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That is too bad. Another historic house bites the dust. There is almost nothing left of the 1937 home. It is a partial shell of a historic home completely gutted and virtually all historic elements removed. Not even the entire shell remains intact. In 5-10 years this will merely be another outdated house and the historic elements cannot be replaced, at least not practically. I do not understand why people do this. It is usually cheaper to just build a new house thank to do this to a historic home. I suppose it is better than tearing it down. At least it appears from the pictures that the new work was not entirely schlocky. Granite counters in a 1937 house? If they fele it is necessary to gut historic properties why can't they at least TRY to put in something appropriate for the time and style of the house>? (Reminds me of the 1940s diner type kitchen that the bozo who bougth our 1893 house installed. When he sold it, the buyer tore out the inappropriate kitchen and tryed to make a modern version of the original. It is too bad that this is profitable. Many forms of destroying historic things are profitable. (For example, tearing lithographs out of old books and selling them on E-bay is also very profitable.).
The shame of it is that once the historic properties are gone, they are gone. they cannot be replaced or re-created. Fortuantely, many people are moving away from the "gut all historical elements" concept and moving more towards actually restoring a historic home with historic integrity.
Sorry to say that peole like your buddy will go down in history as historcial pirates. Destroying history in the name of profits. It has been going on for a thousand eyars or more. Still it is sad to see.
Well, when you find a population of folks with footmen and maids and horse drawn carriages, and that need a parlor and a servants dining area, you can restore houses until your wallet's empty. For the time being, people have a different lifestyle and their happiness is more important than your sense of historic correctness. sorry.
In your world, one would need a lot of plywood to board up the houses configured in a way no longer useful. I don't care much for plywood.
I agree with Coldjensens on this. That house has been destroyed--modern flooring, granite, recessed lighting. I guess we should be thankful that your friend didn't install a floating staircase.
That is too bad. Another historic house bites the dust. There is almost nothing left of the 1937 home. It is a partial shell of a historic home completely gutted and virtually all historic elements removed. Not even the entire shell remains intact. In 5-10 years this will merely be another outdated house and the historic elements cannot be replaced, at least not practically. I do not understand why people do this. It is usually cheaper to just build a new house thank to do this to a historic home. I suppose it is better than tearing it down. At least it appears from the pictures that the new work was not entirely schlocky. Granite counters in a 1937 house? If they fele it is necessary to gut historic properties why can't they at least TRY to put in something appropriate for the time and style of the house>? (Reminds me of the 1940s diner type kitchen that the bozo who bougth our 1893 house installed. When he sold it, the buyer tore out the inappropriate kitchen and tryed to make a modern version of the original. It is too bad that this is profitable. Many forms of destroying historic things are profitable. (For example, tearing lithographs out of old books and selling them on E-bay is also very profitable.).
The shame of it is that once the historic properties are gone, they are gone. they cannot be replaced or re-created. Fortuantely, many people are moving away from the "gut all historical elements" concept and moving more towards actually restoring a historic home with historic integrity.
Sorry to say that peole like your buddy will go down in history as historcial pirates. Destroying history in the name of profits. It has been going on for a thousand eyars or more. Still it is sad to see.
I agree completely. Someone is doing that with a house behind the one I bought. Both of ours needed rehab - theirs more than ours which is largely original. I should thank them for replacing all the windows because I was able to replace al of the missing window sash pulls. Likewise for the casing and baseboards, because now we can repair a couple of damaged areas and have some extra material left over just in case. All of it matched what our house was built with.
That is too bad. Another historic house bites the dust. There is almost nothing left of the 1937 home. It is a partial shell of a historic home completely gutted and virtually all historic elements removed.
Agree. Generic spaces, beige and white, dozens of pot lights everywhere, ugly generic deck, cheap widows with faux muntins, the signature black granite/maple cabinets everyone has, etc. No more character left. If the owner wanted a newish house, they should have just bought something new and left this one alone.
So what if it's $1,000,000? If it had been properly restored, it could have been valued at $2- or $3,000,000.
I bought a home from the original owner that bought it new in 1922...
It was not a "Historic" home... rather a nice bungalow in a mid size 1922 sub-division.
I had so much advice from well meaning folks on how I needed to rip all the old stuff out and up-date the place...
