Questions/Issues Re: Purchase Of 1800s Stone Home/Creamery

[oldhousen00b]

Hey Everybody,

First post on the forum and I'm excited to get everyone's input.

My wife and I have been looking for a home outside the city for some time. Recently, we found a place we both intuitively really loved - a 7.5 acre plot with two structures on it dating from the mid 1800s - however we are both keenly aware of the potential for the property to be a major albatross, and we want to try and assess the situation as completely as possible before rather than after making an offer.

The Structures On The Property

The Creamery - A three story stone building - just massive and in total disrepair internally - tons of stuff, about evenly split between super old furniture, ruined machinery, and straight garbage. It used to be an old creamery. It has on both sides of the original structure newer attached smaller structures - a stone lean-to on one end and a metal-framed shed on the other. The first floor is at grade in the front and below grade in the rear, so that you need to go up to the second floor in order to exit at the rear.

The Home - An 1800s two story stone home with an attached two story brick home built in the 1930s. The first floor is partially embarked. There is a full basement that I believe had concrete, rather than dirt, floors - but it was extremely dark and frankly hard to tell.

The house is about 50 feet or so from a creek. Between the house and the creek there is the septic system, which is marked with a manhole cover.

A Bit About Us

My wife and I did a tour of the house and the creamery, and we understand that this property is, conventionally speaking, a total albatross on its face - especially for two apartment dweller, non engineers from the city.

But the thing is, we both want a life long project to work on. Both of us are eager to do work and to learn as we go. We had the unique experience, for city dwellers, of totally gut renovating our own apartment - and we want very much to do that with a country home.

Ultimately, we have no illusions about what a property like this will look like for us - a ton of neverending work and, conventionally speaking, "headaches" as we slowly, ploddingly bring this place back to life and make it our own.


My Question For All Of You

Our big problem is, we don't know where the boundary lines are between a property that is a dangerous, ultra-expensive short term albatross, and a property that is an old but fundamentally stable, long term albatross that we can manage to slowly work on over the coming years.

To that end, I have two questions for this community:

1. What are the issues, with a stone house of this age, that we MUST get answers to in order to assess whether this house falls into the "total catastrophe, tens of thousands of dollars of immediate repairs" category, or the "livable, long term project" category?

2. Is it a good idea to see the property a second time with an engineer who is comfortable with this kind of construction? And, if so, does anyone have any recommendations for such a specialist in the NJ/tri-state area? Or, alternatively, any information about how to find someone trustworthy?



I've attached as a PDF some information regarding the home and it's history/construction for your perusal.

Thank you all so much for any input you're able to provide.

P.S. Full Disclosure, I am posting this on a couple of forums that cover this subject matter - just want to try and get as wide an input as possible as our information base is quite small.

[Gothichome]

Oldhouse, welcome to the District. I think your plan of getting the thoughts of other old home folks a wise move. You are correct, old homes and grand expectations like the HGTV shows will soon dampen any excitement going into the project. Going in with wide eyes and lots of information and less grand expectations will be the wiser way to go.
As far as the structure of the home, are the foundation walls still stable and not crumbling down, is the roof water tight, is the plumbing and electrics serviceable for use in the short term? These are all very important factors, the first two can be bank breakers. Every thing between the roof and the foundation can be fixed at your discretion. If you can get access to the not so glamorous areas such as the attic and into the basement to inspect the structure form the inside would be helpful.
You don’t need to be a builder or an engineer to know if some thing is way off.
Consider what your end vision for the home is, most century plus homes do not lend themselves to open plan ideas, if that is the vision then plan on some engineering and contractors, both can be very expensive.
Lastly, make sure both of you have the same vision for the long term going into an old home restoration, a change in vision can put strain on a relationship.
I certainly hope these words will not dissuade you from pursuing an old home restoration.
Oh, one other thing, you either have time or money, if you have the time then restoration need not be expensive, if you have no time you may need lots of money.

[oldhousen00b]

Oldhouse, welcome to the District. I think your plan of getting the thoughts of other old home folks a wise move. You are correct, old homes and grand expectations like the HGTV shows will soon dampen any excitement going into the project. Going in with wide eyes and lots of information and less grand expectations will be the wiser way to go.
As far as the structure of the home, are the foundation walls still stable and not crumbling down, is the roof water tight, is the plumbing and electrics serviceable for use in the short term? These are all very important factors, the first two can be bank breakers. Every thing between the roof and the foundation can be fixed at your discretion. If you can get access to the not so glamorous areas such as the attic and into the basement to inspect the structure form the inside would be helpful.
You don’t need to be a builder or an engineer to know if some thing is way off.
Consider what your end vision for the home is, most century plus homes do not lend themselves to open plan ideas, if that is the vision then plan on some engineering and contractors, both can be very expensive.
Lastly, make sure both of you have the same vision for the long term going into an old home restoration, a change in vision can put strain on a relationship.
I certainly hope these words will not dissuade you from pursuing an old home restoration.
Oh, one other thing, you either have time or money, if you have the time then restoration need not be expensive, if you have no time you may need lots of money.

