If blogs were children, I'd be in prison for neglect.
My wife and I are looking for houses, and I wish I had something insightful to say about the process but all I've learned as that I really like old houses and that I don't want a house that doesn't have a basement. And if it does have a basement, it better have a high enough ceiling that I'm not smacking my head into it all the time.
But on the subject of old houses, there's just something I love about all of the little odd incongruities that were either built into the house or that have cropped up over the years as new owners have moved in and out and decided that they didn't need the attic, or didn't need two closets and tore one down for more space in the bedroom. Or decided that, hey, this big empty space in the bedroom would make a pretty nice closet. I have so many damn shoes, Herb! You know that!
The houses we've seen that've been around for about a century or so seem to have grown organically just as much as they've been built. There are dressers and drawers and cabinets built into the walls, and old wood with dozens or hundreds of little nicks in the finish, and little doors here and there that may or may not lead into John Malkovich. We saw a house recently that had a small door (presumably to an attic, possibly to an actor) set twelve feet up into the wall of the master bedroom.
In addition, we looked at one built around 1880-ish that had an all new interior... except for the basement, which had a dirt floor, a fieldstone foundation (just lots of big rocks mortared together) and was propped up by literal tree trunks.
It's kind of a shame that I love old houses, because I'm sure I don't want the problems that go with owning one.
