Is it Worth It?

We stopped by to check on things the other day, and arrived as our neighbour Patrick stood contemplating our house, his pair of pugs snuffling in the grass.

“Is it worth it?” he asked.

Was it worth keeping the existing house? His question hit squarely on the low-level malaise I had lately been nursing about the amount of our house that was left and would be left when all was said and done. Much less than I had expected or had wanted to believe.

All the Little Things

If we could ignore all the steps that led to this moment, the answer might be no, it’s not worth it. Recall, though, that our original plan was a small lot subdivision. In this scenario, we wouldn’t have even touched our existing house until the new one was built and sold. We would then have had numerous options for improving our house incrementally. Melding the two together appeased some of our neighbours and led to a more interesting design, but it also required a more complex and immediate transformation to the existing house.

Our structural engineer came on board late in the process and said we can’t keep the existing roof. We don’t know a lot about structural engineering, but now that the roof’s underside is fully exposed, we see surprisingly little wood up there. So we will now be building a new roof to match the shape of the old roof.

The framing of several interior walls – the location of which dictated our new layout – was also removed during the strip out process. After peeling off the drywall and the wallpaper and the planking, there just wasn’t much left.

$$$

Similarly, if we were to consider only the cost of keeping an old house like this and carefully rebuilding around it, the answer to Patrick’s question would most certainly be no. Two of the three builders who bid on our project more or less bluntly told us that it would be easier (read: cheaper) to build new. The careful deconstruction to save parts of the building, or even to thoroughly salvage a house being demolished, takes time (read: money). Granted, Matt has done a sizable chunk of the manual labour, and even with a full demo and new build, we would still pay hazmat and some demolition costs.

Our next step is to lift and shift the shell of our former house, which is now delaying the project as we wait on the sub-contractor who will do this work. Again, more time and more money we would not be putting out if we just built from scratch.

And Still…

Call it sentimentality if you like, but our house has become more than an “it” now that we’ve lived in it for a few years and have painstakingly peeled away the layers to reveal its bones. It (she?) is more like a person with a history etched by many hands over the years.

This house has stood in this place for over a hundred years. The sun has passed over it tens of thousands of times. Generations of people have walked their dogs past its front yard. Early owners added on the kitchen and bathroom, extended the roof, and shingled over the original lapped siding. Someone added bird wallpaper to the ceiling. Someone else painted over it.

Therefore…

In answer to Patrick’s question, I say no…and yes. We remind ourselves that our decisions are not informed purely by cost, as painful as that can be to our bottom line. It feels right to us to keep everything we can. I only wish we could have kept more of it. And I think what it comes down to is that, by the time you strip all the guts out, there actually isn’t much to a house.

If we’d found rot, the situation would have been even worse. But what is there is in great shape and we can be thankful for that. We can leave much of the exterior sheathing, walls and floor in place.

And so, here we are, our house waiting to be lifted, shifted, and placed back down on her new super-insulated, seismically resistant foundation.

We’ll keep and reuse many of the materials that we did remove, like:

• good wood planking that Matt can use to build us a kitchen worth of cabinets and probably a kitchen table to boot
• brick for outdoor landscaping
• fir flooring that we can relay in the downstairs suite

We found new homes for many other things:

• Our neighbour, Peter, spent a painstaking couple of weekends carefully prying off enough of our cedar shingle siding to patch the hole left when he removes his own chimney.
• Another neighbour, Mike, left a note requesting the basement garage door when it’s ready for removal.
• Someone we found through usedvictoria took the old oil furnace to replace his broken down one.
• Another friend took our hot water tank for his reno project.
• Any scrap wood put to the curb was scooped up almost instantly. Even the old built-in dishwasher was eventually picked up.
• Interactive donated all the wiring and copper plumbing to Power to Be, to fund programs bringing people with barriers into nature.
• We’ll donate the older but still functional appliances.

These parts and pieces of our original house will live on, their histories morphing as they are re-used by us or usefully absorbed or into other people’s homes. That is worth something too, right?