I appreciate the welcome!

My wife and I both think about this as a long term - very long term - plan. We definitely imagine a slow, methodical trickle of changes over the coming years.

My fear is just missing something catastrophically bad - exactly the two issues you mention.

At first walk through, the house looks solid - the floors feel solid - walls aren't tilted or floors buckling in any obvious way. The roof has no gutters - but doesn't have any obviously missing panels. The basement is moist as heck - probably in part due to the lack of gutters - but doesn't seem like its going to collapse in on itself.

But what do I know about roofs? And I definitely know even less about 1800 stone walls. And septic tanks for that matter.

Someone told me today that the only way to buy a house like this is to have the cash value of the house on hand to spend on fixing it after it's purchased. That sort of put the fear of God into me - we can afford a mortgage on this place - but we damn well couldn't spend a couple of hundred thousand raising it from the dead - and getting stuck with a genuine, grade A albatross is my worst fear.

So anyways, I'm of two (or three, or nine) minds about this. As of right now, I really want to get in there with someone who knows what they're doing - but it's hard to know where to find that person.

[GinaC]

Everything Gothichome says is gold, he's the expert around here.

The main thing to check is the foundation, and after that, the roof. Pretty much everything else can be fixed as you go, barring any huge holes or breaks in load-bearing walls. Plumbing and electrical should be in good enough shape for temporary use, but when I moved into my 1933 apartment in Bay Ridge in 1993, I only had drywall and holes in the walls and floor. Granted, I had running water and electricity, but I was young and willing to pretty much camp out in it for awhile.

Honestly, from what you describe, I would worry most about ground water -- does the nearby creek flood? And is the ground near the house wet a lot? That could cause a lot of foundation issues and you are right to worry about how wet the basement is. However, even that can be fixed with pumps and the like if you throw enough money at it. Keep in mind that your number one job as the conservator of an old house is to protect that foundation. This includes landscaping and possibly gutters with drainage tubes underground to draw the water to the street -- this is what I did.

My house is only 80 years old, but I want to chime in here since I only bought it in Feb 2019 and it was my first old house purchase on my own. The situation is also different from yours because my house had been a rental for the past 20 years, so folks had been living in it non-stop. (I do know, however, that people can and do live in houses that are in very bad shape.) It is also within city limits so I don't have to worry about maintaining a septic system.

I had a general home inspection done when I put down an offer with a stipulation for passing that inspection, and I purposely chose an inspector that had a reputation for being a stickler and I walked around with him while he did it. (I'm still using his report as a punch list.) There is a crack in the cement foundation, but I read up on foundation cracks and agreed with the inspector that it's a normal vertical cement-settling one that was probably patched before I was born.

I knew upon walkthrough that the floors were sloped, but once I moved in, I became obsessed with them. Did that one foundation crack shift the whole house? Was the previous owner just really good at patching every single drywall crack that signalled trouble? Did the front deck really move up and down seasonally and was that a sign that the house was sliding down the mostly granite hill that it was built on? (I have PTSD due to 9/11, so my default mindset is usually "catastrophe".)

Yes, I had already bought the house at this point, and I wasn't having buyer's remorse, exactly. I loved my little house too much and I knew that it was generally stable -- but my hypervigilance didn't. I was also wondering if it would be worth it to maybe jack the foundation up to level it, or what else I needed to do to protect the foundation.

It was a fairly large added expense, but for my peace of mind I had a structural engineer come and do an inspection, and I walked around with him asking questions, taking notes and discussing what I wanted to remodel to find out how to do it. (P.S. In a Cape Cod home, every upstairs wall is load bearing if you get a lot of snow. That detail alone was worth the entire price of the inspection because now I won't have some cowboy knocking out my kneewalls willy-nilly.) I did save some money by not having him write up a report -- he charged me half of what he usually charges because of that.

As for the sloping floors? Well, it stumped the structural engineer for a few hours since he agreed that there are no signs of shifting at all anywhere in the house. The front deck was moving up and down since the little mudroom on the front of the house was not being supported at all. So he told me that when I replaced the deck, I should put in a pier 5 feet down underground under the corner of that mudroom and there would be no more stuck front door in the winter and no more front deck on the high seas. This is what I did, and he was right. The garden pavers in front of the deck still move a bit in the winter due to freezing ground water, but nothing else does.

