Advice

When renovation/restoring/whatever an old home, don't assume that other people, even if they're professionals, share your beliefs or your goals or what have you.

A friend of ours, who is a general contractor, reviewed the house with me early on, as I was making the decision to purchase. Keep in mind this is a general contractor. This is a guy who can handle virtually all aspects of construction. But he's not an old house guy. As he was poking and prodding and giving me his opinion on the house, he admitted to me that he'd never even been inside "one of these houses," meaning a victorian-era urban house. So, great guy, and can do whatever we ask him to do. But he might suggest solutions that aren't appropriate to our house, because he's not familiar with our type of house or sharing our basic goal of preserving what we can and adding elements back to the house that are appropriate to it.

Likewise, drywall guy? In all seriousness, he walked into one of the rooms that doesn't have its original ceilings and told me it was "good." The adjective I had in mind was "hideous." But keep in mind that this is a guy who spends 80% of his time putting drywall into new homes and the other 20% throwing drywall up over old plaster walls and ceilings -- plus, of course, he makes no money when people decide to restore old plaster. Of course he's inclined more toward installing drywall than making an appropriate choice for the property.

My point is that decisions about appropriateness are really yours as the owner to make. You make one when you hire a contractor, and hiring a restoration contractor takes some of the pressure off you because a restoration contractor is more likely to know what is appropriate to your house. But once you start talking about jobs, you also have to as the owner of an old house do your own research. Because no one will watch out for your house but you -- it's your job and no one else's.