What do you like and dislike about your period property? Any regrets?

[luckycat888]

Considering a period (Victorian) property

I live in an Edwardian flat which has been renovated to have an upper floor where the bedrooms & bathroom are. Down stairs has the original high ceiling rooms with cornicing in sitting room and original fireplace. All the other rooms on this floor have been reconfigured and new walls bern put up to divide rooms and create a larger hallway with staircase to upper floor. You can feel a real difference in temperature between front of house ( south facing ) & back of house ( north facing ). Room to back of house is pron to small amounts of mildew on back wall of bathroom. I do ventilate bathroom well and this does help minimise the problem.
Overall heating bills are very reasonable but house does get very warm in the summer especially sitting room and south facing bedroom. I love the space I have and size of rooms.

Love: high ceilings, original coving, fireplaces, other features, cool in the summer, sash windows, uniqueness, its history

Don’t love: trying to heat it in winter, expensive repairs, lack of parking

It’s mine though and I adore it.

Modern 5 bed and I deeply regret buying it.
I like the fitted wardrobes and the en-suites but that's it.
We're moving to a 400 year old cottage next. It's the first modern house I've bought and the last.
Large modern houses are really hard to sell on. I didn't know that was a thing. Ditto more than two floors.
We rented one period house and initially wanted to buy it until our first winter. I went to bed in a hat!

I've lived in 3 different Victorian terraced houses (since 1996) and I've come to loathe the narrow layout. 3 rooms in a row, long thin garden, useless hallway.

Do you think the 400yo cottage will be warmer?

Are period homes easier to sell on then? Didn’t know there was such a demand for them

Oh wow, great thread - reading with interest. We are on the final stages of a massive renovation of a derelict victorian house. We basically had to get it all back to a stone shell and start again. LOVE the bay windows, the character and charm you can't get from a new build (I loved our former newbuild - it was huge and so easy) but you just cannot get the character of the older...we have built a very large extention which is open plan and very modern and managed to get all the 3 bedrooms to have an en-suite (albeit, 2 have made both original bedrooms quite small as a result - but we are trying to future proof. NEVER moving again😂.

Hoping the new walls, insulation and windows sort out the cold everyone talks about, but already the coolness of a hot summer day was lovely and I am very much looking forward to having stoves/fires.

Love the size of rooms, the height of ceilings, the 2 coal fires, the fact that all the houses in the street are completely different. The size of garden, the mature trees.
Hate how difficult it is to heat, no insulation in walls as thick stone or in attic as bedrooms have been built there, the maintenance of said mature trees. The fact not one wall is straight, the drafts, the wind blowing down the chimneys when they’re is any storms, the maintenance is never ending.
Given my choice again I would never buy a period property again

Period houses are definitely easier to sell and I've owned 15!
I have antique furniture and it looks horrible in my current house. It's too dark.
However our chosen cottage will be fine
The cottage should be warmer as it's got fires and underfloor heating. Our house is three storey and it's not expensive to heat but it needs loads of cleaning as it's near farmland and it gets dusty from the crops. The cottage we're moving to is smaller. I ant wait

Georgian semi detached.

Love: Kerb appeal - lovely brick, windows and tile path, high ceilings, crown moulding, picture rails, ceiling roses, fireplaces, original shutters, little window above the front door and a beautiful curved bannister.Lots of light and it’s cool in summer.

Don’t Love: single glazing, no window sills as per pp is annoying sometimes, tiny bathroom, kitchen and living room get really cold, upstairs not such a problem, have a lot of electric blankets. Small kitchen and small garden so no room for an extension. We have a reasonable amount of space (big dining room and basement) but it isn’t quite jigged right for modern living.

Georgian farmhouse here and I love it. The high ceilings, thick walls, wonky floors, beautifully proportioned sash windows, original staircases, fireplaces, panelled doors, deep skirting boards, elaborate crown moulding, picture rails and all those wonderful period features that give a house its character. But the high ceilings mean it costs approximately the GDP of a small country to heat, the thick walls have absolutely no intention of retaining any of that heat, and the cobwebs are so extensive I’m considering charging the spiders rent.

