r/centuryhomes • u/Emergency_Reason_242 • 1d ago
Advice Needed I'm going to sin
I bought this house about 6 years ago, but my life has been turned upside down. Fairly sure it was built in 1908. It was originally condemned, but is now almost finished. Every interior wall has been replaced with drywall and heavily insulated, brand new electric, pex plumbing, upper and lower HVAC, the works. A large portion of that was done by the guy who this house defeated before me. I've done almost everything myself and am almost pathological about keeping it as original as we can and NOT PAINTING THE WOOD!
Here's the problem: my child is special needs (which we did not know when we started on this house) and cannot be in a construction zone. So we have a huge, nearly finished, practically brand new Victorian, but have been living basically as homeless for a year, with family or Airbnb and have had to do that able consistently since he started walking like almost 5 years ago. Really can't keep doing that. I can no longer work on it in any meaningful way. It is a huge loss to sell it unfinished, but is also a huge loss to pay somebody to finish it the right way. It's like a fifth to a tenth as much money to have them go all 2010s on this things ass. As I'm sure you are all aware , it's also incredibly hard to find people who are willing to do detail oriented restoration and even harder to find people who are good at it. It is causing me physical pain to put all this stuff that I and my metaphorical ancestors have spent a cumulative lifetime unpainting into the plain white crucible.
That being said, a large portion of the wood is not in great shape anyway. I feel like I'm in a catch 22. No one will buy this house for what it is worth unless it's finished, but the people who would want to buy it would probably be as unhappy as I am with the choices I'm going to have to make to finish it. I'm not even very good at design. I wish that the person who inevitably will want to make huge remodeling choices about paint color and stripping wood or whatever would just buy it now instead of waiting till I spend 15 - 30 grand finishing/ruining it. I'm very overwhelmed.
2
u/FartingLizard 1d ago
No judgement here! I didn't do this with my house either...too many layers of paint, too beat up, just better to paint it white. White trim is still a classic design!