The Price of an Old House

Years ago, one of the major credit card companies ran a wildly successful and nearly decade-long ad campaign that followed some form of this one, the first of many ads that ran over the years.

A father and his young son are out together enjoying a baseball game; the pitch went something like this:

Two tickets: $46.

Two hot dogs, two popcorns, two sodas: $27, One autographed baseball: $50.

Real conversation with 11-year-old son: Priceless.

Although the ads ostensibly pitched the value of buying things on credit, the ad resonated so deeply with so many of us because it also articulated and acknowledged that many of the best things in life are not able to be monetarily quantified. What truly is the value of spending time with one’s children, knowing how quickly childhood slips away? These times can never be retrieved once gone. No photo nor video can capture the essence of the moment – the feeling of being some place at some time.

I think I have a fascination with old houses partly because they do capture a brief snapshot of the way we were for a brief span of time; the way those houses were built tells us a story about what society valued. Take closets, for example. Most closets built back then were no wider than the closet door. Folks only had a few garments. Most homes had one bathroom, and a tiny one at that.

Compare that to today’s homes in which a walk-in closet in a new build may be bigger than a bedroom in an old house. Bathroom sizes have exploded over the decades; the expectation now is that a bathroom MUST have double vanities or it simply isn’t good enough, and it must have a huge soaking tub, a shower that fits four and heated floors. Many people pass over old homes in favor of new builds, which to my eye are cheap and flimsy boxes, no matter how large they are and I just don’t know why someone would pick a new house over an old one when given the choice but once again, even this tells a story; it speaks to our collective belief that new=better.

The story of our ever- expanding egos, our ever- expanding materialism, our ever- expanding dissatisfaction with what we have is written right there in the story of the houses that we build. Further, the speed at which we build new homes today, and the lack of artistic detail that goes into their construction speak to our impatience as a culture. The way that these homes are often only adorned on the front façade, leaving all other sides of the home a blank and faceless box, and the interior a meek beige and white blandness speaks to our focus on outward appearance as the be-all to end all, a cultural shift from substance to appearance, and that is a shame.

The fact that many old homes are still around to even be lived in by someone speaks to the quality of the craftsmanship of the builders at that time. Do you think that a vinyl clad, drywalled home with vinyl windows built in 2018 will be around in 200 years in its original form? Will it even survive 100 years? Fifty?

There are so many houses that were built generations before us, and those builders, their families and everyone they knew and loved have long since passed away, made inaccessible by time. I often wonder what those old builders thought as they built these homes. Did they understand how the home they built – something they probably did as a wage-earning job – would go on to outlive, outlast them? That they, in essence, had a way to reach forward into a future that they’d never see and quite possibly would never understand?

I have a business that focuses on “flipping” vintage homes in the city I have come to love, Harrisburg PA (the sometimes derided, sometimes lauded state capital). I decided to flip homes here because so many homes – in fact, entire blocks of them – have fallen into disrepair and have been neglected for decades. Most of the homes in the city core were built prior to World War II, and that craftsmanship, the detailed and ornate trim-work so common on these house exteriors are rapidly becoming a lost art. So these homes, which are a dime a dozen in these parts (almost literally; today I just saw a listing for a semi-detached home in Uptown that someone is selling for $9,900) may not survive. And we will never be able to replace what once was.

So “flipping” houses (what I really do is re-create houses) is perhaps my way of reaching backward in time and linking hands, if only for a few months, with those original builders. I hope they are proud that the product of their minds and hands are still around, and that many of us still care about what they did, whether they did it for the love of building, or whether they did it to just earn a living.

I am currently working on a semi-detached home in the Riverside neighborhood of Uptown Harrisburg that was built in 1925, the year that Calvin Coolidge became President of the US. I’ll drop tens of thousands of dollars into repairing the home and will make a very slim profit if I’m lucky. But it seems to be something I am compelled to do.

The cost of the new kitchen will be about $6,000. The cost of each piece of subway tile $2.40

The cost – to me – to preserve this home for a generation of people who are yet to be born and who I will never know?

Priceless.