Put some 2025 pennies on the floor before the new flooring goes down... vacuum seal a newspaper and put it in the wall before closing the walls up... leave artifacts for the future :)

This doesn't sound like gutting at all. This sounds like necessary renovations and preservation

Don't panic, friends! The title is much scarier than the reality of what is happening. So many historic restorations and refurbishments require a near gut job for water damage, rewiring, plaster fixes, and so much more. The important part- the charm ISN'T being thrown away!

Nicole is doing a great job of carefully removing the trim, windows, doors, and fixtures for refinishing. This house is going to look so much nicer and historically authentic once she's done!

Tell me the "Fascinating Things Found in your Walls"

My house was built in 1912. When pulling things out of the walls, I found:

- a BB rifle
- a deer antler
- a Buffalo New York flag (house is in Minnesota)

When we remodeled our 1911 kitchen the tops of the cabinets were lined with old newspapers with headlines about the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. We also uncovered an arched niche.

My house turns100 years old this year.  When we climbed into the attic to check the insulation, we discovered cotton tick mattresses from the 1930s or 40s had been laid end-to-end across the attic floor.  They were dry and in surprisingly excellent condition.  We were advised to leave them there and replace them only if we had any kind of rodent infestation.  There were no signs that the multitude of squirrels in our neighborhood had ever made an inroad into the Attic.  I have five bored cats, so rodents will be the least of my worries.

When I moved into my place (it's Victorian) I didn't find anything in the walls. Maybe not surprising as they're mostly granite. However, when I explored the subfloor under the house I found:
- Christmas tree
- Mangy tinsel
- Bedframe
- Dining table (strangely crumbly)
- Moth-eaten rug
- Rolls of disgusting carpet
- Rolls of disgusting carpet underlay
- Boxes of ceramic tiles in dubious shades of cream and orange
- Tins of paint
- A huge lampshade frame
- A chest of drawers
- An old broom head
- An old broom handle (not from the same broom)
- Box of assorted 1990s casette tapes of questionable musical taste
- Assorted newspapers, also from the 1990s
- Beanbag, rotten and split open
- Polysterene beads. So. Many. Polystyrene. Beads. EVERYWHERE (see above)
- Elderly person's wheeled shopping trolley
- Rusty clothes airer
- Empty coke cans
- Stepladder

All the wooden items were infested with woodworm. With the exception of the stepladder, none of it was salvageable. It took weeks to dispose of it all. Never want to see another polystyrene bead as long as I live.

I CANNOT WAIT for all the "history of [random house thing]" videos! It's so fascinating, and I'm so excited to annoy everyone I know with new bits of info about old houses 😂

Many years ago a friend of mine bought 220 four pane, sash windows that had been removed from buildings here in Texas. She planned to use them to build a greenhouse and, they all had to be reglazed. Since I have experience with stained glass, she offered to pay me to do the work. My recommendations are to have a good quality brass brush for removing the old glazer’s putty from the frames, prime and paint them before adding the glass (tape the channel where the glass goes as the putty adheres better to raw wood) and work in a well ventilated area. I was in a large, open hay barn in the summer but it was breezy. Good luck with your windows and all the rest of your projects! I work in construction education and this will be fun for me to see. When you showed those half cut studs I nearly fell off my chair and that nest of wires in the ceiling, holy cow!

One potential explanation for the faux breakers: Code doesn't allow you to have open holes in the breaker panel. When the panel is new there are metal knock-out covers for all the holes and breaker slots. If someone removes those breaker slot covers you can't put them back (they're originally barely attached by pieces of metal that break off to remove them), but you can install a breaker that's not being used for anything to "fill" the hole. The goal is to keep rodents and fingers out of the danger box.

It looks worse before it looks better. The job you planned to do will always reveal 1 to infinity more jobs necessary before you can complete the job you planned to do.

Truths of house renovation, luckily I learned these as a child of parents who gutted properties!

Glad y'all got rid of those pipes in time. I struggled to wash dishes for a few days in my 1915 apartment last year, because every time I would use the kitchen sink it would spill water into the wooden cabinet beneath. I filed a maintenance request with my landlord, and they assumed it was just clogged with rotten food and sent someone out a week later (I put a plastic bucket under the leak in the meantime so the cabinet wouldn't get damaged). The pipe was clear, the problem was that after 110 years, the cast iron had rusted completely through, and there was just a hole on the underside of the pipe. It only took them a few days to fix that, as they replaced it with a black plastic sewer pipe immediately, but I had to wait a bit for the silicone they sealed it with to finish curing.

if you haven’t covered it already, i’d love a history of bathroom/kitchen fixtures! i’d be very interested in what finishes and shapes were popular throughout the years

My house was built in 1907 and it’s framed out of oak. Oak hardens as it ages and it’s literally like trying to nail into steel. In my walls I found an embalming fluid bottle, walnut shells(there’s a 100+year old walnut tree in the yard) and a Woodrow Wilson campaign button lol

My son and daughter-in-law bought a 1920's house. The previous owners had let things go so they knew some work was needed. The kitchen had been remodeled in the 80's and had upgraded electrical. Upstairs was still knob and tube. He and an electrician friend spend a year upgrading it. Luckily they could go through the attic. My son is now working on the electrical of the free standing garage. Whatever the previous owner cobbled together to put in openers was really sketchy.  The house itself still has the original woodwork and slate roof. Definitely work the sweat equity.

Aircraft cable instead of rope for your window sashes if you can!  Most old theaters have replaced their hemp rope rigging with aircraft cable and it's much more durable. As long as your wall is open, you have a great opportunity to upgrade.

You gutted it down to the bones, but found out the bones are in great condition.  It's just the things that run within the bones that need to be replaced because they're at the end of life span.  That's wonderful news!

The wiring could also be worse. I used to live in a small town in North Dakota where the local insurance agent refused to insure any home that still had the original wiring, because the town electrician for the first fifty years they had electricity in town was absolutely awful and didn't do anything up to code even at the time. For example, he really liked knob-and-tube wiring, and kept using it after it was no longer legal, and only stopped when he couldn't get the supplies any longer. And it was badly done knob-and-tube to boot.

0:23 Literally my last worry when it comes to you and this channel 😁

My house isn’t historic, only about 68 years old. And we had to remove the kitchen and bathroom because of the pipes rotting out and we had water damage that caused mold and mildew growing in the basement. Your house will last longer because you are taking care of it