My decision was to make sure every detail was clean, painted, polished and in good working order...
Replaced double hung window cords, rebuilt the faucets, made the old high leg stove sparkle and refinished the old match stick hardwood.
It looked very much like a catalog picture from 1922... even had the old gravity furnace in good working condition.
Years later, when it came time to sell... I got the highest price in the neighborhood of similar homes... some had several remodels and many were dated... 60's, 70's, 80's etc... mine was dated 1920's
Anyone can easily spend all the money they choose... just don't get fooled into thinking everything is an "Improvement"
I bought a home from the original owner that bought it new in 1922...
It was not a "Historic" home... rather a nice bungalow in a mid size 1922 sub-division.
I had so much advice from well meaning folks on how I needed to rip all the old stuff out and up-date the place...
My decision was to make sure every detail was clean, painted, polished and in good working order...
Replaced double hung window cords, rebuilt the faucets, made the old high leg stove sparkle and refinished the old match stick hardwood.
It looked very much like a catalog picture from 1922... even had the old gravity furnace in good working condition.
Years later, when it came time to sell... I got the highest price in the neighborhood of similar homes... some had several remodels and many were dated... 60's, 70's, 80's etc... mine was dated 1920's
Anyone can easily spend all the money they choose... just don't get fooled into thinking everything is an "Improvement"
I agree! I can't tell you how many times I've been told that, to fix my house "right," I have have to tear everything out, and put all new stuff in. The only way I seem to get them on my side, is by saying that I'm being "green," and don't want to use up landfill space needlessly.
The original windows in my project house have been neglected longer than most cheap replacements would last. Yet, with a little elbow grease, I can make them look and work like new. (and last for another 110 years)
Sure you can dispute about tastes. I see houses re-done by "interior decorators" freqenlty which no one but the decorator woudl dispute are comeplte disasters.
You can "update" a historic home without destroying the historic integrity. You just have to use some thinking, creativity, a lot of research for materils and stay the heck away from Home Depot. In many instances it may cost a bit more. Someone might have to take a step or two extra to get to a hidden microwave, or diswahser, but most people will not mind if their kitchen is utterly charming (rather than just like everyone else's kitchen). I am not sure whether the net return is greater or not. However when you remove the charm ou cannot put it back.
Someone mentioned baseboards. That is one of the worst things people do. Modern molding looks stupid in a historic home. Replacing rpped out molding is expensive. Nice 18" unpainted yellow pine baseboard molding often sells for $16 per foot. That means a few thousand dollars per room!
Things like granite counter tops and engineered flororing are just a passing phase. "Modernizing" is temproary. Soon it will be just an outdated house from 10 or 20 years ago. If you restore the historic charm, it will retain the charm as long as it is maintained.
It may be more profitable to detroy the histrical integrity, I am not sure that it is. However it certinaly requris a lot less thinking, creativity, research and knowlege to just to a gut and rebuild like the one depicted.
A guy who bought our former house did that. We had it beautifully restored. People walked in and their mouths literally dropped open. It still had a few things that needed attention. The guy who bought it told us that he was a historical house resorer and he knew exactly what to do. He woudl fully presere the historical integrity. HE didn't. HE ripped out everything neat and repalced it with the same trendy bland stuff we see in those picutres (excpet gutting the kitchen an installing a 1940s diner style kitchen). HE spent $250,000 on his destruciton and could not sell the house. (I wonder wy?) He lost it and the bank sold it for almost $300,000 less than he paid us for it. Part of that was market. Part of that was his removal of almost every aspect of historic charm.
If the builder who raped the 1937 house linked above wants to make some money and be impressive, he should do some research, learn to think and figure out how to restore a home while retaining historical integrity. It is hard. Nothing worthwhile is easy. But then my feeling has always been that nothing is worth doing at all if it is not worth doing right. Maybe that builder will someday adapt the same philosophy and take the time to learn how to do a restoration and make the time and effort to think it through research and save history rather than destroying it. then he can truely create heirloom treasures rather than destroying history and focussing on profits by temporarily modernizing old homes. Is the guy smart enught to figure that out?
Last edited by Coldjensens; 02-27-2012 at 08:29 AM..
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