Reply to New vs old homes, what problems with you old vs brand new, they don't build them like they used to?

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[quote=Anonymous]First home was a 37-year old home that was in fairly good condition.  However, didn't like the small rooms, small closets, small bathrooms, narrow staircase (difficult to get some furniture upstairs).  The flow of the home was very closed off and when entertaining groups, you had 5-8 people in this room, 5-8 in that room, 10-12 in that room.  Much harder for mingling.  In our group of friends from 2-3 different activities, the groups tended to segregate into different rooms and there was less mingling.  There were more "old home issues" which included plumbing issues behind the walls, limited electrical (and older, smaller circuit panel, so hard to upgrade electrical without a big cost).  And outdoor maintenance issues.  For example, we had wonderful old-growth trees, that dropped tons and tons of branches and caused damage to the roof.  We ended up having to cut down one tree (and it was very expensive--only thing that saved us was that the next door neighbor who also had branches on his roof agreed to split the cost) to save the roof from annual damage.  Older windows that were leaky ended up needing repair.  While some of these are specific to our house, there are a whole class of general issues that come with age and 80+% of the older homes have 2 or more of these (plumbing, electrical, windows, appliances, foundation, exterior walls, roof, etc).

Second home we built in 2006, had it inspected several times during the construction and is a good solid build.  After 5 years, we're far happier with "new construction" issues than with old.  We love the open floor plan, larger rooms, larger closets, wider staircase.  New homes issues include "nail pops" and settlement cracks.  In older homes, the settlement cracks are there, and more stable and when patched, stay patches.  In newer homes, the settlement cracks appear and grow as the house settles/shifts. If you patch, then in another year or two, it could settle and crack again.  All typical, but annoying.  Also, in new homes, the lack of old growth outdoors is unattractive.  There are no old growth trees anywhere in our neighborhood which makes the neighborhood look more institutional and two-dimensional.  The fact that most homes look very similar from outside.  Indoors, they are all quite different, even the same models have much more variety indoors, but outdoors, it's very cookie cutter.  Some features in newer homes look good but are a pain to maintain such as the chandelier in the 2-story front hall.  I had to get a new taller ladder just to change the light bulbs.  But I love the new safety features such as a gas shutoff valve that is away from the furnace on a nice accessible wall instead of behind the furnace and hard to reach in the old house.  The water has two cutoffs, one cuts off all water to the house and one that cuts off all water except the sprinkler system.  And both cutoffs are next to the water boiler and easily accessible.  Old water cutoff was behind the water boiler in a small space and hard to get to.

We are definitely fans of newer construction.  But we have plenty of friends who love their old homes with character and have renovated them to eliminate many of the "old home" problems.  They've done newer renovations but kept the style of the older home.  Great for them, but  you still can't get around the smaller size and accessibility issues.  And their renovations were much more expensive to keep the style.[/quote]

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