The Historic District

I'm not sure about central PA., but in Western PA everyone and their friend is doing barn salvage and it's nearly impossible to find a good deal on a decent salvaged flooring material. Some of the material they offer as "flooring" is humorous due to it's poor condition...i.e. you'd need to...

Did you check the paint for lead content? Wouldn't sand blasting make a bigger mess than stripping? There are a number of safer/healthier stripper options. I've seen people use the kind where you apply the stripper and then the paper over it to do the entire outside of their brick homes. Not much of...

That's a nice profit.
Did I read that correctly that ~8500 sq feet is a "huge" lot?

How do you even have room to have a mcmansion and some small yard, let alone two of them?

not a structural engineer, but in the top drawing it looks like those cross braces are just being nailed ( do you plan to just toe nail them at the bottom? which could put some load on the nails, maybe if the cross brace were morticed in or something like that it would add strength and take the loa...

Rafter ties are usually the ticket to prevent exterior walls from moving under the weight of the roof.
Probably one would be sufficient, although two might look better.

I think if it's cleaned with TSP first, any regular acrylic latex exterior paint will work fine whether it's 50 years old or 150 years old. People have been painting bricks for a long time. Just like with wood siding, the moisture in the walls and house as well as the weather elements it's exposed t...

There are specifically designed underlayment products for behind cedar siding(cedar breather is common). Of course, they're somewhat expensive. Additional strapping adds up as well and changes the depth of the siding potentially causing problems with window and cornice trim, etc. We did Tyvek then l...

I guess an added question to this is WHEN did you acquire your homeowner's insurance? This is something that started rearing it's ugly head about two or three years ago. Nice house Greg. I have a center chimney gambrel roof cape(although 100+ yrs younger) in PA. The property value is probably less ...

This must be a regional thing. I have K+T, very large trees hanging over the home, and most every other old home non weather "high risk" potential, and Allstate has never personally looked at my property and the rates are fairly reasonable....costs more to insure a good driver in a low ris...

A picture would help. Just guessing otherwise.

Maybe part of a cistern, part of access to a root cellar, a buttress to support a weak foundation area.