Older homes are not build to last. Older homes are just worth preserving. I live in the Netherlands we have a shit ton of old homes, if these homes weren’t repaired or renovated across the centuries most of them would have collapsed. Before modern build codes, like before the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon for an old home to just collapse with the inhabitants in it.
In many Dutch cities old homes are literally sinking into the ground, but instead of demolishing them most owners put in a new foundation. If it was an ugly modern glass box it would have been razed to the ground without a second thought.
Interesting. There are a ton of homes here built (starting about 1920) that still stand. And trust me they were built to last. Minor upkeep and they are still good today, but then everything is going to require minor upkeep.
I too owned a house built in the late 19th century with an addition built probably around the same time! The houses in the neighborhood were built to house workers from the steel mills nearby. On the main streets you had the foreman houses. Lots of brick, well made. My house was a worker’s house, a stick frame shotgun shack. What little of a foundation it had was a few rows of bricks set upon railroad ties just below the surface. Most likely the only reason it is still standing is because it is on top of a hill and the soil drains quickly. When the wind would blow real hard the house would lean enough that the front door would open. The latch could get past the jam. Fixed it with shims but you get the idea. Nowadays building code would require a foundation built on footers beneath the frost line. (4 feet here) Another building code that is a big improvement is requiring (I forget the proper name) walls to be built in such a way that the space in-between studs doesn’t act like a chimney in case of a fire. Major safety improvement there. I now own a house at least a hundred years old. Same story, built to house quarry workers. Fortunately someone who owned this house before me poured a concrete foundation all the way around. The additions on both my houses are pretty amateur probably because they were done by the homeowners and there was little enforcement of building codes if there were any.
Also well built houses also fall into ruin due to disrepair. Here in Cleveland there used to be Millionair’s Row. A street where the titans of industry built their mansions, the Rockefellers, Carnegie, Mellon. Very few still exist due to being expensive to maintain. I have a lot of experience with old buildings not only in my personal life but also at work (I’m a contractor) also most of my friends are in the trades with experience in old homes. Suffice to say just because a house is old is no indication of its quality. I can say plenty of bad stuff about new houses too.
My house was built in the late 19th century with an expansion added on in the 40s. The build quality of the original part of the house compared to the later built section is night and day, with the newest part of the house being the part that has aged so much worse due to trying out this new wood framing thing they started really getting into after the war
Specifically light framing which was pioneered in the early 20th century and became the dominant construction method in North America during the post-war housing boom.
Light framing can mean a lot of things. Wood framing has been around a lot longer than that. I too owned a house built in the 19th century, stick frame though. Also an addition sometime after ww2. They dug a rotund basement (round brick room) to accommodate indoor plumbing and built a kitchen on top of it.
We ultimately had to not use the upstairs for our bedroom because a queen sized bed can’t fit up the stairs. We use the largest main floor room as our bedroom (which inconveniently one has to walk through that room to get to the stairs)
It’s pretty clear that the stuff people choose to have in their homes today is different from the stuff people chose to have in their homes a century ago
The amount of furniture moving we do today is pretty insane. I kind of hate it.
One more step in this direction and suddenly even kitchen cabinets are separate pieces, carried up and down and in and out and around tight corners. No longer attached to the wall. Just another freestanding cabinet, there in the kitchen, with some dust, two coins, a random piece from a toy and a few dead bugs behind it. So sometimes you’ll feel like you have to pull the whole thing away from the wall and clean behind it. And you’ll have to remove all the dishes first, becouse the MDF panels and their connections are not strong enough to witstand all that weight while being pulled and twisted and turned. And even then you’ll notice a bit more wobble than last time. So maybe you’ll cut a rough match with the baseboard and screw it into the wall when you put it back. Or maybe you won’t, either way it still won’t be good.
When you end up moving a few years later, depending on your financial situation, you’ll remove the terrible cabinet snd either toss it or bring the poorly built half-mangled half-mess still technically usable thing to the new apartment. An apartment someone else just pulled a kitchen cabinet and everything else out of. And it was hard and annoying for them, too. And just like you, they’re not happy either.
The amount of furniture moving we do today is pretty insane. I kind of hate it.
