Renovating a Pre-War Detroit Home Without Regrets

A lot of the housing stock in our service area went up before 1945. Ferndale, Royal Oak, Berkley, Wyandotte, Trenton, the older sections of Livonia and Grosse Ile. Brick colonials, 1920s bungalows with the arched living room opening, Tudors with the steep roofline and the original leaded glass.

These houses were built well. The framing lumber is denser than anything you can buy today, the masonry is real, and the proportions of the rooms are better than most of what gets built now. That is why people buy them.

They also have ninety to a hundred years of systems in them, several rounds of previous work of varying quality, and materials that require specific handling. Renovating one is a different job than renovating a house from 1998, and the homeowners who regret their projects almost always regret the same four things.

Here is what is actually behind those walls, and how to spend the money in an order you will be happy with.

What is in a pre-war Metro Detroit house

Plaster and lath, not drywall. Wood lath strips nailed to the studs with plaster pushed through the gaps to form keys on the back side. When those keys break, the plaster goes hollow and separates from the lath, which is why a wall can look fine and sound like a drum. Cutting into it, patching it, and matching the existing texture is slower and more skilled work than hanging drywall, and it is a real line item.

Balloon framing. In many pre-war homes the wall studs run continuously from the sill plate to the roof rather than stopping at each floor. That means open cavities from the basement to the attic, which is convenient for running wire and a genuine fire safety issue that requires fire blocking when the wall is opened. It also changes how wall removal and structural work gets approached, because load paths in a balloon-framed house do not look like load paths in a platform-framed one.

Knob and tube wiring and undersized service. Original wiring in these houses is ungrounded, has no capacity for modern loads, and was never designed for a house with a microwave, a home office, and an EV in the driveway. Plenty of these homes are still on a 60 amp service, or on a panel that got a partial upgrade in 1978 and has been added to ever since. Insulation packed against active knob and tube is a fire hazard and a problem for insurers.

Galvanized supply and cast iron drains. Galvanized steel water lines corrode from the inside and choke down over decades. If the water pressure upstairs drops when someone runs the kitchen faucet, that is usually why. Cast iron drain stacks can be sound at ninety years or can be scaled and cracked. Some communities in the area also still have lead service lines from the street, which is separate from anything inside your walls and worth checking with your water department.

Little to no wall insulation. Original construction often has empty stud bays. Blown-in cellulose added in the seventies has usually settled. The exterior walls, the rim joist, and the attic are where the comfort problem lives, and no amount of new HVAC equipment fixes a leaky envelope.

Lead paint. Every one of these houses has it somewhere. The federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule requires that renovation work in housing built before 1978 be performed by an EPA lead-safe certified firm using certified renovators and lead-safe work practices. The rule is triggered when the work disturbs more than six square feet of interior painted surface in a room, or more than twenty square feet of exterior painted surface. Window replacement is covered as well. Ask any contractor bidding your pre-war house whether their firm is certified, because it is a legal requirement, not a preference.

Asbestos. Nine-by-nine floor tile, the black mastic under it, pipe and duct wrap, some plaster and joint compound. It is not dangerous sitting still. It becomes dangerous when someone grinds it up. The rule is simple: test, do not guess, and use a licensed abatement contractor if the test comes back positive.

Low basements. Pre-war basements often have seven feet or less from slab to joist, and once you account for ductwork and beams, finishing to code height can be impossible without underpinning or lowering the slab. If you bought a 1926 bungalow imagining a finished lower level, measure before you budget.

The four regrets

1. Spending the budget on finishes and leaving the systems

This is the most expensive mistake in old houses, and the most common.

New kitchen, new bath, refinished floors, fresh paint. The house looks beautiful and it is still on knob and tube with a 60 amp panel and galvanized supply lines behind the new tile. Two years later the wiring has to come out, which means opening the walls you just finished.

The order that works is unglamorous. Investigate first, then mechanicals, then the envelope, then structure, then finishes. If the budget will not cover everything, cut the finish scope and keep the mechanical scope. You can add a backsplash later. You cannot rewire behind a finished wall without unfinishing it.

2. Taking out a wall without knowing what is in it

Old houses hide things in walls. Chimney chases that still serve a furnace flue. Cast iron plumbing stacks. Ductwork that was routed in 1954 by someone with no other option. Bearing conditions that do not read as bearing from the room side.

We open exploratory holes before pricing structural work, because the difference between a wall with nothing in it and a wall with the main soil stack in it is thousands of dollars and a different design. Most walls people want gone are not holding the house up, and when one is, we set a beam and take it out anyway. But that has to be known before you have a number, not after demolition.

3. Removing character that cannot be bought back

Original trim profiles, solid doors, cast hardware, quarter-sawn oak floors, plaster arches, leaded glass. None of it is available new at any price that makes sense, and reproduction is close but not the same.

Homeowners rarely regret keeping it. They regret pulling five-inch baseboard out of a 1927 house and replacing it with three-inch from the big box store to save a few thousand dollars. Strip it, repair it, reuse it where you can, and match new work to the old profiles where you cannot.

The exception is when a previous owner already replaced everything on the first floor with hollow-core doors and colonial casing. Then you are not preserving anything, and you are free to make a clean decision.

4. Doing it in the wrong sequence

Floors refinished before the plumber cuts a supply line through them. Painting before the electrician sets devices. Cabinets set before the HVAC contractor finds out the new duct run goes exactly where the pantry is.

Sequencing is most of what a general contractor is for, and on an old house it matters more because the trades keep finding things. Every discovery reshuffles the schedule. If the person running the job is not thinking three trades ahead, the work gets done twice.

How we approach an old house

We price these differently than a house from 2004, and we say so up front.

We open exploratory areas before we build the proposal, so the scope reflects what is actually there. We carry a real contingency line rather than pretending a ninety-year-old house holds no surprises. We write the mechanical scope first and the finish scope second, so if the budget has to move, it moves in the right direction. And when we find something, you see it, you get the options and the pricing, and you decide before we proceed.

Tim does the walkthrough and the design himself, which matters more on an old house than a new one, because the person deciding what is possible needs to be the person who saw the framing.

Next step: book a free in-home estimate and tell us what the house is and what you want it to be.