My main character is buying an old house. What or some things that could go wrong that she didn't plan for or think about earlier?

Well with older homes, depending on how old, they made need to be lifted so a new foundation can be put in. If the home is old enough the bathroom might be an extenstion and it's easy to find places where the extension may not have been done properly. It's hard to find new windows to fit older houses sometimes. If the house is in the country and uses a well for water, then a new well might need to be dug if the old one goes dry....

I'm sure there's oodles more things that can be mentioned.

I live in an old home (a 1800s farmhouse).
The floors are all crooked (ceilings too). There's only one bathroom, and septic is always a problem. We've never had a problem with our well, but if there was a problem it would require major renovation. You can also look at termites, or mold, or the roof needing to be replaced. There could be shoddy electrical work added incorrectly by prior owners of the house. There will be drafts, and the heater could need replaced. There probably won't be central air, or other amenities that everyone considers necessary these days.

The funny thing is, with all the quirks and what not, I love living in an old house. I think new houses have no souls, no personalities. And for a house to last this long, it has been built well, with more attention to detail than most modern houses are these days.

My sister and brother-in-law bought an old home and there were a lot of issues they had to deal with, new pipes, new wiring for all the electric to bring it up to code, repairing the wood floors, new water heater,...but these are all things that you would expect with a house that is 90 years old.

What they did not expect, and were very much not aware of until they started to redo the walls was that the ceiling would disintegrate the moment you touched it. (It was lath and plaster and was well past its prime). They figured this out when a broom handle touched the ceiling and a large piece just fell apart. In the end they had to replace the ceilings in the entire house with money that had not been allocated in the budget.

Heh...we just bought a farmhouse in October of 2008, t hat was built in 1812. We had a house inspection done (any good realtor will suggest that), which turned up a host of things. Most we didn't care about. The oil furnace is quirky, but we actually are using the original (very old) wood furnace. The shingles are asbestos shingles, which means we'll either have to replace them ourselves, or we'll have ot pay a LOT of cash to get someone else to do it. We found out that the blown insulation someone had put into the attic space tends to come down through the attic trap door in one of the closets, even though we've never opened it. Heat leaks out of the windows and doors like water through a seive. The basement tends to get wet in the spring (ahh, the joys of ailing foundations!). Umm... the plants were all horridly overgrown, and we're having to take a lot of time ripping stuff out and replacing it.

Does that help? *grin*

Things we found with our house:

-There were several additions added on through the years, and most of them were never insulated correctly. My old bedroom was always freezing in the winter and a sauna come summer. You can feel the wind under our kitchen sink.

- Rodents! Thank goodness there were only a couple mice in the basement that our cat quickly rooted out. But the yard had been given over to gophers for several years, and they were burrowing right next to the foundation. It took us (and our dog) a few years to get them under control. And we never did find whatever hole allowed so many bats to get in through the years.

- The yard work. Nothing had been done with the yard for years - it was so overgrown that people didn't realize there was a house there (even though it's on a busy street). Trees were leaning against the house. Even now (over a decade after we moved in) the trees are all so old and big that clearing branches out of the yard is almost a full time job. Everything that had to be pulled out was old, too. There were shrubs that almost destroyed the truck we were using to pull them out because the roots were so deep. The added bonus was that, when the bushes finally flew out of the ground, we learned that someone had buried their dog under them. It's now reburied under a very nice flower garden.

-Ancient appliances. The double ovens were avocado green when we moved in (and for several years afterward). The stove hood sounded like a death rattle.

- Odd construction and decorating choices. The kitchen and bathroom had brown carpet, even though the rest of the house had hardwood floors (or so we thought - some were actually soft wood and were torn to bits as soon as we moved something across them). The living room and foyer had burlap wallpaper. The dining room was painted pink. There's a room upstairs that we still haven't found any real use for, with built-in shelves that are the wrong size and shape to actually hold anything. All the rooms are odd sizes and broken up strangely. The stairs are so narrow and steep that you can't move any furniture up them and someone slips and falls at least once a month. To top it all off, the woman who owned the house before us was a chain-smoking recluse so there were smoke stains on the ceilings and walls.

- Shoddy wiring and plumbing. When we remodeled the upstairs bathroom, we ended up with water dripping through the dining room ceiling because the plumbing was screwed up. When the light switch in the downstairs bathroom broke, we had to have a new one special ordered because everything else was the wrong size. To make it even more fun, someone had used regular masking tape on the wires instead of electrical. If a breaker flips or a fuse blows it's a major to-do because the breaker box isn't labeled at all and there is no logic as to what rooms are on what circuits.

-We were told that the chimney had a screen over the top and that the blocked-off fireplace could be used. Both turned out to be false. The fireplace is still closed off and, sadly, has become the grave of many birds and bats. At least, that's what we assume every time the cats go nuts and stare at it for days. If I could get the big metal thing off it, I would let them out, but I can't and I honestly don't want to know what's back there.

Emmylee...

Consider yourself lucky. I had an older house in the country once and there were two wells, one for the new house and one for the old house (the older well). Well in the heat of summer we would have to pump water from the new well to the old well so I would have enough!

I want to thank all of you for your stories. This really helps. I'm sorry I had to laugh at some of it. Thanks for the help.

WEIRD PLUMBING REPAIRS! In our house (built 1927) some new PVC pipes were installed in the basement... one pipe was installed so that the water had to flow UP instead of DOWN. Even the plumber we called was confused.

I've just started a tenancy in an older home. Some things I've noticed:

- Whoever said old houses with additions are unevenly insulated? I agree with this completely. My computer room can be toasty while the bedroom is freezing.
- Weird noises. When I'm trying to sleep, there are many interesting creaks, pops and other noises for me to listen to! Also it sounds like somebody whacks the floorboards whenever I turn on/off the tap in the kitchen.
- Weird smells. My bathroom, for instance. I have no idea where it's coming from.

