The wonderful thing about houses is that they can be retrofitted. I live in a house built in the 1850s. It didn’t have Wi-Fi back then, and there was an outhouse in the backyard. Central heating and a water heater were added at some point, and we added air conditioning.
Today, it has “smart home” technology, which is usually super easy to install and use. In some cases, old houses are in better shape than newer ones with newer mechanicals and many improvements.
Understanding old houses is an important part of my job. I have rarely met an old house that I don’t like. Sometimes, people ruin them when they remodel so that the house has some character from the turn of the century and some from the 1980s.
The oldest houses in St. Paul are those that are the closest to downtown. The newest houses are in the Eastern and Western edge of the city. There are newer houses here and there and even some new construction. Half of all the houses in St. Paul were built before 1920. The chart is a screen print from a city of St. Paul planning report.
The house I grew up in was a beautiful craftsman-style house in the Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood. It was built in 1926 and is the newest house I have ever lived in. It had an ancient boiler that burned oil. I remember the great oil shortage and taking turns with my dad, hauling containers of diesel fuel from the local gas station and using it as fuel for the boiler. That same boiler was later converted to natural gas.
