I just saw this thread! In April we bought a 1909 (or 1918? there were two listings with two different years listed) 2.5 storey farmhouse. Luckily for us, in 1997 it had been gutted, moved into town from a farm yard, put on a new foundation, and had a main floor addition and double car attached garage built! They totally re-did all of the electrical, plumbing, drywall, siding, windows, etc. while still keeping the old features like doors, frames, stairs, banisters, and all original fir floors (not redone, just filled with character!) It's aboslutely beautiful and my dream house. We had to move 20 minutes out of the city where we work, but I'm a small town girl to begin with and I couldn't pass up the house... our realtor even told us if that same house was IN the city, it would be worth at least 1.2 MILLION
Needless to say, we paid SUBSTANTIALLY less than that lol! But being only 20 minutes out, and both working in the engineering field and knowing our city is expanding that direction, we're sure we made a pretty good investment
The neat thing about our house is that it's an Eaton's catalogue house. Eaton's was a huge Canadian company back in the day (bought out by Sears in the 90's) and the only way farmers shopped was through their Eaton's catalogue for clothing, household items, farm equipment, etc. And yes, they could even order houses. The blueprints and all materials needed to build the house were delivered by train. Cool, right? We have an expert on these homes right in our city and he's wrote a book on them, so we're going to contact him and see if he can give us a copy of the original blueprints, if he can figure out which design it is.
I don't have any pictures here at work but I stole this one from my facebook
I kind of hate the white siding and it is so hard to keep clean, but it's going to last for a long time so I'll deal with it lol!