Hello helpful forum members, and thanks in advance for your advice and opinions!
I am considering buying a very old house (grade II listed), dating back to around 1840 or so – as such it has various issues, but the particular one that concerns me is some very uneven floors in two of the rooms on the first floor.
Possibly my memory is playing tricks on me, but the floors actually seemed to be higher in the centre of the rooms than at the edges. In one case, the ceiling of the room below has a long (but not particularly wide) crack across it.
Now a bit of digging into online planning records has told me that the side walls of the house are stone, while the front and back are timber framed. Both rooms in question have one external stone wall and one external timber wall. There are no cracks visible on the exterior.
It also seems that there has historically been an issue with damp getting into the front wall, which may or may not have been rectified (I asked the vendors about what works they had done, and they haven’t mentioned a few things that I can see they applied for listed building consent for)
So with this in mind, is it likely that these floors (and the wider structure of the building) are not stable and need work to rectify that? What work would need to be done, and how much (approximately) would it cost?
Or is there a fair chance that the floor movement is historic and can safely be left as it is, just patching up the cracks?
I realize there are no hard and fast answers here, particularly without seeing it, and I would of course be getting a structural engineer to have a look at it if I decided to put an offer on the house, but I am trying to decide if it’s worth the cost and hassle or if I should leave what could be a beautiful and characterful house for someone else to take on!
Thank you all!
I am considering buying a very old house (grade II listed), dating back to around 1840 or so – as such it has various issues, but the particular one that concerns me is some very uneven floors in two of the rooms on the first floor.
Possibly my memory is playing tricks on me, but the floors actually seemed to be higher in the centre of the rooms than at the edges. In one case, the ceiling of the room below has a long (but not particularly wide) crack across it.
Now a bit of digging into online planning records has told me that the side walls of the house are stone, while the front and back are timber framed. Both rooms in question have one external stone wall and one external timber wall. There are no cracks visible on the exterior.
It also seems that there has historically been an issue with damp getting into the front wall, which may or may not have been rectified (I asked the vendors about what works they had done, and they haven’t mentioned a few things that I can see they applied for listed building consent for)
So with this in mind, is it likely that these floors (and the wider structure of the building) are not stable and need work to rectify that? What work would need to be done, and how much (approximately) would it cost?
Or is there a fair chance that the floor movement is historic and can safely be left as it is, just patching up the cracks?
I realize there are no hard and fast answers here, particularly without seeing it, and I would of course be getting a structural engineer to have a look at it if I decided to put an offer on the house, but I am trying to decide if it’s worth the cost and hassle or if I should leave what could be a beautiful and characterful house for someone else to take on!
Thank you all!
