An experiment, build new, like the old

[rncx (WavyGlass)]

So unfortunately, my prized 105 year old possession will soon be for sale . It's been about 5-6 years of part time labor getting it restored, including building new windows, cabinets, etc to match the old and re-create what was once there. I've posted pics along the way at the old OHW and at HistoricHomeworks so people who know my name from those two have seen the progress. But the catch is, that house is in Little Rock and I'm moving to Dallas. Worse yet, not the old neighborhoods of North Dallas, my fiance has her daughter in a school that she likes in the suburbs for the next 5 years (daughter is 13).

And oh yes, there are McMansions galore, and middle-class plastic/particle board Home Depot cut-outs as far as the eye can see. Worse yet, there are no old houses to buy and live in. Everything old that's still standing has been converted into retail space in the smallish downtown area of the city.

Now, like you all, I have a certain lifestyle I'm accustomed to. And needless to say, drywall, 3" baseboards, laminate floors, vinyl windows, and fiberglass doors ain't gonna cut it.

So we've been kicking around the idea of building a new old house. While we can't get an old style neighborhood in town, we can get country neighborhoods just a few miles out of town, and remain in the school district in question. That's an acceptable compromise, and the catch then becomes, how we go about building a new old-style house without a multi-million dollar budget.

So here's what we're looking at, as a base of numbers to work with...

1) The average home price in this city is about 300k.
2) The upper end out in the areas that are still 'country' will bear 750k resale values, so that could be considered a "hard limit" on what we can spend and reasonably expect to sell at some point.
3) We're talking about something in the range of 400k, disregarding the lot which will be about 100k, so a 500-600k total budget.
4) We are shooting for 3000-3500 square feet total living area.
5) There will be no plywood/OSB/other laminate type material in or on the building whatsoever.
6) Pier and beam foundation, stucco exterior walls, clay tile or metal roof, just as you would have in a so-equipped older home.
7) Interior appropriately trimmed with wall to wall floors, 6+" baseboards, patterned tile, solid wood doors, etc., as you would have in an older home.

Starting with the givens, we're firstly planning on a single story, not a two story design. I'm partial to Wright prairie knock offs, which would fit in the setting and help us on some of the cost (by being more open, eliminating multitudes of interior doors, for instance). Something like this, for example....link.

Givens that we are not able to do ourselves...

Best guesstimate I can come up with on pier and beam foundation work is 40-50k (assuming 40-50 piers @ ~1000 per pier, high estimate).
Best guesstimate I can come up with on a new clay tile roof is 75k (assuming 15 dollars a square for 5000 square feet, also high estimate).
Stucco and plaster I'm familiar with the exact cost of, I have a plaster guy on speed dial , 6-7 dollars a foot at 4000 square feet of outside stucco is about 30k, add the inside plaster another 15k so call it 50k total (another high estimate).
Framing, electrical, plumbing, A/C, should be able to get all done on a house this size for 100-125k total?

That leaves us with 100-125k to spend in interior finish details to make the 500k, plus whatever to stay under 600k, so the crux of the issue is now how to fit a proper elaborately trimmed interior into a 100-125k budget. That's where I come in, with the ability to do a lot of this work myself, having done it before. I don't know how to build roofs and piers and plaster walls, but I do know about floors, doors, windows, cabinets, and moldings, so can do a whole lot on a limited budget inside the house...maybe.

I have some experiments to do along those lines . Will be pics later.

[rncx (WavyGlass)]

The first hurdle, in such an undertaking, is that while certain materials are still available, other old materials are simply cost prohibitive. My 105 year old house in Little Rock being a prime example. It was built entirely out of old growth heart pine, but for a custom living room and dining room floor of tiger oak.

These simply aren't feasible construction materials in this day and age. The heart pine was cheap in 1908, that's why they used it, but now people get upwards of 10-15 dollars a square foot for heart pine floors. You could do everything in white oak and actually come out cheaper at 8 to 9 dollars a foot, which the old timers surely would have done had that been the choice then.

On the plus side yellow pine is still available and for a relatively inexpensive price, so structural material is fine, the catch is finding an inexpensive option for interior floors, doors, and trim.

That brings me to, an experiment in higher end modern finishes to see if they can make lesser wood 'ok'. We'll see...

(disregard the Minwax can, it's simply for a demonstration of how awful BORG finishing products are)

[Neighmond]

would you be $$ ahead to flake your present house and reassemble it in your new locale?

