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Worst install week of my career was in an old Victorian house in Boston
Last fall I spent three days trying to get sensors to stick to horsehair plaster that kept crumbling. The homeowner was watching me the whole time and kept asking if I'd ever worked on a house this old before. Anyone else deal with plaster walls that just fall apart on you?
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richardknight10d ago
Old houses fall apart because modern stuff fights old methods.
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the_cameron10d ago
...and it's wild how specific that gets. Like, I've seen people slap modern vapor barrier paint on old brick walls in basements thinking it'll stop moisture, but it just traps it and makes the bricks crumble from the inside. Or they use Portland cement mortar instead of lime mortar to repoint a 19th century house, and suddenly the softer old bricks start cracking because the cement is too hard and doesn't let them breathe. Same thing with replacing old single-pane windows with sealed vinyl units without any trickle vents, and then the whole house gets musty and moldy because the air can't move like it used to. It's not that modern stuff is bad, it's just designed for modern building methods that don't flex or breathe the same way.
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