Victorian houses

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Hi, I'm thinking about purchasing a victorian house, but I've heard so much about the liklihood of damp and high ongoing maintenance costs. Anyone had experience of owning and living in one?

I recently purchased and moved into a 1893 Victorian two up two down miners terrace. It's kept the old floor plan with separate front and back rooms and a kitchen extension at the back so rooms are quite small.

So far, there's water ingress in one bedroom that we can't find the source of, more water ingress in the front room that might be the same water from the bedroom above but we don't know for sure but it's put a huge spanner in the works because we can't find tradesmen to come and look so we're kind of stuck in limbo. There's yet more water ingress in the 1970's extension but we're 80% sure it's from a loose external light on the other side of the wall that I'm praying an electrician will be around today to safely disconnect so we can seal the wall.

Honestly there would be mold / damp as I can see signs where the previous owner has struggled with it but I ventilate the house religiously and so far I've not seen anything new. Humidity hovers around 60%, spikes as high as 75% in the bedroom of a morning when we wake up and same in the bathroom after a shower. We open the bedroom window every morning no matter the weather or temperature and it drops back down before we leave for work. When we shower, we squeegee down shower cubicle and open the window until all signs of condensation are gone. I also have a dehumidifier that I sometimes use, a heat pump condensing tumble dryer so no clothes drying on radiators etc.

Right now it's 6 degrees outside and 14 degrees in the back room where I'm sitting with no heating on. It's cold but not freezing, the best thing we've purchased is an electric blanket for each of us and it's more than enough to stay cozy. Obviously every house is different but we did a basic test before we moved in and set the thermostat to 16 degrees and left the heating on constantly for a week (Late December). Heating only was coming in at £4 a day in gas but we increased the temperature to 18 degrees for one day and it cost £6!

At the moment we have a love, hate relationship with the house, it's SOLID, the walls are thick, the roof is fine, the original stairs are still in place and the carpenter we had in to give us a quote of replacing them was shocked that something so sturdy should be ripped out and was gleefully pointing out the handy work done all those years ago. I have no doubt that the house will still be here in another 100 years. However, a house this old is hiding decades of botched DIY projects and patch repairs. Something can look fine on the surface but be hiding Lord knows what underneath. My house was built as a functional place to live, it doesn't have fancy period features so work to be done doesn't have to be anything grand. Also, as things like central heating and even electricity have been added, wires and pipes run along walls and can pop out in strange places which doesn't look very good but I have no intention of digging up floors and such to hide them.

At the moment our main concern is the water ingress. I've spoken to several neighbors and every single one has issues with water in one form or another.

I'd still buy this house again but I'd have probably paid a few thousand less had I known the extent of the issues. As it was our level three survey didn't find any issues and to be honest, unless you were pulling up carpet and floor boards you wouldn't have known.

All our homes for the past 40+ years were built in the 1890s. I cannot say the maintenance costs seem higher than those of our families who live in newer houses and as for damp, the only time that has been a problem was when we had a damaged gutter (and which was easily fixed).

Frankly, I would have a house built post-1900 as a gift.

For anyone trying to get on top of condensation, get a karcher window vac (Screwfix do their own version for about £30).

So much more effective after showering than a squeegee. You can vac tiles,shower screen, mirrors, windows, I've even been known to vac the bath panel and floor tiles. After showering, open the window, vac surfaces, leave fan running and close door. 10 mins later it is all dry.

Any sign of condensation on windows in the morning is vacuumed away, bedrooms always aired every morning without fail.

Only needs charging around once a month.

I have several btl Victorian terraced houses. There is only damp in houses where tenants do not heat and ventilate adequately and do not use the extractor fans in kitchen and bathroom or tumble dryer I provide instead draping wet washing around their freezing house. When previous tenants lived there no damp occured. When tenants like this move out we eliminate damp/mould and it doesn't come back with new tenants in so shows it is caused by lifestyle not structural issues. After saying this heating costs are probably higher as ECP D.

Ours is 1905, previous was 1890. Both have had incidents of damp, but nothing major and both related to water ingress which can happen in any age property. Last one was mid terrace so a dream to heat as you didn’t lose much. This one can be a bit cold on the top floor (it’s three stories) but nothing major and our bills are not at all expensive. Good windows and insulation in the bays helps.

I don't think new builds last as long as Victorian houses, but who needs to buy a house that will last 300 years anyway ? Most people are dead within 60 years of buying a place.

They aren't generally built on good foundations and some of them can have earth under the floorboards rather than being built on concrete bases. Correcting damp problems can be horribly difficult and expensive. They also perform poorly thermally, do not have great (or at least optimised) soundproofing, are often in areas where it is difficult to park cars, have poor drainage/sewers in collapsed conditions and ancient electric wiring. Most have them have patched roofs of some sort unless the roof has been replaced.

"I don't think new builds last as long as Victorian houses, but who needs to buy a house that will last 300 years anyway ? Most people are dead within 60 years of buying a place."

Some new builds will last, you can say the same of houses built in any era, the Victorian (and earlier) houses that are still standing are the better ones, the crap ones were demolished or fell down years ago. I don't think anybody is shedding a tear for the post war slums, or going dewy eyed about back-to-backs sharing a privvy.

