What Renovating a 100 Year Old House Taught Us

Some of the old things are worth keeping

When a house is in poor condition, it is very easy to look at everything through the lens of what needs to go.

But some of my favourite parts of the renovation came from doing the opposite.

We refurbished some of the old light fittings rather than replacing them with new ones.

We also found pieces of the home's old leadlight stored away in the shed.

Discovering things like that changed the way we looked at the house.

Not everything old was a problem to solve.

Some things were part of what made the house interesting in the first place.

Heritage restrictions need to be part of the plan

The house was affected by a heritage overlay, which meant we couldn't simply assume we could make whatever changes we wanted.

That was something we had to consider when thinking about the future of the house and what a larger renovation might eventually look like.

Heritage controls will be different for every property, but our experience taught us to understand those restrictions before getting too attached to a particular renovation idea.

An old house might have enormous potential, but that doesn't necessarily mean every version of that potential is possible.

An interim renovation can be a real renovation

We always described what we were doing as the interim renovation.

The idea was that we would improve the house enough to make it comfortable and enjoyable while we saved for the big renovation.

That affected many of the decisions we made.

We worked with the existing kitchen, bathroom and other parts of the house rather than treating every room as a blank canvas.

But something interesting happened.

The interim renovation made an enormous difference.

The house became somewhere we really enjoyed living.

It wasn't the major architectural renovation we had imagined for the future, but it didn't need to be.

You can see some of those individual projects in our kitchen renovation, bathroom renovation, lounge renovation and IKEA PAX wardrobe stories.

Old doesn't always mean it needs replacing

Our roof was probably the best example of this.

It was more than 100 years old, rusty and even had some holes.

Replacing it would have been the obvious response.

Instead, we patched the holes and painted the old corrugated iron.

With brooms.

It cost us very little compared with replacing the roof and completely changed the appearance of the house.

You can see the full project in We Painted Our 100 Year Old Roof With Brooms and It Transformed the House.

That experience stayed with us throughout the renovation.

Sometimes replacement is necessary.

But sometimes an old material or feature just needs some attention.

The renovation you plan might never happen

This was probably the biggest lesson.

For years, we thought of the work we were doing as the renovation before the renovation.

We would improve the house now, save our money and eventually undertake the major renovation.

We had plans for what the house could become.

And then life changed.

We eventually decided to sell.

The major renovation we'd been working towards never happened.

In hindsight, that made me appreciate the interim renovation even more.

We hadn't spent years living in a house we disliked while waiting for some future version of it.

We had made it better with the resources we had at the time.

We got to enjoy those improvements while we lived there, and when it came time to sell, the tired old house we'd originally bought looked completely different.

What the old house taught us

The biggest thing I took from the experience is that renovating doesn't have to be all or nothing.

You can preserve something old.

You can repair rather than replace.

You can make smaller improvements while saving for something bigger.

And you can change your mind entirely.

Our big renovation never happened.

Instead, we sold the house and eventually started a new chapter on the Great Ocean Road.

In a funny way, the renovation we kept calling temporary turned out to be the finished one.

And I'm glad we didn't spend all those years waiting to make the house somewhere we wanted to live.

The outdoor work followed the same practical approach, including replacing and painting the fences around the old house.

If you're considering an old home yourself, these are the things we would look for before buying an old house.