Archive for the ‘House’ Category
Nothing in a house gets more action than the windows and doors. If they don’t fit exactly as they should, then they’ll catch on the jamb or threshold and suffer the consequences. And windows and doors that are made of wood are always changing their shape slightly, getting bigger in the summer and smaller (because drier) in the winter. Carpenters account for this variation in standard construction technique, but if the house has gone out of square, or if the hinges and related hardware are not in good order, then the built-in tolerances won’t be adequate.
Unfortunately, most older houses’ doors show their age. They’re either too drafty or too tight. They typically display the ravages of several attempts to get them to lock better with a variety of bolts, latches, slides, chains, and the like. One of the worst old front doors lever saw was on a farmhouse that our “This Old House” team once renovated. The door had nearly lost its threshold through wear. The sidelights, which had once been a nicely multipaned decoration, had been stuffed with cardboard and covered with Plexiglas in a struggle against the oil cartel. The door’s glass panels were cracked. The knob hung loosely from the broken lockset. The jamb was splintered. The leavings of several failed attempts to weather-strip the door were evident.
I knew we were in for trouble with this one. You can’t just replace what’s missing or broken; you often have to restore it, not just for aesthetic reasons but to make the door work right. When a pair of hundred-year-old sidelights has to be replaced, you go to a mifi with your specs, prepared to wait a long time and pay a big price.
We sent the door itself off to the stripper, who for a hundred dollars removed all of its many layers of paint. The stripping process is very hard on doors. The whole door is dipped into a solution of caustic chemicals, which is terrific for getting rid of the paint but also makes the door’s various joints swell up. Then, after the door is rinsed in another solution and dried under heat, it shrinks, and this causes the joints to separate. Fixing the resulting mess requires glue and clamps.
Once the door is back on its hinges, the next step is to “dutchman” its holes and splits — the wounds left by previous owners in their various attempts to install locks and chains. To dutchman is to insert pieces of wood to fill in the voids, the objective being to make the repair invisible once a new coat of paint is applied over the patch. It should be done only by those who understand chisels, knives, and other woodworking tools.
After a great many man-hours, our old door was working just fine, with a new lock, new weather stripping, a new storm door, and, of course, new sidelights. With a new oak threshold and some new molding, the door looked as if had been there forever. And the whole job cost about $1,500.
Moral: entrance doors that don’t work cost lots to fix, and there’s no walking away from a door that doesn’t work.
Patio doors. These have been causing problems since they were introduced at least fifty years ago. The earliest versions were constructed of aluminum frame and “thermal” glass — that is, two pieces of single-thickness tempered glass, or “lights,” with an air space between them. This air space creates a measure of insulation, but the seal can break. When that happens, moisture gets into the air space and condenses, causing streaks that cannot be removed. Another problem is that the aluminum frame is an excellent conductor of cold. Such doors are cold to the touch and can actually frost up on cold nights. Newer patio doors use wooden frames to overcome that problem, as well as an improved glass sandwich to keep out the heat in the summer and the cold in the winter. The down side is that installing such doors is not cheap.
In your tour of each dwelling, you’ll look at a lot of broad, flat surfaces. You’re looking for cracks, stains (an indicator of leaks), and peeling paint.
If you have small children, peeling paint is of medical as well as aesthetic concern because of the danger of lead poisoning (see the final section in this chapter, “Toxic Environments”).
If there’s wallpaper, is it in good condition? Is it a color and style you can live with, or wifi you want to get it off the walls as soon as you take possession?
If there’s wall-to-wall carpeting, can you stand it? Will it last a while, or does it really need immediate replacing?
If there are area rugs, look under them to check the condition of the floors. Look behind paintings as well, to see if they’re covering holes or water stains. I know that doesn’t seem terribly polite, but you’re not trying to win a popularity contest; you’re trying to find out as much as possible about the home you’re considering investing a lot of money in. You should be a lot more concerned about avoiding a costly mistake than about offending the seller. Of course, before yanking back the throw rug, you might first ask, “Do you mind?”
