Old House Problems + How to Learn to Solve Them
It’s our first full winter in the Big Red House, and we’ve noticed that during rainy San Francisco days, our house is COLD. Here’s a look into our old house problems. And how to learn to solve them.
We run into problems in this house on the regular since most of the current systems were installed when the last owners purchased this house. Our furnace has asbestos wrapped ducts and is an early 1980s unit. I’ve got siblings younger than the 1996 water heater we had (RIP).
As we are trying to resolve some of these issues, we’ve had to do a deep dive on how to best approach these fixes, as my main concern with doing repairs and replacements is keeping historic materials in place and not doing any permanent damage to them. I think it would be a shame to have something with superior craftsmanship that’s lasted almost 150 years and replace the higher quality materials (i.e. locally sourced virgin timber versus the 7 year old farmed timber that isn’t from the area and doesn’t have the same quality of durability or insect/weather repellent that a locally-sourced option has).
For this example, I’ll walk you through our process so far. My fiancé Garret is insanely good at consuming large amounts of information in a short period of time and buys all of the crazy tools for each project he decides to take on. He ended up buying a thermal camera to do a sort of audit on our house to see if we had any major air leaks or anything else we needed to deal with. He found that we do indeed have leaks where the wrapping on our ducts is failing. We are basically heating our basement level every time we run the heat, which is not great! You can pay for someone to do an energy audit on your house, FYI.
He devised a plan to fix some of the immediate issues, but I wanted to be super sure that we weren’t using any methods to harm our old gal. If you’ve ever done even a small job in your home, you may have googled so much that you end up more confused than when you started. There are so many ways people solve problems, but they aren’t always doing it the right way, so sometimes it’s hard to find a reliable source who has the same values as you. I see us as stewards of our home and not the owners. This house should outlast me and everyone I love, so I want to make sure we do our part in keeping it around for the next generation.
With this in mind, I usually read most online articles with extreme skepticism, which I know drives Garret insane. I decided to see what the National Park Service Preservation Briefs had to say about this and I was lucky that they had a few articles, so I got to reading. I was specifically interested the ones about improving energy efficiency and more general info on HVAC systems in historic buildings. We were able to confirm that it’s the way they would handle these particular issues and also confirmed what we were seeing is common in the older HVAC units.
I have a few go-to’s for repairs in historic houses. First up, it’s the books in my library. Second, I’ll see what the National Park Service has to say, since they quite literally wrote the book on their standards. Third, I’ll sort of trust Old House Journal, sometimes Bob Vila’s site (from This Old House). I’ll also ping my local historic house group and my instagram friends who also own old houses to see what they’ve done. It takes a lot of folks to make the right choices, but I feel lucky to be getting the hang of all of this. You can’t do it all alone!
