quite literal skin-crawly sensations when I interact with it, as if some part of my hindbrain can't trust that the whole structure isn't going to come crashing down around me if I should happen to, say, slam a door.  (Not that you can slam one of the common hollow-core plywood doors you see so many of these days.  They're too light.   The most you can do with one of those is close it huffily.)

And yet it's hard, the upkeep, the constant process of figuring out what the next thing is about your old house that must be dealt with, inevitably at some cost, so that one thing doesn't lead to another to another and to damage that is actually pretty catastrophic.  It's a constant rear-guard action, a perennial mental and physical patrolling plus a continual background rumble of tasks that want doing and preferably sooner rather than later.

It is, I suppose, what comes of building a box out of wood and rocks and metal and stuff, and then putting that box out-of-doors in all weathers for simply decades and decades, and putting all kinds of horribly damaging things inside it as well — water, and water vapor, and heated air, and chilled air, and for heaven's sake, keeping animals in it (two-legged and four).  I mean, what can you expect if you're going to treat it like that?

I'm thinking about this today because we've just replaced our furnace and air conditioning system for the house.  It was badly wheezy and inefficient and, we discovered as the old one was being dismantled, pumping a not inconsiderable quantity of carbon monoxide into our cellar thanks to a broken exhaust manifold tubing.  This replacement was, as you may well imagine, not inexpensive, and not undisruptive.  I'm glad we got it done.  It kind of looks like Star Trek down there now, all sleek and clean and efficient and whatnot.

And yet…

And yet there is so much left to do on this old house, just to keep things in decent working order, just to keep things from decaying in bad ways, just to keep up.

It'll happen.  And in the meantime if any of you have a fetish for tuck-pointing the mortar between the stones of old fieldstone houses, or perhaps for repairing and painting porches, do let me know.