Do you live in a really old house?

[Cocogreen]

I live in Australia and our oldest houses are largely from the end of the nineteenth century. In another thread someone mentioned their house was from the 16th century ( I think?, can't actually remember the century).
I'm fascinated by this and wonder if any of you live in a property with a long history? Any drawbacks to living in such old buildings?

My house was built in 1852, but I don't think that fits your definition of 'really old', feels really old to me though

Ours is from 1550 and love it, its a thatched cottage, very pretty, grade II listed so you need permission to do some work. Ceiling height is only about 6 foot.

@Youcanchangeyournamebut

My house was built in 1852, but I don't think that fits your definition of 'really old', feels really old to me though

That's still old! How do you find the ceiling heights, room sizes etc, does it suit you or do you find things about it frustrating?

@Silkiescatz

Ours is from 1550 and love it, its a thatched cottage, very pretty, grade II listed so you need permission to do some work. Ceiling height is only about 6 foot.

Wow! Do you know it's history?

Well it's Georgian style so very high ceilings and huge floor to ceiling windows so it feels lovely and big and light. I adore it! It is (IMHO) a beautiful house and we feel so lucky to live here. It has lovely thick walls so we don't hear the neighbours (we're semi detached). We have spent a lot of money on it since moving in three years ago-new windows, partially replaced the roof, chimney re done as they were about to fall down. One of the worst things is finding layer upon layer of shoddy DIY from previous owners- I always say it's falling down, but it won't fall down I'm confident in that as it's been here long enough!

Bloody cold in winter and expensive to heat! Trying to fix that with insulation but only so much you can do!

Yes I do. My house was built in the 1450’s and is the oldest recorded house in the parish. It is an original ‘hall’ house. I do know quite a bit about it. I find it fascinating. 😊

Ours is approx 1750 though wasn't always a house. It's a difficult to heat, more expensive to insure but we love it.

1750 here. Love it. However realistically lots of cons!

Pros

• semi rural location and amazing views
• something quite lovely about then sense of permanence and history, 2 feet thick walls, exposed beams and huge fire places. So cosy in winter.
• quirky layout forms years of building onto it (only 2 rooms upstairs and 6 downstairs) makes it ideal for parties and hosting weekend guests
• lots of land & really lovely mature gardens

Cons

• ancient heating including coal for back boiler, plus oil tank central heating and then wood stoves - dirty and time consuming in winter. It can be a warm house but took us a few years to get used to the rhythms of it
• the spiders. I have never known anything like it compared to our old, newer houses. My mum is also in an old house and says same. Spiderwebs like you would not believe
• ditto mice when the nearby fields are waterlogged in wet years
• everything just being a bit more complicated with renovations eg not one straight line in this house, inside of walls made of what looks rocks from the fields
• maintaining ie painting house render, mowing and strumming along side and front, keeping all the mature trees in check, emptying septic etc etc

On balance though i love it. Every time I drive home I feel a sense of peace. And I love the feeling I am another chapter in the house’s history.

@Silkiescatz

Ours is from 1550 and love it, its a thatched cottage, very pretty, grade II listed so you need permission to do some work. Ceiling height is only about 6 foot.

Similar here! Dds BF is 6 foot 4 poor bloke!

Ours gets damp around the windows and the ventilation in the kitchen is poor

House dates from 1830 , we found old newspapers !
Nice thick walls , but very cold in winter ( stone floors )

Our last house was built about 200 years ago. It is a stone built farmhouse with really thick walls and window sills that were deep enough to sit on. The rooms were large with high ceilings.

It had loads of character and lovely views. However, it was little isolated, it cost a fortune to heat, and we had problems with damp and woodworm.

I did work in an old Hall farmhouse and that dated from 1500’s or earlier.
It was a money pit for the owners.
Interesting though, a visiting architect was able to see where rooms had been in the past as over the years it had been reconfigured.

1762 here and didn’t use to be a house. It’s dusty, damp, full of cobwebs, costs a fortune to insure and I love it.

1829 here. It was a cottage for someone who looked after orchards that surrounded it. No orchards now. It also had views to a castle and the road was named after it but when the houses opposite were built 70yrs later the name of the road was changed because they blocked the view of the castle.

The original history you can get with the listing on the English Heritage page then books will have photos of the property at various times which give an idea then when you buy you get some of the history and local people tell you more.

I'm loving hearing about these houses, thanks so much for sharing. I've been to the UK twice ( longing to come again one day) and the oldest hotel I stayed in was in Stratford ( 17th century). Loved it.

