We're in Ohio and one day I was lying in bed, and the earth shook. An earthquake they said, this was about 1982. A few weeks later we noticed the center of the house fell a bit and we knew we had to do 'something.'
The next winter my husband noticed there were old railroad RAILS down the road, by the tracks. He comes from a family of railroaders and knew they would just be scrapped.
In the middle of the night he went down and chained one to his pickup, on the icy road. Luckily the chains held because when he stopped, the rail kept sliding under his truck. He used my dad's dozer?backhoe? and slid it through holes in the basement walls and is still holding up the house!
The original house had no insulation in the walls, and a couple of inches in the attic We have added:
20” in the attic
We were doing the electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and a central vac so the walls were going to be torn up anyways, so we just made the walls 2 x 6 from the inside.
In 1990 we added on – we paid someone to put up the shell, replace all the windows, and side the outside, so we did the same insulating there, and added a house wrap over foam insulation to the whole house. We have 2 furnaces, old and new, and each heats the new and old part. Now that the kids are gone we only heat and cool the old front if we are in that part.
I don’t know if our heat bill is reasonable, but it’s certainly manageable.
One of the things about remodeling an old house, doing it cheaply is not worth it. There’s just too much sweat equity to not buy good quality things.
When we bought this house, one of the selling points was that no one had attempted remodeling. Hopefully, the next people after us will come away knowing that though the decor things are not their style, they would have a good base to work from. It took us longer, but the house was livable so we worked while we lived here.
This is an old photo of the original house. This was taken after we painted it, something we had to do to get our escrow money back from the bank. We had to fix an area of the soffit and we had to fix the ceiling in a bedroom where it fell too.
Our kids learned that it pays to wait for what you want, something they can use their whole lives.
Like we always say, a house is not something we have, it's something we do!