The most important rooms in any house, as most people come to agree, are the kitchen and the bathrooms. Studies have shown that for most people, a well-designed kitchen with plenty of cabinets and counter space and a bathroom with luxurious appointments can compensate for a great many shortcomings in other departments. Even if you now tend to think of a kitchen as an unnecessary waste of space that might better go toward a studio, look carefully at what it offers. Is it large enough to put in a table with a few chairs? Is there good work space that’s conveniently located relative to the stove, the refrigerator, the pantry?
What about the appliances, built in or otherwise? How old are they? Do they work? Are any of them still under warranty? Is the owner planning to take any of them out? Is the lighting what you need?
Check the bathrooms with equal care. Are the fixtures in good condition? Are there showers and bathtubs, or only showers? Does it matter to you?
The source of heat in the bathroom is not a trivial matter. Some people may like the idea of stepping out of a hot shower into a cold bathroom in the dead of winter, but if you’re like me, you’ll want to find out how well heated the bathroom is.
Never fail to check the water pressure at every tap. If this is a house you’re beginning to think seriously about, turn on all the taps, upstairs and downstairs, and let them all run at once. Make sure the pressure remains strong at each of them. Check under the sinks in the bath and kitchen for leaks and for water stains, evidence of past leakage.
The first thing to consider when you move inside the house is the number of moms it has, and whether they are adequate for your needs. Are there enough bedrooms and baths? How are the rooms laid out? Will you be happy if you have to walk through the master bedroom to get to the kitchen? If it’s a two-story house, what’s upstairs and what’s downstairs? Don’t underestimate the inconvenience of a two-story house that doesn’t have even a half-bathroom downstairs.
Pay careful attention to the size of the rooms, and don’t just rely on your general impression of how large they are. Get out your tape measure and write down the actual numbers. This is the time to figure out whether your grand piano will fit in the living room, not when the movers are glaring at you with the thing on their backs.
Also, try to imagine these rooms filled with your furniture, not with that of the people living there. Your Salvation Army surplus may not set off the fireplace and bay window quite as nicely as does the current residents’ Danish Modem living-room set.
Another general point about the floor plan: as you go through a house, develop an overall impression of whether its rooms tend to be bright or dark. Bright, airy rooms with lots of windows can be a definite plus, especially if you envision filling them with plants. Darker rooms offer other possibilities — a cozy study, for example, or a well-lit work area. Consider every detail of the house in terms of your life-style and your family’s needs for space, privacy, and an appropriate layout.
If the existing space does not seem adequate, then your next question is whether the house has expansion possibffities. An unfinished basement or an attic could become that additional room you have to have. A large lot may give you room to expand to the side or the rear.
If you are considering an unfinished basement or an attic for extra living space, make sure it’s dry. That’s something you have to ascertain in any case, whether you intend to use it for conversion to a new room or for storage.
Be honest with yourself about the extent to which you can bend your needs to fit the limitations of the house. The house may be charming and well located but wrong for you. If it has only one bedroom and you need two, you cannot learn to be happy with it. Be realistic about what you need, what you can concede, and what you can afford to do. Adding two bathrooms, raising the roof, and digging out the basement might make the house “perfect,” but you might be better off waiting for a house that comes closer to meeting your needs without all that work.
If you decide that expanding an existing structure (by building up or out) would be essential before you could live in it, and if you are certain that you can afford the needed renovations, wait one more minute before you sign the contract to buy it. Check the local zoning and building codes to be sure you won’t run afoul of setback requirements — the distances that must be maintained between your house and the street and your house and those next to it. Would you need a “variance” from those rules in order to build an addition? If so, are you positive you could get it? It’s not always obvious what changes to your own property you have to get other people’s permission for. In many areas neighbors are given a legal right to object to any request for a variance. If you need to do something to the house that might raise a zoning-related issue, you should discuss your plans with your potential new neighbors to see how they’ll react. A zoning dispute is not the best way to meet your neighbors.
