The New Place - The Downsides of a 140-Year-Old House

Before I get to the numerous gushing posts about how wonderful our new house is, you need to know about the challenges we've found so far in this place. It was built in 1875. Peterborough was only incorporated as a town in 1850, so it's one of the earlier houses in our beautiful little city. For a house that is almost 140 years old, it's pretty well kept and updated, but there are still little quirks attendant to this kind of building. This is a listing of my least favourite of these quirks.

The porch floor is kind of a mess. Cracked and pitted and a little bit ugly - especially since the porch itself is beautiful and a huge selling feature for us! However, our landlady is having this patched and recoated sometime this spring. Can't wait!

Ugly faux mantel with ugly brackets and even uglier bookshelves in it. But this is one frown I have plans for . . . Stay tuned.

Frosting on the side window - I wouldn't mind the frosting for privacy. But why, oh why did they have to frost leaves into it?! It's a mess. I'm wondering how much work it would be to scrape this down and refrost it.

The terrifyingly narrow stairs down to the dungeon. 

The corner on the stairs up to the second floor which means we can't take our boxsprings onto the second floor. They're in storage for now and the mattresses are on the floor. There are also plans in the works here, but Tim is still puzzling his way through this one.

ALL of the walls are stucco. Besides not loving the stucco itself, it's in pretty bad shape. It's really old, so it crumbles easily. There are nail and screw holes EVERYWHERE. I've also been told it's full of asbestos, not that I plan on sniffing it any time soon. We do need to figure out some way of patching some of the spots. I'm hoping my brother-in-law, who is a commercial painter, will have some ideas. 

No ceiling fixtures! The entire house has one ceiling fixture in the kitchen. For the rest . . . basically nothing. There are some sconces and weird outdoor carriage fixtures on some of the walls, but I hate not having ceiling fixtures. Lamps are on the investment list for this place.

The upstairs bathroom toilet that hardly flushes. We've already reported this to the landlady, though, and she has said she'll have her plumber come in. I hope he can do something, because it's annoying not having a workable washroom on the upper floor. 

And last, but nowhere in the least, is the weirdly placed shower. Tucked up under the eaves on the second floor, this shower is SHORT. I just fit under the centre of the roof, but Tim does not. Even I have a morning squats workout to wash my hair. Saturday morning I heard a huge thud from the washroom and then hysterical laughter - Tim had smoked his head off the ceiling. I'm sure it will not be the last time. A couple of the doorways are just my height as well, including the one into the master bedroom. To put this into perspective, I'm about 5'6" - I guess people are just taller these days!

I didn't take any pictures of it, but while the wiring has been updated in the house (no knob and tube), the main room only has two-prong outlets. Tim is choosing to see this as a benefit because we can only plug in low power load items, but it's kind of a pain. Luckily our TV is so fancy and low power load that it doesn't need a ground. We've already had an electrician friend of ours take a look at this for us, though.