The fact is, the average person owns so much more now than they did at any other point in history. In the 19th century the average American home was about 400-800 sq feet with Victorian mansions pushing 2000 sq feet (also worth noting that the concept of a bedroom is only about 200 years old, and the option of kids not sharing rooms is only about 50 years old)
I’d also argue that housing becoming a commodity is also a factor. With rapidly increasing rents, rental properties as an investment and non-present landlords one is forced to move in order to maintain their lifestyle far more frequently than they should
Honestly in this historical context, I feel like there’s some wisdom to the small home and minimalism movements, primarily in that it returns to a more sustainable lifestyle in our urban modern lives
I don’t think it is so much a thing of today unless you mean for the last few decades at least. Kitchens in particular are very weird since people just rip them out out of spite it seems just so the person renting the place next will have to buy a new one.
I am in Germany. Here people are very weird about kitchens when renting (medium to long-term, not with stuff like student apartments) and often do rip out their kitchen even if they don’t plan on keeping it unless the next renter pays them for it, if anything that got a bit better in the last few years as people have been raising awareness how wasteful that is.
I don’t know of people bringing kitchen cabinetry during moves either, just the occasional kitchen remodeling.
What I went on about was the logical extreme of this kind of moving behavior. The kitchen and bathroom are the two places left in a house where things tend to stay put, built in.
What taladar said about a lot of Germans tearing out kitchens for no reason sounds absolutely ridiculous and I really hope that stops.
Per the article posted in the comments, this is a new-build. In the UK, 90% of them are built in the same style that uses a lot of traditional features.
I do agree with the old homes being awkward though. Our staircase is straight, but narrow and very steep. The house itself was probably well built, but the decades of renovations made to it are not necessarily well done. We’ve found that we’ve had to strip rooms down to the brick and dirt floor to do it properly.
I love older homes because they were built to last.
I hate them because you can’t move anything anywhere without a saw.
Older homes are not build to last. Older homes are just worth preserving. I live in the Netherlands we have a shit ton of old homes, if these homes weren’t repaired or renovated across the centuries most of them would have collapsed. Before modern build codes, like before the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon for an old home to just collapse with the inhabitants in it.
In many Dutch cities old homes are literally sinking into the ground, but instead of demolishing them most owners put in a new foundation. If it was an ugly modern glass box it would have been razed to the ground without a second thought.
Interesting. There are a ton of homes here built (starting about 1920) that still stand. And trust me they were built to last. Minor upkeep and they are still good today, but then everything is going to require minor upkeep.
Survivors bias. You don’t see the old houses that weren’t built well because they’re gone.
Look at trainguyrom and read his comment it might give you a different perspective.
I would also say the ones that didn’t survive were the ones that failed do to not being maintained.
I too owned a house built in the late 19th century with an addition built probably around the same time! The houses in the neighborhood were built to house workers from the steel mills nearby. On the main streets you had the foreman houses. Lots of brick, well made. My house was a worker’s house, a stick frame shotgun shack. What little of a foundation it had was a few rows of bricks set upon railroad ties just below the surface. Most likely the only reason it is still standing is because it is on top of a hill and the soil drains quickly. When the wind would blow real hard the house would lean enough that the front door would open. The latch could get past the jam. Fixed it with shims but you get the idea. Nowadays building code would require a foundation built on footers beneath the frost line. (4 feet here) Another building code that is a big improvement is requiring (I forget the proper name) walls to be built in such a way that the space in-between studs doesn’t act like a chimney in case of a fire. Major safety improvement there. I now own a house at least a hundred years old. Same story, built to house quarry workers. Fortunately someone who owned this house before me poured a concrete foundation all the way around. The additions on both my houses are pretty amateur probably because they were done by the homeowners and there was little enforcement of building codes if there were any.
Also well built houses also fall into ruin due to disrepair. Here in Cleveland there used to be Millionair’s Row. A street where the titans of industry built their mansions, the Rockefellers, Carnegie, Mellon. Very few still exist due to being expensive to maintain. I have a lot of experience with old buildings not only in my personal life but also at work (I’m a contractor) also most of my friends are in the trades with experience in old homes. Suffice to say just because a house is old is no indication of its quality. I can say plenty of bad stuff about new houses too.
