Restoring Your Historic House: The Comprehensive Guide for Homeowners

by Scott T. Hanson

How to accommodate contemporary life in a historic house.

This book does not repeat basic information that is readily available in many standard DIY books about carpentry, wiring, and plumbing. Rather, it shows how to adapt those DIY skills to the specialized needs of a historic house.

Although there are other books about renovating old houses, this is the first that prioritizes the identification and preservation of the historic, character-defining features of a house as a starting point in the process. That is the purpose of this book: to describe and illustrate a best-practices approach for updating historic homes for modern life in ways that do not attempt to turn an old house into a new one. The book also suggests many ways to save money in the process, without settling for cheap or inappropriate solutions.

Scott Hanson is a historic-building preservation professional and has 40 years’ experience rehabilitating historic houses. He has illustrated this authoritative book with hundreds of step-by-step photos, illustrations, charts, and decision-making guides. Interspersed throughout are photo essays of 13 restored historic houses representing a range of periods and architectural styles: Italianate, Victorian, Queen Anne, Federal, Colonial, Colonial Revival, Greek Revival, Ranch, Adobe, Craftsman, Shingle, and Rustic. With interior and exterior photography by David Clough, these multi-page features show what can be achieved when a historic home is renovated with a desire to preserve or restore as much historic character as possible.

Genres: Nonfiction

720 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 10, 2019

Reviews

[Lisa Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing!

An awesome book! Thorough, practical, insightful, educational, and absolutely inspirational. The kindle book was just like owning the actual hardback book in experience.

I recommend this book for anyone who loves old homes. And I highly recommend this if you’re restoring a home as it has great resources, examples of full restoration/conservation and budget limiting partial restoration.

Awesome photos throughout which illustrate correct restoration, mistakes in other periods, and how he solved issues, such as missing wood details. The photo illustrations are excellent and extremely helpful!

[Jenny Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very thorough guide for the historic home owner and an interesting read for those who may be looking forward to owning a historic home some day. I appreciated that Hanson kept budgets in mind when giving advice on restoring historic homes. If I have any complaints about this book, it is that it is weighted toward earlier historic homes (18th and 19th century) over later historic homes (20th century). Hanson's experience and expertise (as well as his passion) is obviously with these older homes, but he makes a valiant effort of addressing issues around newer historic homes.

[Randal White · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible! I do not think that there has ever been a better, more thorough guide to renovating an old home. This book has so much information, and is presented so well! It's an amazing accomplishment. I will refer to an utilize this book for years to come!

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is more for someone thinking about buying a historic home. If you already have an old house, you know most of it. Though there are a few interesting parts that I did not already know about. It is well written and does make you think of things you may not have thought about if you did not already live in the home. It also tells you what to look for when your contractor is doing the work to make sure it is done correctly. Things you would assume the contractor would already know. Like make sure the outlets and switches are level. In my house I would say the 50 percent are not level. So I would know to check already. Overall, AI would recommend this book. Lots of pretty pictures too.