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Warpy

(113,131 posts)
5. Generally speaking, standardized building codes
Sat May 23, 2015, 03:15 PM
May 2015

and mandated inspections have made it safer.

However, industry has managed to ram through a few things that are now biting homeowners on the butts, expensively, like PVC tubing within concrete slabs as water supplies. Settling and age are causing it to fail and some homeowners are facing having the whole house replumbed above ground with copper.

I lived in New England, where I saw some pretty amazing things in old construction to the point I was wondering why the place was still standing. Often reclaimed lumber picked up after storms was used in those old houses. You never knew how close the studs were because it varied from stud to stud and everything was hidden behind lath and horsehair plaster. If you didn't have covered wiring running along the baseboards, you knew it was knob and tube or worse, like wiring insulated with tar that would flake off if a truck rumbled by outside.

Give me new construction any day, thanks, or enough money to gut an old house down to the studs and exterior sheathing and rebuild it.

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