Restoring Your Historic House: The Comprehensive Guide for Homeowners

Restoring Your Historic House: The Comprehensive Guide for Homeowners

Restoring Your Historic House: The Comprehensive Guide for Homeowners

Restoring Your Historic House: The Comprehensive Guide for Homeowners

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Overview

How to accommodate contemporary life in a historic house.

This book does not repeat basic information that is readily available in many standard DIY books about carpentry, wiring, and plumbing. Rather, it shows how to adapt those DIY skills to the specialized needs of a historic house.

Although there are other books about renovating old houses, this is the first that prioritizes the identification and preservation of the historic, character-defining features of a house as a starting point in the process. That is the purpose of this book: to describe and illustrate a best-practices approach for updating historic homes for modern life in ways that do not attempt to turn an old house into a new one. The book also suggests many ways to save money in the process, without settling for cheap or inappropriate solutions.

Scott Hanson is a historic-building preservation professional and has 40 years’ experience rehabilitating historic houses. He has illustrated this authoritative book with hundreds of step-by-step photos, illustrations, charts, and decision-making guides. Interspersed throughout are photo essays of 13 restored historic houses representing a range of periods and architectural styles: Italianate, Victorian, Queen Anne, Federal, Colonial, Colonial Revival, Greek Revival, Ranch, Adobe, Craftsman, Shingle, and Rustic. With interior and exterior photography by David Clough, these multi-page features show what can be achieved when a historic home is renovated with a desire to preserve or restore as much historic character as possible.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780884484905
Publisher: Down East Books
Publication date: 12/10/2019
Pages: 720
Sales rank: 646,342
Product dimensions: 9.10(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

SCOTT T. HANSON (Topsham, ME) has thought deeply about the renovation of historic homes in his 40 years as a designer, carpenter, municipal historic district regulator, historic preservation consultant, and architectural historian. His own 15-year renovation of a historic house, doing the vast majority of the work himself, has allowed him to put his ideas to the test and to learn from his mistakes while accumulating the library of how-to photos that illustrates this book. Scott is Director of Preservation Consulting Services with Sutherland Conservation & Consulting and has researched and written numerous National Register nominations and Maine Historic Building Record documentation projects. He is the co-author of Homes Down East: Classic Maine Coastal Cottages and Town Houses.

David Clough is a lifelong lover of photography with a special passion for photographing structures of historical significance. His work has been published in Japan and the U.S. He lives in Rockland, Maine.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Finding the Right Historic House

Chapter 2: What is It? Architectural Styles

Chapter 4: Do-It-Yourself Or Hire a Contractor?

Chapter 5: Bureaucrats You'll Meet

Chapter 6: Demolition

Chapter 7: Structural and Mechanical

Chapter 8: Exteriors

Chapter 9: Interiors

Chapter 10: Resources

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