There’s always something that needs repairing, and what starts as a simple ten-minute job turns into an archaeological excavation of 250 years of other people’s questionable DIY decisions. Every time you lift a floorboard or remove a bit of plaster, you uncover another bodge lovingly passed down through generations of men who clearly thought, “That’ll do.” Nothing is straight, nothing is standard, nothing is ever simple, and absolutely nothing costs what you think it will. But would I swap it for a warm, draught-free, low-maintenance modern house? Not a chance. Although I might reconsider this when the next heating bill arrives.

I've only ever lived in period properties. I can't imagine living in lower ceilinged, boxier places.

Currently I'm in a tall thin Victorian terrace. Pros are high ceilings, period features, proportions. Cons, the cracks, the old plaster falling off walls, rattling, draughty sash windows, Proximity of neighbours. Lack of parking (probably - I don't have a car, so it doesn't bother me).

Large Cotswold stone house. We can never be bored because there is always something to do.
My husband always has a project, but we love this house. We have modernised quite a lot inside, making a big dining/ kitchen, with bifolds to get the view of the rolling hills. I was reluctant, but I could sit and look at the view for hours.
We have insulated everything we can, renovated our sash windows, added underfloor heating etc, but it will never be as warm as a brand new house. Sometimes I envy people with plastic windows as we spend days and days every year working on ours. Now we need to repoint quite a lot of the stone - it’s been around since 1860 and always needs working on. The soffits took a week to paint this year, using a cherry picker.
One day it will be too much and we will move on, but it will break my heart.

I absolutely adore my 4 bed detached 1980s house on the edge of an AONB in a pretty village on a tidal estuary in Cornwall. It is the perfect house to live in, light and sunny, because I have spent 30 years and roughly £150k to make it perfect. But now we plan to relocate because as we age, we just want to be closer to our family and friends.

Great at first but then everything goes wrong

That's interesting. I've noticed town houses are often much cheaper than other types of house. I love them, I really want to move to a modern town house, as long as the rooms are not too narrow. They are so well laid out - all the bedrooms are doubles; they have two bathrooms, long smooth walls.

Exactly,
There are large period properties and large new builds. There are small period properties and small new builds.

I love the beautiful high ceilings and big windows. It never ever gets too hot in summer.

Contrastingly it’s the coldest place in England in winter.

Not quite as old, our house is 1920s.

Love the character and period features.
Hate - it’s so cold! Even with double glazing & central heating. Lack of cavity walls and suspended floors means there’s a limit to how warm you can make them.

Also, consider how much disposable cash you will have going forward for heating bills and the general upkeep. It’s a lot. You need to factor this in to your budgeting.

I love how soundproof it is. I can’t hear anything from neighbouring rooms. In my parents’ 1980s house you can hear a pin drop at the other end of the house.

It’s warm in winter and cool in summer.

Sash windows fill my heart with joy. And I love putting my Christmas tree in the bay window.

Open fire, picture rails, exposed brickwork , sash windows, original oak floors… all the lovely features that come with an old property.

1840s workers cottage - 2 knocked into one. Always needing repairs of some sort and as pp has mentioned, we often uncover botched jobs done in the past. Repairs can be expensive. Lack of storage. It’s very cold 8 months of the year but lovely and cool in the summer. The worst thing is the damp. Despite several attempts to fix it, there are still a few stubborn areas where it reappears. The pluses are many - quiet and private, lots of character, lovely fireplaces, large garden, huge out building. I love it - despite its flaws.

My house isn't narrow. It's a normal layout with an extra top floor en-suite. Our son had that room for study and then privacy. Our development only had two of these three storey houses built out of 300 houses. It's been great but it's not as valuable as conventional 5 beds. I've no idea why. We had to sell it with a massive discount.
We have some whoppers on the estate at £750k and they sell immediately.
It's cheap to heat with zoned heating etc.
I just don't have the modern furniture that people expect on the photos apparently.

Im not sure mine counts as period. But its 1920s and it does have character like picture rails and fireplaces.

Its a cold house which i guess is good in summer but it is hard to insulate. We dud the roof, but the walls are cavity but not proper cavity and its lime mortor so when we got insulation companies out they said they wouldnt do it. People have done it and got damp. Others did insulating render which was better but expensive.

Ditto here.
Add in rising damp and woodworm. It was a lovely house but a money pit.

We no longer live in that house and have fewer worries about the one we live in now (30 years old instead of 200 years old).