Lessons from old houses

Renovating four different hundred year old homes has taught me some important life lessons. Scroll for journaling prompts!

As the home inspector clumped down the attic stairs, he called out, “This house is awesome!"

Sipping tea in the kitchen, I sighed with relief. Getting a pre-inspection was our realtor’s idea. It had been a stressful February getting the house ready (mostly because we are still in hurricane clean-up), but so far the inspector’s punch list only included:

• tighten right faucet in back bathroom

• check when it warms up to see if hose bib in the courtyard is just iced or actually broken

• replace screws with nails where attic stairs attach to ceiling

• swap the hot and cold on the kitchen faucet (which is not gonna happen. I still live here and I’m used to it the way it is.)

Making his way over to me, the inspector said, “Your house is built like a tank. And so well maintained. You wouldn’t believe the places I’ve seen.”

Actually, I would. Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve renovated four homes all a century old (or more). The most venerable was a Philadelphia row home built in 1852. The youngest—our first place in Asheville—was built in the early 1920s. I’ve seen joists held up by the plumbing running through them, and floors patched with rolled-out tin cans. I’ve seen decades worth of electric wires, no longer in use, but still threading confusingly through walls, and doors squared up with nothing more than cardboard. Each time I find one of these anomalies, I sigh over the short sightedness of humans, how we only see what’s expedient in the moment and forget to treat the house like both a legacy and a living, breathing space.

(The exception to my exasperation was the flattened-tin-can floor repairs. The cans were printed with labels from Campbell’s soup and some sort of green beans. I was loath to replace them even though they perpetually caught at my socks.)

Decades of discovering jerry-rigged electric panels and structurally unsound kitchen renovations, made me realize that I am but one of many people who will live in a house. Long after I’ve moved on, that house will still be standing and sheltering people. Feeling this flow of human history has led me to think of homes as spaces that I steward, enjoying them for myself while preserving them for someone else. So, when we moved into our current house, the only one I’ve ever lived in during the same century it was built, I told Andrew I was determined to make good choices, even if they cost us more money.

When I mentioned this to the home inspector, he said everyone should have to renovate an old house.

The Haudenosaunee nation, the Iroquois, taught that you should look forward seven generations—which is about 150 years—when making a decision. In our fast changing world this feels near impossible. What will an oven look like in one-hundred-and-fifty years? A refrigerator? How will future generations heat and cool their homes?

Thinking like this makes taking the long view feel impossible.

But renovating houses has shown me that I don’t need to understand where technology is going to get it right. What I have to know is that technology will change. So I don’t install outlets complete with USB ports. As convenient as those might seem, in a decade they’ll be as relevant as cable connectors. (If you’re thinking huh? What are cable connectors? I’ve proved my point.)

It’s not actually the big decisions—what furnace to purchase, or which light fixture to hang over the dining room table—that matter in the long run. These choices will get changed out over time. The furnace will fail and be replaced with a new model. Styles will come and go (as well as light bulbs) and the dining room chandelier will be swapped for a more fashionable one. These choices feel monumental in the moment, but in the life of the house, they are fleeting.

What harms a house over the long haul isn’t your choice of dishwasher or even whether you go with gas or electric heat. What harms a house is the financial focus on these things that are temporary instead of on the (not so sexy) parts that will persevere through all these other changes. A house needs a solid foundation and a strong roof. It requires walls that are squared and doors hung plumb. The windows need to seal, open, and close with ease. A home needs stuff removed that is no longer useful—whether that’s old wires in the walls or unused clothes in your closet. And, to waken its spirit, it needs a bit of love. Protect these things and you create a space worth living in, one that even home inspectors admire.

Of course, these lessons don’t just apply to houses. While we live in physical spaces, we also inhabit metaphoric spaces: our family, our community, our nation. What would it look like to think a hundred years into the future when making choices for these spaces?