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Old homes not restored in a day

By Alan J. Heavens
INQUIRER REAL ESTATE WRITER

When it rained, water would quickly find its way under an exterior door of Mark Dixon's 1816 farmhouse in Wayne.

"The threshold tilted in toward the house rather than out, either because of errant workmanship or because of settling," Dixon said. Originally, it wasn't a problem, because the door opened on to a covered porch that was about 12 inches above the ground, according to Dixon.

"Unfortunately, that porch had been removed or had rotted away decades ago," he said. "It wasn't there in a 1942 photograph that came with the house, but we could see its shadow about halfway up the exterior stucco."

The solution was easy. Dixon just built a new porch "in a month and a half of weekends," he said. Not only did he stop the leak, but he and his wife, Cindy, made a substantial contribution to the restoration/renovation of their house.

According to the experts, Dixon took all the right steps. He recognized the problem, determined the cause, and came up with the correct solution.

"Try to look at the building with your eyes open," said Peter B. Trieb, a preservation consultant from Rochester, N.Y. "The wonderful times to walk around your house are the times when you don't want to see things - during rainstorms and in cold weather. But you need to familiarize yourself with how the seasons affect it."

You also need to take your time and think about what you are doing.

"Sometimes we are in a rush," Trieb said. "We think we need to get that kitchen finished or we have to fix the leak in the roof before the next rain. But rushing to get things done is the wrong approach in a lot of cases. Old houses are best served by a methodical approach."

Dixon discovered the leak in the first winter after moving into the house in 1989, and the new porch was built in the "winterless" winter of 1990.  Between the two winters, he read David Hackett Fischer's book Albion Seed, which chronicled the transfer of British folkways to Pennsylvania by the Quakers in the 17th and 18th centuries.

"He talked about architectural styles, including the kind of porch that was built on houses here - a simple shed roof off a stone wall - a style that came from the English Midlands, where many of the Quakers who settled here were from," Dixon said.

That was the porch Dixon built.

"Understanding your house is a process," said Trieb. "We don't go to sleep at night or wake up in the morning and say, 'Aha! I understand it now.' It's an evolutionary sort of thing."

"Your house is continually changing, being built up and also in a constant state of deterioration," Trieb said.

"People have to understand that we live in an age when we are told what we need - what deodorant to buy, what jeans to buy, what toys to buy." But older buildings don't work that way, he said. "You need to understand that maintaining your old house is a process and that things don't have to be done all at once."

According to Thomas O. Green, a Boston-area timber-framing expert, "Restoration is like putting together a puzzle. You have to figure out what's first, what's second, and what are the final pieces."

One of Green's major jobs is replacing rotted foundation supports, or sills, which often is the first piece of any restoration puzzle.

"My clients will say their house is settling," he said. "But older houses don't settle. Beams rot, and they don't do it uniformly. The rotting puts the places where timbers are joined under strain, and this affects the stability of the building."

As the sill rots to nothing, the walls of the house actually drift outward.

"The beams can even be hollowed by insects crawling through them, yet on the outside of the beams, it may look as if there is nothing wrong," Green said. "Many people try to determine if the sills are rotted from the basement side, trying to stick an ice pick through the wood. But no ice pick can go through two inches of oak."

Rotting sills are not limited to older houses either.

"It is happening to houses that were built in the 1950s over crawl spaces with no ventilation," Green said. "Anytime wood comes into direct contact with the soil, there is going to be deterioration. And if you have a structural problem, it isn't going to go away. It's just going to get worse."

So what do you do?

"You consider all options in replacement," Green said. "Some people use pressure-treated wood, for example, but whatever you decide is usually governed by municipal code.

"The main thing is to find a contractor in whose skills you are confident, who has a feel for early buildings, and who offers you options in taking care of the problem," Green said.

"Remember, too, that there are hidden costs in any older-house project, and sill replacement is no exception," Green said. "Don't assume the contractor can tell you the exact amount you need unless he or she is grossly overinflating the price.

"Keep some money in reserve in case problems do show up," Green said. "Ask contractors for alternatives and prices if problems do crop up."

One thing you have to be sure of is that the solution doesn't compound the problem.

"There was one house that was shored up using two pressure-treated 2 by 6s," Green said. "What was needed, however, was an eight by eight, and the 2 by 6s created a void that was connected to nothing."

To replace the sills you usually need to jack up the house, and if the contractor isn't skilled, he or she might end up doing even more damage.

"In jacking up the building, use a lot of different jacks," Green said. "With one or two 50-ton jacks, beams can break and bend. But if you use 12-to-20-ton jacks and spread them evenly, the risk of breaking or bending is reduced and the power will be more than adequate."

Work of that scope, while frequent, is not an everyday problem.

"Living in an old house is often like an archaeological dig," Dixon said. "Unlike new houses, which are all alike, in an old house, you'll never know what you'll find next."

There was that potential when Dixon went after "ugly-as-sin" 1960s aluminum siding that adorned the circa-1880 and 1942 frame additions to the farmhouse.

"Everyone tried to dissuade us from removing the siding because they said we didn't know what we'd find under it," Dixon said. "To me, that sounded like a good reason to remove it.

"We simply ripped the siding off and took it to a recycling plant," Dixon said. "We didn't get much for it - about the cost of the paint. And the siding underneath was cedar and in pretty good shape after I pulled out about a thousand staples that had been used to apply the aluminum."

The only unexpected thing was that he had to rebuild the crown moldings that had been on the top of each of the windows.

"The guys who applied the siding had ripped the moldings off to square up the windows in preparation for installing the siding," Dixon said.

"The key to preservation is knowledge," said Joan Abel, a preservation consultant from Annapolis, Md. "And ongoing maintenance is an important and essential aspect of preservation."

Paint is the most visible of all house maintenance issues, according to Trieb.

"We see it peeling, and we go out and get paint to correct it," he said. "But we fail to isolate the cause, just the symptom. Paint peels from a number of different reasons, and we need to find the right cause to come up with the right cure."

The paint was flaking off Dixon's stucco-over-stone farmhouse. Several paint contractors explained that stucco was a lime-based mortar that wasn't meant to be painted but had been.

"The only real option was to remove the paint and the paint-repelling mortar, which I did by chipping away at it by hand over an 18-month period," Dixon said. "I resealed it with a product called Thoroseal, which was paintable."

Get to know your house first, the experts recommend.

"Repointing is often necessary for a stone house," Trieb said, but "often, high-lime-content original mortar is replaced with mortar that has a high cement content, which doesn't work properly and washes out, or doesn't match.

"Hiring a restoration mason with knowledge of mortar is your goal," he said. "They know that high-cement mortars are brittle, while high-lime mortars are softer, bring the water from the wall outside, and allow the water to evaporate."

But the most important piece of advice: Take your time.

"Go slowly," Trieb said. "Ally yourself with good, professional help, pay well for those services, be sensitive to your house, and above all, understand it's not going to happen all at once."

After owning his house for 10 years, Dixon is still not through. He and Cindy are trying to choose among three contractors who will build their addition.

"It's time," Dixon said. "The soil pipe has shifted, making one bathroom unusable, and the electrical system is beginning to fail."

"In building additions, try to keep the original footprint of the house," Trieb said. "You can make changes, but keep architectural integrity of the structure in mind. And most of all, develop that maintenance program."

From his track record, these are lessons Dixon already knows well.

Mark E. Dixon