[Kansas.1911]

Interesting proposition. I personally love the prairie style. Why don't you buy a plan for a Sarah Susanka style house which gives you a small footprint but more money left over for millwork and built ins? It seems that 3,000K square feet for three people is big. Just dig a basement and put the guest rooms down there. Those tornados come through, you know.

I can tell you have put a lot of thought into this concept, and I am coming in at the last minute to disagree. But I think a kitchen can run $50,000, which leaves you almost nothing for the wood in the rest of the interior. Once it's built, it would be wonderful to live in it. Truly one of a kind.

[Kansas.1911]

Another thought:
Have you been to http://starcraftcustombuilders.com/articleslist.htm

You can read for hours about how present-day craftsmen are helping homeowners put the "old" in their new and old homes. They are in Lincoln, NE.

I think their use of built ins fits with the prairie style and economy of space.

[rncx (WavyGlass)]

would you be $$ ahead to flake your present house and reassemble it in your new locale?

Not really feasible, the current house is stucco on the outside, and the inside plaster lath is galvanized steel. These are big selling points, obviously, it's an abnormally rugged and low maintenance building, even for an old house.

You'd have to tear those down.

Even if it were feasible, it wouldn't really be. It's in a downtown neighborhood that is designated historic and has a no-demolition ordinance.

Interesting proposition. I personally love the prairie style. Why don't you buy a plan for a Sarah Susanka style house which gives you a small footprint but more money left over for millwork and built ins? It seems that 3,000K square feet for three people is big. Just dig a basement and put the guest rooms down there. Those tornados come through, you know.

I can tell you have put a lot of thought into this concept, and I am coming in at the last minute to disagree. But I think a kitchen can run $50,000, which leaves you almost nothing for the wood in the rest of the interior. Once it's built, it would be wonderful to live in it. Truly one of a kind.

Well, that's why the proposition has some legs. I can do inside trim work, including building the cabinets. I've built replacement doors/windows/cabinets for my current old house, so have the machines and the know-how. The cost in kitchen cabinets is two-fold...

1) Lumber quality and finishing. We both kinda prefer a lightly colored kitchen, so poplar will be fine on painted cabinets, and I can build them myself.

2) Time/skill of the cabinet maker. You can do a lot in a kitchen, all of which requires intricate fitting. Designing a kitchen around having multiple but otherwise independent and identical cabinet sections I think can lower the time required to put a kitchen together. That's another part of the plan. As I go I'll have some drawings detailing this idea.

I think all of this will involve gradually building things ahead of time and having them in storage ready to go when their time comes (in the case of cabinets, you could have frames, doors, and drawers pre-built). That's how I think I can make it work. It will probably entail having a shop built on site before the house. The same principle will probably apply to wooden windows. I can have them built but unfinished, and delivered to me that way. I can gradually glaze, paint, and then store them until they're needed. I could build the windows too but they're time consuming without multiple dedicated machines (particularly a tenoner) so I think buying them hung unfinished will be a good compromise. I also think going entirely with outward opening casements will greatly lower the cost too. Double hungs are complex and tedious to fit, not to mention having the expense of pulleys, chain, lifts, etc. Casements are simpler to build, simpler to hang, and have simpler hardware.

As for the tornadoes, the impact of them in my opinion is largely the fault of new construction methods. Houses that are sealed too tight (insulated brick walls on a slab) hold their air pressure too well. A tornado is a low pressure air mass, so when one passes over a house the pressure variation in the air causes the house to explode after some minor damage causes the air to suddenly escape. Same principle as a needle popping a balloon. That's why you'll often see a particularly bad tornado mow through a new residential area like a meat grinder ripping new houses apart, but on the highway a short distance away an old rickety house on piers will be left standing.

You can see the same effect whenever you ride in an unpressurized airplane. Take a 20oz Coke with you. Drink half before takeoff, then put the lid back on. Fly up to 8 thousand feet or so, you'll notice that the Coke bottle is fine. Then when you land, you'll see the air pressure variation start to chew the bottle up. It'll dent, compress, bend, all sorts of weird things all by itself. It looks like a ghost has grabbed it and is squashing it.

Air pressure is a powerful force, even on objects that are, on paper, stronger than air.

Blame pilot training for my amateur meteorology, lol. I went and learned to fly a few years ago and have a raggedy ole Piper Cherokee that I putter around in on the weekends.