Had a Victorian terrace - cold and damp especially kitchen and bathroom as it was single skin extension.

and the dust was amazing - I think it was quietly disintegrating

and the street was way to narrow with very little parking and half of that on the pavement

but like any generation of homes / there will be good and bad

Lived in both victorian and edwardian houses and loved them all. Although it can take a while for them to heat up the very thick walls hold the heat for a while unlike modern houses.

these houses are perfect for having an original AGA in the kitchen as the heat from that will permeat the whole house.

Again you are making generalisations

clearly some modern homes don’t hold heat well but others are a lot less expensive to heat and keep warm - our friends in older homes are always complaining about the cold or expense of heating

although one vacillates between saying how expensive it is or how wonderful the thick walls are depending if it’s on the market or not

I think the fact you say "original aga" means that you are talking about a totally different Victorian house to the ones that exist in most towns. A nearby town has many Victorian terraces, built cheaply to house railway and factory workers, no agas here and a tin bath in front of the fire when they were built. Small rooms and low ceilings, thin walls, yes you can here if someone next door farts.

Victorian is often far better quality than newer builds (greedy developers hire the cheapest labour and use cheapest supplies cutting every corner they can to pump them out as cheap and shoddily as possible to maximize profits).

All houses have issues, you aren't buying new flawless product that will stay utterly perfect indefinitely and somehow never need maintenance or updating to modern standards.

@housethatbuiltme Modern houses have foundations designed for the soil around them. Building regs apply. Victorian houses - no such thing. That’s why there are far more issues with subsidence and heave with Victorian (or older) houses. They often have insufficient foundations.

Plus newer houses can often have better insulation as they have two skins. Victorian houses are single brick - no cavity. Many modern houses have double glazing too. Obviously they are not all perfect but are less likely to have bowing walls and be compromised structurally by alterations in the last 150 years. Covering up air bricks and damp proof courses is standard problem with Victorian homes and broken drains are not unusual. Build quality was not better as evidenced by many slums that existed. We have great technology now to keep homes warm, aired and cheaper to run.

I have a tiny, stone built 1880s cottage. Double glazed windows, new boiler, thick walls and, because it's a cottage the ceilings aren't massively high. It's
cosy, characterful and has no damp issues at all. Not expensive to heat.

My previous house was 1730s, so my cottage feels modern to me 😀

No damp (if anything a little drafty!). No walls or floors or ceiling were straight or parallel to one another! All our maintenence problems were caused by the cowboy builder in the previous 10 years, not the original victorian building.

To clarify what i said above - it does depend on how well the terraced house is built. Very small terraced houses probably werent built that well but there are lots of larger terraced and semi-detached houses that were built to a much higher standard. Also of course it depends how the house has been looked after for all those years.

i didnt mean an original AGA being in the house from years ago but that an AGA is a good thing to thing to have in an old house - not a ‘new AGA’ but one that is on all the time and will keep the kitchen warm in winter.

The lifetime of a house is about 50-year before a full refurb is needed (bricks, joists , foundations and roof all need redoing by then). Budget 200k if the last full refurb is over this time.

People saying Victorian terraces where just cheap for workers, you are aware the builders and commissioners built their own and their families houses into them plus the 'higher ups' in the business like pit managers etc... also got their first choice of house. It was just cheap slums for the commoners, it was all round housing.

It was common for the builder of the street to have one house of his own so they weren't bodging them. It was usually the end house but not always however thats often why the end one is usually bigger or has slightly higher grade trim or more fireplaces or bigger land.

Sometime the boss himself might even live on your street, it really wasn't uncommon. It not Scrooge Mcduck living in a mansion full of gold coins while slaves slept in shacks, they paid for housing to be built including themselves in that need for housing.

I don't know where you are in the world or what type of house you're talking about but this is certainly not the case for houses in the UK. Nobody is replacing the foundations, bricks and joists of the millions of houses built over 50 years ago in the UK. That accounts for over half of all houses!

The stone, bricks, joists and foundations of my house have been there for nearly 150 years.....my previous house for nearly 300 years.

I have a Georgian house with thick stone walls and I LOVE IT. We are renovating it in terms of decor but it had been meticulously maintained and we’ve had no issues on that front, home report was all 1s. Lovely high ceilings , big windows , ceiling roses, beautiful staircase. I wouldn’t have a new build… my brothers new build cost a lot more than our house (10 years ago) and it’s already falling to bits.

Used to own an 1875 Victorian two bed terrace in Brighton over 3 floors. There was damp bit we had damp course put it. It had been built with something called bangaroush. Still miss it 20 years later.

Hence all the decrepit damp Victorian houses lining our streets. This is no way to live in a developed country.

I used to live in a Victorian house and now I live in a Tudor one. I can honestly say that the Tudor house is no more expensive to maintain than the Victorian one was and weirdly it’s also warmer - which makes no sense scientifically, but is definitely true. I suppose a modern house would work out cheaper to run but I can’t imagine living somewhere that wasn’t full of character.

Yes this is what it’s like in my village, which was a cotton mill village. I live in one of the terraced cottages, which are a run of four houses, and the ones on the ends are about 1.5 times the size of mine (a mid terrace), and theirs have bay windows, mine doesn’t. Th foremen from the mill would get the end cottages.

The cottages are lovely and well built. High ceilings and spacious rooms. we all have small gardens, though, as it was just communal land and outdoor privies. There was a land grab at some point and everyone got a slice of garden.

@Vixenlover It is probably because the walls are thicker. Victorian houses with single skin walls tend to provide poor insulation,