Entry tags:
house follies
Just got a letter from the State Division of Parks and Recreation saying that our house (and several blocks around it) has been placed on the State Register of Historic Places, and nominated to the National Register of Historic Places.
We attended a community meeting about this a month or two ago, and were told "this designation doesn't protect the house from the owner; it protects the house from the government." So the downside is if you want to sell your house to the government, there are certain things the government can't do with it without consulting with the historic-district people. The upside is that if you make renovations to the house that are compatible with historic-district standards, you can get a 20% tax credit for them.
We have two projects in mind that might qualify. The second-story windows were all replaced, probably in the 1980's, with reasonably energy-efficient double-paned windows with obviously plastic frames. One of the double-paned windows got broken a few years ago (only the outer pane, so it hasn't been a high priority for us to fix), and the plastic frames have photo-degraded to the point that they crumble in one's hand. I'd like to replace them with something that's both energy-efficient and period-looking (the "period" in question being 19teens). We had an Anderson representative give us a spiel a few years ago, and were so put off by his hard sell and the plasticky-looking frames (I think they're actually a sawdust composite) that we never called him back.
The other project is removing the aluminum siding and restoring the house to its original cedar-shake shingles. We have some reason to believe the original shingles are still there under the siding, but they've been covered over for probably forty or fifty years so we have no idea what condition they're in, and assume we'd have to replace a good fraction of them. Problem is, we can't tell how many we'll have to replace, and thus estimate the budget, until we start ripping off the siding. Is it even possible to replace a shake shingle without replacing all the ones above it? (Our garage is shingled, and the bottom two or three rows of shingles, the ones closest to the ground, are in the worst shape. We might try re-shingling the garage as a warmup project, but that's a more dubious investment, as any future owner might knock down and replace the whole garage.)
Has anybody reading this done either of these sorts of home improvements?
Meanwhile,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shalmestere has been looking at other houses in the neighborhood, with an eye to moving to a larger and/or more attractive house, since our income is about three times what it was when we bought this house. If we're serious about that, we should certainly skip the shingling project and possibly the windows project.
We attended a community meeting about this a month or two ago, and were told "this designation doesn't protect the house from the owner; it protects the house from the government." So the downside is if you want to sell your house to the government, there are certain things the government can't do with it without consulting with the historic-district people. The upside is that if you make renovations to the house that are compatible with historic-district standards, you can get a 20% tax credit for them.
We have two projects in mind that might qualify. The second-story windows were all replaced, probably in the 1980's, with reasonably energy-efficient double-paned windows with obviously plastic frames. One of the double-paned windows got broken a few years ago (only the outer pane, so it hasn't been a high priority for us to fix), and the plastic frames have photo-degraded to the point that they crumble in one's hand. I'd like to replace them with something that's both energy-efficient and period-looking (the "period" in question being 19teens). We had an Anderson representative give us a spiel a few years ago, and were so put off by his hard sell and the plasticky-looking frames (I think they're actually a sawdust composite) that we never called him back.
The other project is removing the aluminum siding and restoring the house to its original cedar-shake shingles. We have some reason to believe the original shingles are still there under the siding, but they've been covered over for probably forty or fifty years so we have no idea what condition they're in, and assume we'd have to replace a good fraction of them. Problem is, we can't tell how many we'll have to replace, and thus estimate the budget, until we start ripping off the siding. Is it even possible to replace a shake shingle without replacing all the ones above it? (Our garage is shingled, and the bottom two or three rows of shingles, the ones closest to the ground, are in the worst shape. We might try re-shingling the garage as a warmup project, but that's a more dubious investment, as any future owner might knock down and replace the whole garage.)
Has anybody reading this done either of these sorts of home improvements?
Meanwhile,
shalmestere has been looking at other houses in the neighborhood, with an eye to moving to a larger and/or more attractive house, since our income is about three times what it was when we bought this house. If we're serious about that, we should certainly skip the shingling project and possibly the windows project.