Another thought:
Have you been to http://starcraftcustombuilders.com/articleslist.htm

You can read for hours about how present-day craftsmen are helping homeowners put the "old" in their new and old homes. They are in Lincoln, NE.

I think their use of built ins fits with the prairie style and economy of space.

Thanks for the link! Reading up on there now...

[rncx (WavyGlass)]

This should help with anyone finishing anything that wants to color the board(s) in question...

Take some cheapo Home Depot 2x4s. These were sanded with 60, 120, and 180 grits, as you would with a floor, not taking too much care to get them really smooth (there are still some ridges and dips).



From left to right...

1) Un-sealed Minwax oil stain.
2) Sealed Minwax oil stain.
3) General Finishes gel stain.

After all three dried to the touch a couple of quick coats of satin lacquer was sprayed on to give them an equivalent sheen. Pics taken under an incandescent light bulb with no flash, as you would have inside a house typically.

The sealer is Zinnser SealCoat (clear dewaxed shellac) thinned by half to make a 1 pound cut.



And here are the colors advertised on the cans in question....



So you can take multiple things from this.

Are the colors as advertised? Kinda.

The liquid oil stain is way off if you do what you need to do to make it even. The unsealed example, of course, looks awful as you would expect pine to look if stained without a sealer but the color isn't far off. The sealed example has less splotching, the shellac fixed that, but it also has less color. The stain can't penetrate so it didn't color nearly as much as advertised. This is (one of many) reasons why liquid oil stains have such a bad reputation. They must penetrate to color and unless they penetrate evenly the color will be off.

The gel stain "just works" even with the sealer. It doesn't need to penetrate as much, the color is left mostly on the surface. The color was advertised as "Georgian Cherry" which would suggest reddish, and evenly distributed red is what we got.

As you can see the gel stain is also neater. It goes on thick so it doesn't run nearly as much. It didn't run down the vertical surfaces.

As for the cost...

One half pint Minwax stain at a big box store.

One full pint General Finishes gel stain at another big box store

The above considering you get about twice as much mileage out of a regular oil stain than a gel stain. Cost, about 3x for the General Finishes stain. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for, there's no free lunch .

But is it possible to use lesser lumber with a better finish and cheat the system a bit? Sure. That's the idea I'm after.

[Texas_Ranger]

Have you considered gutting a cookie cutter and making it old? Getting salvaged materials would help in getting the real old-time feeling, unless the look you're after is "what an old house looked like when it was new".

OTOH, you can make new quite interesting with simple methods. One of my uncles has a mid-90s house (I think) but it has a real unique vibe to it. All the walls are solid brick and hand-plastered, which gives them an interesting texture. In the finished attic there's a lot of drywall, but he whitewashed everything, which makes the surface look old again.

Here's another source of inspiration, although Ryan and Leah were somewhat limited in their possibilities and had to compromise, using some modern materials:
http://raisetheranch.com/intro.html

[Iggychic (WavyGlass)]

You don't have to answer this here but the banker in me wants to ask if you plan on paying cash for this build. The reason being is that financing construction is a pain in the arse now a days and owner builders in any form (ie you doing the inside finishes) is challenging to get financed. You may need to do a great deal of the work in advance, not mentioning you did it instead "I've got xyz number of kitchen cabs in the garage that will go in the build" etc.

Banks don't want to take risks at all and an unfinished home is very hard for them to sell.

[rncx (WavyGlass)]

unless the look you're after is "what an old house looked like when it was new".

Yeah, that's what I'm after.

You don't have to answer this here but the banker in me wants to ask if you plan on paying cash for this build. The reason being is that financing construction is a pain in the arse now a days and owner builders in any form (ie you doing the inside finishes) is challenging to get financed. You may need to do a great deal of the work in advance, not mentioning you did it instead "I've got xyz number of kitchen cabs in the garage that will go in the build" etc.

Banks don't want to take risks at all and an unfinished home is very hard for them to sell.

The banker in you unfortunately is exactly right. We'll have to pay cash, then finance it after it's built.

That's not a huge deal breaker since I have more than half of the budget coming back to me when I sell my real old house in Little Rock, but would likely eliminate the idea for a lot of folks, sadly.

One more, picked up a Home Depot poplar board. I looked for a particularly bad one, had a lot of green and yellow and a nasty black streak.

Poorer quality image from my phone but the results are close. The poplar board on the right and the pine from the previous post on the left.