This probably doesn't help any more, but if it does ...

I was raised in an old house (early 1800s) and we completely remodeled the whole thing over ... too long. My absolute favorite discovery was that the original house (two rooms) and the first two additions (four more rooms) were insulated with old newspapers. I got yelled at for the better part of a decade for saving and reading all those papers. Dad would hunt them down and throw away any that he found, which led to me hiding them in small clusters, in several different places including the dirt-floor basement and outside under the shed. Then I would lay them out in the sun and dry them off before I could read them. Good thing Dad liked to go to work.
The front outside wall was held up by (read: leaning on) the inner living room wall, which was, incidentally, an addition. No idea what held it up before they added onto the structure. The beams were all going in different directions, and the walls were made with some two-by-fours, some thicker, some thinner. The beams didn't all reach the ceiling. The living room and first bedroom were lathe and plaster, and when we started taking that out there was dust for WEEKS. It didn't seem to ever settle, and there was a thick haze that spread through the whole house.
There was a huge cast-iron pipe hanging in midair from the upstairs bathroom, which had never been quite finished before we got there. My dad took out the elbow connector one day because he was going to stop at the hardware store on his way home from work and find a replacement. Well ... the enormous, now-unsupported cast-iron pipe fell through the bathroom floor, through the washing machine in the laundry room, through that floor, and into the basement. It took out the plumbing for the entire house - downstairs bathroom, kitchen, laundry room, even to the hose outside.
The electricity was ... interesting. In the space between the living room and kitchen ceilings and the bedrooms above them, we found live wires just dangling in the middle of nowhere. They weren't connected to switches, outlets, anything that we could find. Our best guess was a hidden fusebox somewhere, but we never found their source. We traced them to the floor in the living room, but couldn't find them in the basement. Dad taped them up very tightly and put them back, which was probably a bad idea. The house is still standing, amazingly.
The front porch had a flat roof, which gradually developed a dip that collected water. The water then dripped into my room and my sister's room, at the floor-level. We ended up repairing the floors and walls, and giving the porch a slanted roof that completely ruined the view from my front window. We also had to replace the real roof, beams and all, because it hadn't been done before (!). Because the house had been built two rooms at a time, the floors and walls usually didn't match up, with half-inch rises and drops everywhere. The staircase to the basement was rotten, sagging wood, and the staircase upstairs we reinforced so we wouldn't fall through.
When we got a good wind the whole house would shudder.
Every four or five years the septic tank would have to be roto-rootered, but that was the same with everybody in town.
The well never gave us any trouble, but the water was awful. Our next-door neighbor was, we all thought for years, a redhead. Not so. She was naturally a platinum-blond, like her very young daughter. Her husband just wouldn't spend the money to get a water softener. My father thought that was an interesting idea, and so one month he just never bothered putting salt in our softener. He *bought* it and took it to the basement, so Mom wouldn't know he was cheating (yeah, right). My hair is light brown, but it turned a very pretty auburn with quite notable rusty highlights until Mom and my younger brother buddy-lifted the salt in. We all looked like we had fake tans all winter long, because we couldn't scrub all the rust out of our skin.
The floors sagged in places even after we'd replaced them, because the house was damp. The mice got in every fall no matter how many times we - erm, Mom - went along the inside and outside walls with bathroom caulk trying to plug up any holes. My brother took the caulk to the basement and climbed up on the little ledges to seal it at ground-level, to no avail.
What else? Oh, the attic. It was little more than a dusty, moldy crawlspace, alternately infested with squirrels and bats. There was a little trapdoor in the upstairs hallway, which could be reached only if we got out a ladder. One day my best friend dared me to open it (none of us kids ever had before) which I did. Staring at me from about an inch away was the full skeleton of a squirrel. I gulped, closed the door, climbed down, dragged the ladder downstairs and outside, and then burst into tears. Everybody was dumbfounded. Unless the new owners were industrious or curious, that poor squirrel is probably still there.
The hallway upstairs creaked something awful if anyone walked on it, but I made up a sort of dance to get from one end to the other silently, going from one side to the other, avoiding most of the center. The kitchen was really loud, too; nobody else even tried getting through it without announcement. I found that if I skipped about half of the tiles and went around the table nobody would know I was coming. Midnight snacks were much easier that way.
I loved that house. As hard as it was and as much as it cost, I think I would buy another fixer-upper if I got the chance. Except now I'm not the little kid, I *have* a little kid ... which is much scarier IMO. Maybe a cosmetic fixer ... hmm. Good times, good times.

I just bought a 1947 house. It was vacant for almost a full year, and it was never winterized properly so, as soon as we got the water turned on, the house turned into a giant sprinkler. Literally. The guy turned the bolt-thing and every pipe in my house sprung a leak. This is because when the people left, there was water in the pipes, and when winter rolled around, and no one was here to manage it, the house got so cold the water froze and cracked all the pipe.

Also, sometimes 'back in the day' (I guess some still do..) People would plant "cute" little bushes or "mini" trees right up next to their house, but if no one ever rips them out; sixty years down the road those "little bushes" turn into honking masses of unkept shrubbery, who's expanding roots are cracking your foundation and crushing pipes,also dropping heeps of needles all over the porch, windowsills, lawn (which kills it), roof, and raingutters... *deep breath*

Needless to say, we promptly cut down the junipers.
Now I use the bare patches of dirt that were under each tree as my veggie garden.

-also, it was the dirtiest house I'd ever seen. Dirt, not mess; plain of-the-ground dirt. Even the white ceiling fans were brown -with dust and dirt. I'm not joking.

It's turned out nicely tho. And I got a heck of a deal on it, so I can't complain too much. ;]