What we find behind the walls of a century home
We opened a wall in a Guelph kitchen and found newspaper from the 1920s. That is a good day. Here is what the other days look like.
Century homes in Guelph, Old Oakville, Bronte and downtown Orangeville are worth renovating precisely because they were built with materials and proportions nobody uses now. They are also full of a hundred years of other people's decisions.
None of what follows is a reason to avoid an old house. It is a reason to plan and budget as though the walls contain surprises, because they do.
Knob and tube wiring
Original knob and tube shows up as ceramic knobs holding single conductors, often spliced into over the decades by people with varying levels of care. It has no ground, the insulation is brittle with age, and many insurers will not write a policy on a house that still has it in active use.
Once a wall is open, replacing the wiring in that wall is comparatively straightforward and it is by far the cheapest time to do it. Closing a wall back up over knob and tube you have just seen is not something we are willing to do.
Newspaper, sawdust, and no insulation at all
On a Guelph kitchen we took back to the studs, the wall cavities were stuffed with newspaper from the 1920s. It was a genuinely lovely thing to find, and we read a fair bit of it before it went in the bin.
It was also, of course, doing almost nothing. Old houses were built to breathe rather than to seal, and the exterior walls are often empty, packed with sawdust, or filled with something long since settled to the bottom of the cavity. Insulating properly while the wall is open is one of the few renovation decisions that pays you back every month.
Floors that are not level and joists that are not enough
A hundred-year-old floor has settled, and it has usually settled unevenly. Sometimes that is charm. When you are installing cabinetry, tile, or a large-format floor, it is a problem that has to be corrected before the finish goes down, because those materials will not forgive it.
Joists in older homes are also frequently undersized by current standards, or have been notched and drilled by previous trades in ways that quietly removed a lot of their strength. Sistering joists or adding support is common and it is not dramatic, as long as it is found before the new floor is on top of it.
Three eras of plumbing in one house
It is normal to open a century home and find galvanised steel from the original build, copper from a seventies update, and a length of plastic from something done in the nineties, all connected to each other. Galvanised in particular corrodes from the inside and chokes off flow long before it leaks.
The pattern with old houses is not that things are broken. It is that everything has been added to, by different people, with different standards, for a hundred years.
How to budget for a house that has secrets
We do two things to keep this from becoming a series of unpleasant conversations. First, we investigate before quoting where we can: opening a small section, looking in the basement at what runs where, checking the panel.
Second, we tell you plainly which parts of the quote are firm and which depend on what we find. A quote on a century home that pretends to know exactly what is behind the plaster is not being straight with you.
Set aside a contingency for an old house. Not because the work will go badly, but because the house was built in 1910 and has been lived in ever since.
Common questions
Does knob and tube wiring have to be removed?
There is no blanket legal requirement to remove it everywhere, but most insurers will require it to be out of service, and any wall we open gets rewired. In practice, a serious renovation on a century home means replacing it.
How much contingency should I budget for a century home renovation?
Homeowners commonly set aside more for an old house than a new one, and we would rather over-prepare you than surprise you. We tell you which parts of our quote are firm and which are conditional on what we uncover.
Can you renovate a century home kitchen without gutting it?
Sometimes, if the wiring and plumbing are already updated and the floor is sound. If they are not, a partial renovation often means covering up problems you will pay to reach again later.
Do heritage rules affect what I can do?
They can, particularly in designated areas like Old Oakville and Bronte, and they usually govern exterior changes rather than interiors. We check the designation before quoting anything that touches the outside of the house.
Where we do it
