The first house I bought was a 1905 Colonial! It was all refinished with love before we bought it. We had 1 original window left bc it was between 2 rooms. It had all the original hardwoods floors and a big hardwood grand staircase. It had arched doorways, high ceilings and beautiful woodwork everywhere, and only the master bedroom had a closet, the other bedrooms did not. It had horse hair plaster walls and we cut a hole in one of them to make a niche shelf wow.. those walls were HEAVY!!! You could see in the ceilings where they strung the electrical since the house was built before electricity! I loved this house, everything about it, it was gorgeous and unique! I miss it!
It was actually designed well to be efficient, but for some reason it was not that efficient at all. 3 heat zones, we only kept the middle one on, and at a temp of 68 and in Jan/Feb it was almost $500/month! Even with the new windows.
Then again, there were no doors on the main floor, except a bathroom door, which means that we couldn't shut off rooms that we didn't use much.