1890 - a young old house . There was clearly a building boom around this time as houses this age are very common in my area, but numbers drop off before that. Mind, I did read a report from the 1860s in the local history section of our library which made a rather sneering comment about the smell of sawdust in the air as new houses were going up in our town. Implication being that anyone of taste would have a nice older house!

I do love very old properties, but they’re a different ballgame. There aren’t many, so I’d be wary any time work needed doing it it could be irreparably damaged as tradespeople wouldn’t understand the materials. Is that realistic though? What problems or obstacles have the posters on here with very old houses faced?

And as PP’s said. Cost a fortune to heat, damp, lots of spiders and cluster flies . You would open a window and a ton of overwintering ladybirds would fall out. Light a fire and stir up all sorts of beasties would be stirred up.

Our insurance is expensive, around 1,000 pounds a year but that is the thatch. We had thatch rethatched last year and that was fascinating to learn about and see.

Properties are often rural or in villages.

@Celticdawn5 omg forgot to mention the dead old ladybirds

Before we moved to our current Victorian terraced, we lived in a Northumbrian long house built in 1703. It was grade 2 listed, built with local stone and had a pan tile roof. Originally, the farm house was attached to a byre and small hay loft but around 20 years before we bought it, it had been converted into a family home. The ceilings were very low and my husband had to duck to get through door ways. It had originally been built as a farm to provide food to monks in a local Priory. During WW1 the hayloft was used as a gun store and soldiers camped in make shift shelters in the garden. There's a war memorial standing on the village green next to the house and a service held every year.

Pros - lots of character; the conversion was exceptionally well done so we had no major work to do; homely and cosy; large byre windows in the lounge; a complete one off; amazing original range in the dining room

Cons - on a main road through the village which was used as a commuter road so 4000/5000 cars would pass a day and the windows would rattle ; the house had a peculiar layout and was very long but narrow. You had to walk through one room to get to another in some cases; the rooms was quite small; original land was sold off and built on; people assumed we has loads of money living there and we were given absolutely ridiculous quotes for everyday improvement jobs; running costs were high; guests occasionally badly banged their heads on the low door frames

Thanks, celtic- I reckon I could live with that (I’m sure everyone thinks that!), but don’t know where I’d start if something needed doing.

I’ve been to see a few old cottages around here (Cheshire area) and most of those were on main roads. In one case, the back wall of the house was the side of the road. If there was a more plentiful supply in other locations...

Mine is a detached former silkweaver’s cottage in the north west and was built in 1860. It’s lovely - high ceilings etc, but does come with its problems. It’s rendered so has to be painted fairly regularly, and the brick underneath is spongy and lets in water, so can’t do without the render. It also has a really small garden and previous owners have stripped out everything original. It has no cavity wall insulation so the side nearest the prevailing wind gets very cold in the winter. Not one wall, ceiling or floor is level.

But it’s on the edge of a small country park, and is the “posh” bit of where I live. It’s on a single track lane and is very quiet and beautiful.

I lived in a c.300 year old East Anglian clay lump cottage for a short period in my early 20s. Clay lump houses are unique to that particular area and basically very sophisticated mud huts.

It had a massive sitting room with low ceilings and an inglenook fireplace that took up almost an entire wall. The kitchen and (downstairs) bathroom were tiny, accessed by a tiny doorway and steps and obviously added on later. The walls were about 2 foot deep and the windows tiny. It was cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The upstairs was accessed by a tiny death-defying windy staircase hidden in a cupboard. Upstairs had originally been one large bedroom, but had been divided to form a tiny bedroom (used as a wardrobe in my case!) which you walked through to access the main bedroom.

The bad was not much natural light, awkward layout, stairs that could kill you, spiders the size of kittens, doorways that even me at 5’ 6” had to watch my head on, strange access rights outside and the ever-present risk of damp. None of this put me off and I was in the process of discussing buying it from the landlord when I met my now-husband and instead moved in with him.

We lived in his 18th century cottage for a while before buying a 1970s house together, so a bit of a change there!

@SweatyBetty20 - macclesfield? I really love the houses there! A colleague of mine rented a small weaver’s cottage in the town centre - just one or two rooms on each of the four levels. It was lovely and quirky. As for features, you can always start adding them back in. I mentioned on another thread yesterday that I bought a fireplace from a warehouse in Stockport. He had so many you could specify the dates you wanted and he’d show you a selection. They did doors too.

Oh, and I just realised Celtic was not actually answering me. I assumed that.