We had the a-ha moment about the sloping floors while walking around outside discussing landscaping changes for drainage purposes. The original siding was level, but the windows were installed at different heights according to the slope in the floor. This means that the house was built that way -- sloped and unlevel, but she's solid. I'm still breathing sighs of relief, and now I just shim my furniture and get on with my life. Leveling out the floors would only mess up every single thing inside.

Welcome to the forum, you've come to the right place! I've rambled on long enough, and I hope that I've helped at least in a small way.

[oldhousen00b]

Welcome to the forum, you've come to the right place! I've rambled on long enough, and I hope that I've helped at least in a small way.

Thank you! This is really helpful to read - even just getting a sense of other people going through their own process. It's definitely a nerve wracking endeavor even to consider, let alone go through on!

I'm glad to hear my instincts about major points of concern are not too far off the mark. I was also very concerned about the groundwater and the relationship to both the basement and the septic. Actually the septic is placed about halfway between the house and the creek - which also sort of has me nervous.

Long and short of it, I definitely want to find a general contractor or engineer who knows these kinds of structures and can do a walk through with us. It was suggested to me that I contact local historic preservation societies and ask for recommendations, which I've begun doing. But if anyone has any recommendations in the tri-state area/New Jersey I'm all ears!

[GinaC]

Long and short of it, I definitely want to find a general contractor or engineer who knows these kinds of structures and can do a walk through with us. It was suggested to me that I contact local historic preservation societies and ask for recommendations, which I've begun doing. But if anyone has any recommendations in the tri-state area/New Jersey I'm all ears!

My realtor was the one who gave me the inspector recommendation. I know that folks say that you can't trust realtors for this stuff, but I say keep looking if you can't trust the one you have. You're paying them to represent you.

The way I found my structural engineer is, down the street there is a civic engineer's office, and I just walked in, told him what I was looking for, and he gave me the name of the guy I used. He also helped me out by coming over one day to find my property markers for fence installation purposes without having to do a full survey.

[Gothichome]

Oldhouse, needing the home value in cash is nonsense, yes I can see it if you want it done fast and are not willing to pick up a hammer. We have several stone house folks who have had creeks running through there basement. The house was just adapted to allow the water to run right through it from the very beginning. Yes having no eaves troughs is really not a good thing, but that can be remedied for a small outlay a cash by even a novice handyperson. All you need to do is get the water away from the foundation, the basement will dry out in a short amount of time.
Get hold of the local historical society or old home group, they surely can get you in touch with a local old home inspector.
Gina gives me more credit than I have earned but glad I was able to offer some ideas to consider. If your posting the same questions on other good old home sites you will find the information given will start to sound the same.

[1918ColonialRevival]

Stone is usually pretty resilient, but there are a couple of things I would look for. Check the interior walls for signs of moisture. Efflourescence (a chalky-looking buildup of dissolved minerals) is often the calling card of water intrusion, along with interior plaster that is separating from the exterior walls.

Also, look at the mortar joints between the stones. The good news is, mortar can be re-pointed. And stone is not as fussy as old brick. With older brick, the existing mortar should be sampled and analyzed. New mortar should be made with the same recipe as the old. Most stone is a little more forgiving in that one does not have to worry about using a mortar that is too "hard" that will cause compression fractures like can happen with brick.

If you can see them, check the sills and the floor joists for water damage, rot, or signs of termites.

Plumbing and electrical can be repaired enough to be functional and upgraded as time and funds allow. If there are any old fixtures present, I highly recommend restoring them as they are much better quality than anything made today.

Also, being only 50 feet from a creek would concern me. Flooding is a concern for any creek, no matter how small. Not really a big deal if all it floods is an unfinished basement, but there's always the risk of the "right" flood hitting and undermining the whole place. Take a look at the flooding in Ellicott City, MD, in 2016 and 2018 and its aftermath. That was the result of a creek not being able to keep up with a downpour. Those were two supposed "500 year floods" that happened two years apart.

Finally, I would be more afraid of the New Jersey taxes than any problem with the house or outbuildings! You'll be giving just as much if not more to the state than you will be spending making repairs.

[1918ColonialRevival]

...We have several stone house folks who have had creeks running through there basement. The house was just adapted to allow the water to run right through it from the very beginning.

The house I grew up in was a somewhat primitive 1880s cottage on a mountainside. Underneath the house was a small spring that came from out of the mountain. The house didn't get indoor plumbing until around 1925, so the spring was the original water source. They got away with it by leaving the area under the house open except for lattice exterior walls.

[oldhousen00b]

Thank you everyone! So much helpful information

If your posting the same questions on other good old home sites you will find the information given will start to sound the same.

That's the surest way to separate the wheat from the chaff when you go to the internet for advice on niche matters - the advice that keeps repeating is generally the good advice!