Buying an old house, honestly

In Marietta the river is two blocks from almost everything, and the houses along those blocks have been standing since before the canal, watching the water rise and fall and occasionally come up the street. Walk it in March. The brick is dark with rain, the shutters are the original weight, and every third house has a for sale sign that has been there a while. People fall in love on that walk. I have watched it happen, more than once, in the space of an afternoon.

Pennsylvania has more pre 1900 housing stock than almost anywhere in the country, and a remarkable amount of it is still doing its job without complaint. The romance is entirely real. So is the maintenance schedule, and the two are not in conflict as long as you know which one you are looking at on any given day.

The four places old houses fail

• Water management. Grading, gutters, and pointing. Nearly every serious problem in a stone or brick house began as water that was allowed to sit.
• Structure at the sill. Where wood framing meets masonry is where rot and insects arrive first. Go to the basement and walk the perimeter.
• Systems. Knob and tube wiring, galvanized supply lines, and a boiler past its expectancy are not deal breakers. They are budget lines.
• Roof and flashing, especially at chimneys and valleys.

What is not on that list, and what nearly everyone panics about instead: plaster cracks, sloping floors, doors that stick in July. That is a house behaving normally after two centuries of settling and seasonal movement. A perfectly level floor in an 1820 house usually means somebody did something to it.

Get the right inspection

A general home inspector is trained on typical housing stock, which is a reasonable thing to be trained on and not much help here. For anything built before roughly 1940 it is worth paying separately for somebody who works on old buildings, and for a mason to look at the pointing if the house is stone or brick. Repointing done wrong, with hard modern cement over soft historic mortar, causes damage that costs several times what the original job did.

Hard mortar on soft brick traps water in the masonry. The wall then fails instead of the joint.

Windows

The reflex is to replace them, and every contractor who comes through the door will encourage the reflex. The better analysis, in most historic Pennsylvania houses, is that original wood sash with proper storms performs close to a replacement unit, lasts another century, and can be repaired by a person with a heat gun rather than reordered from a factory. The replacement conversation is usually about convenience. It is rarely about physics.

What an appraiser sees

Historic homes can be genuinely difficult to appraise, because comparable sales are scarce in a way that is not the appraiser's fault. An 1820 stone farmhouse on four acres has no true neighbor. It has a category of one. That is worth understanding before you write an offer well above the recent sales in the township, because the appraised number is the number the loan is built on.

None of this is an argument against the house on the second block in from the river. It is an argument for walking into it with your eyes open, which is the only way anyone has ever kept one of these standing for two hundred years.