My house was built in the late 19th century with an expansion added on in the 40s. The build quality of the original part of the house compared to the later built section is night and day, with the newest part of the house being the part that has aged so much worse due to trying out this new wood framing thing they started really getting into after the war
Wood framing has been around a lot longer than that?
Specifically light framing which was pioneered in the early 20th century and became the dominant construction method in North America during the post-war housing boom.
Light framing can mean a lot of things. Wood framing has been around a lot longer than that. I too owned a house built in the 19th century, stick frame though. Also an addition sometime after ww2. They dug a rotund basement (round brick room) to accommodate indoor plumbing and built a kitchen on top of it.
… and no 90º angle is actually 90º
I feel this one in my soul.
We had to literally take our stairs apart to get our bed upstairs. Convenient!
We ultimately had to not use the upstairs for our bedroom because a queen sized bed can’t fit up the stairs. We use the largest main floor room as our bedroom (which inconveniently one has to walk through that room to get to the stairs)
It’s pretty clear that the stuff people choose to have in their homes today is different from the stuff people chose to have in their homes a century ago
The amount of furniture moving we do today is pretty insane. I kind of hate it.
One more step in this direction and suddenly even kitchen cabinets are separate pieces, carried up and down and in and out and around tight corners. No longer attached to the wall. Just another freestanding cabinet, there in the kitchen, with some dust, two coins, a random piece from a toy and a few dead bugs behind it. So sometimes you’ll feel like you have to pull the whole thing away from the wall and clean behind it. And you’ll have to remove all the dishes first, becouse the MDF panels and their connections are not strong enough to witstand all that weight while being pulled and twisted and turned. And even then you’ll notice a bit more wobble than last time. So maybe you’ll cut a rough match with the baseboard and screw it into the wall when you put it back. Or maybe you won’t, either way it still won’t be good.
When you end up moving a few years later, depending on your financial situation, you’ll remove the terrible cabinet snd either toss it or bring the poorly built half-mangled half-mess still technically usable thing to the new apartment. An apartment someone else just pulled a kitchen cabinet and everything else out of. And it was hard and annoying for them, too. And just like you, they’re not happy either.
The fact is, the average person owns so much more now than they did at any other point in history. In the 19th century the average American home was about 400-800 sq feet with Victorian mansions pushing 2000 sq feet (also worth noting that the concept of a bedroom is only about 200 years old, and the option of kids not sharing rooms is only about 50 years old)
I’d also argue that housing becoming a commodity is also a factor. With rapidly increasing rents, rental properties as an investment and non-present landlords one is forced to move in order to maintain their lifestyle far more frequently than they should
Honestly in this historical context, I feel like there’s some wisdom to the small home and minimalism movements, primarily in that it returns to a more sustainable lifestyle in our urban modern lives
I don’t think it is so much a thing of today unless you mean for the last few decades at least. Kitchens in particular are very weird since people just rip them out out of spite it seems just so the person renting the place next will have to buy a new one.
Not sure where you live but where I live no one takes the kitchen cabinets when they move (us here.)
I am in Germany. Here people are very weird about kitchens when renting (medium to long-term, not with stuff like student apartments) and often do rip out their kitchen even if they don’t plan on keeping it unless the next renter pays them for it, if anything that got a bit better in the last few years as people have been raising awareness how wasteful that is.
I don’t know of people bringing kitchen cabinetry during moves either, just the occasional kitchen remodeling.
What I went on about was the logical extreme of this kind of moving behavior. The kitchen and bathroom are the two places left in a house where things tend to stay put, built in.
What taladar said about a lot of Germans tearing out kitchens for no reason sounds absolutely ridiculous and I really hope that stops.
Per the article posted in the comments, this is a new-build. In the UK, 90% of them are built in the same style that uses a lot of traditional features.
I do agree with the old homes being awkward though. Our staircase is straight, but narrow and very steep. The house itself was probably well built, but the decades of renovations made to it are not necessarily well done. We’ve found that we’ve had to strip rooms down to the brick and dirt floor to do it properly.