Congratulations! You’ve purchased a home that is 50, 100, 200(!) years old and brimming with special qualities. Maybe it’s the way the light filters through wavy-glass windows and warms the mellow wide-board floors. Or the smooth feel of the banister,

People come to me when they have an old house that needs work, they know it’s special, and they desperately don’t want to f&%# it up. How do you bring a 50- or 100- or 200-year-old house into the 21st century

"You realize it would be faster and cheaper to just tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.” My client and I stood outside the ca-1876 train depot she had purchased a few months earlier, the contractor who made this pronouncement