Begin with the home’s surroundings. You’re not just buying the house, you’re also buying into a community and a neighborhood. What’s around the house can be as important as what’s inside it. Consider the street on which the home is located, as well as the other streets with the six blocks or so on all sides. Do the homes and yards appear to be well cared for? The condition of nearby properties will affect the value of the house you buy. If the houses around yours are in poor repair, you should be concerned about what’s happening in the neighborhood. Maybe it’s a down-and-out area that’s on its way back up; on the other hand, it may be heading down. Make sure you know which way the trends are moving. What kind of area is it in? Is it exclusively residential, or are there commercial uses as well? How much space is there between houses? What amenities — shopping, movies, transportation, parks, schools, churches, and so on — are close by? Are there any other developments planned for the area? If one of the things you like is the open space nearby, see if you can find out who owns the land and whether it’s likely to stay open. This is the time to discover that a developer plans to build a 200- home subdivision across the road, or that the state has selected the nice field at the foot of the hifi as the site of its new waste- treatment facility. All of these questions about the neighborhood are of concern to you not only as a prospective buyer, which you are today, but as a prospective seller, which you may be in the future. Don’t say about potential problems, “I guess we could live with them,” without also asking, “But what about other people — the ones we might want to sell to later on?” So if you’re interested in a neighborhood, find out as much as you can about it. A real-estate broker should be able to provide basic information about market trends, development plans, and the like. But count on doing some research on your own. Now’s a good time to start reading the community newspapers — the supermarket “throwaways” as well as the wider-circulation dailies and weeklies. Grab anything you can find that might give you a better idea of what it would be like to live in the area. This is how you might discover, for example, that a regional shopping center is in the works nearby or, in a less positive vein, that the local schools have lost their accreditation or that local property taxes are going to be revalued for the first time in twent’ years (which means they’re likely to jump).
Make sure your research on the neighborhood includes the other people living there. Is the area full of two-career families, leaving it practically deserted during the day? That might be a drawback to a new mother who’s going to be at home with her child. Families with children typically like to live in areas where there are other children living nearby. It’s true that you can’t really know how you’re going to like a neighborhood until you live there, but you can ask other people how they like living there. One very good question to ask some of your prospective neighbors is simply, “If you had it to do over again, would you still buy a house in this area?”
In the course of evaluating your options, some of you may find yourselves in a position to consider whether to buy an existing home or to build a new one. The appeal of building your dream home can be hard to resist. The paint is fresh, the systems are unused and probably covered by warranties, and, most important, you decide on the materials to be used, the layout of the rooms, and the size of the closets. From a cost-efficiency standpoint, however, you stand to get significantly more house for your money by buying a previously owned and occupied house.
These are the key points:
1. Square foot for square foot, an existing house is cheaper than a freshly built new home. In 1987 the median price of new homes nationally was approximately $105,000, while the median price of existing homes was about $87,000.
2. An existing home has the additional advantage of being something of a known quantity. You don’t have to guess what the utility costs will be, because the people who are already living there can tell you. If there are structural problems in an occupied ñouse — a leaky roof or a damp basement, for example -
can find out about them before making the deal and moving in. As the first occupant of a new home, you’ll be the one to discover all its hidden flaws.
3. Building generally requires undeveloped land, which is scarce almost everywhere and virtually nonexistent in some of the major markets.
4. Financing a land purchase can be a problem, since in many areas lenders prefer not to get involved in land deals. You may have to buy the lot outright.
5. Managing any kind of building project is a headache. No matter what the project — whether it’s rehabbing a kitchen or building a new home from scratch — there always seems to be a force at work that causes every job to take three times as long and to cost twice as much as planned. Finding reliable workers who do quality work can prove to be a challenge, and scheduling and supervising their work even more so. You can hire a general contractor to ride herd, which is expensive, or you can do the supervising yourself, which is vexatious, time-consuming, and usually more difficult than people who aren’t in the business typically assume.
6. A house isn’t going to be perfect just because it’s new. A shoddily built home will mean an endless stream of problems large and small, from a leaky roof to a heating system that breaks down to a stairway that sways. Even in well-constructed homes, settling can cause walls to crack. New systems often have to be debugged, and even small problems can seem worse because you were expecting perfection.
7. Scheduling occupancy is more likely to be a problem with a newly built house than with an existing one. The pressure can get intense when you know you have to be out of your current apartment by an impending date and the contractors are still putting up staging and waiting for materials.
Building a new home can also be a brilliant solution. You may have a special shot at a choice piece of land. You may be living in a region where builders are desperate for work. You may be in a position in which financial factors are not constraining. If so, good luck and God speed.
But if you’re among the almost 90 percent of new homeowners who buy existing homes, then let’s move on to the business of sizing up houses that are already standing.