New Construction Homes

What you trade by choosing new over old

Plenty of people who call us are standing between two options. One is an older house in a town they love, usually a colonial or a Cape with good bones and a long list of things to fix. The other is a lot, or a tired house on a good lot, and a new home built from the ground up. Both can be right. They are different kinds of work, and they carry different kinds of risk.

An older house gives you a location, mature trees, a known neighborhood and character you cannot buy new. It also gives you whatever the last eighty or hundred years left behind. A new house gives you control over almost everything inside the walls. It asks for more patience at the front, with land, permits and design, and it gives you fewer unknowns once the work begins. Some lots in older towns only come with a house on them, so building new may also mean taking an old house down first.

We build both kinds of projects, so we have no reason to push you one way. What we can do is tell you, from a walkthrough and a look at the lot, what each path is likely to involve.

What older houses tend to hide

Renovating an older Massachusetts house means opening walls you cannot see into until the work starts. Knob-and-tube wiring still turns up during demo, sometimes still live. Older homes may have balloon framing, where wall studs run up past the floors with no fire blocking between levels, and that has to be dealt with when walls are opened. Fieldstone foundations can be sound for another century or can be the reason the basement takes on water every spring.

Houses built before 1978 may have lead paint, so the renovation has to follow lead-safe work practices under the EPA RRP rule. Plaster walls crack when they are disturbed. Floors that have settled for decades rarely come back to level without real structural work. Insulation may be missing, packed down or full of mice.

None of these are reasons to walk away from an old house. They are reasons to plan for some of the money and time going to work you never see. With new construction, that line in the plan is far shorter.

Systems age too. Heating equipment, oil tanks, galvanized supply lines and undersized electrical services are common in older houses, and replacing them is a project in its own right, done by licensed plumbers and electricians and often found mid-job rather than at the start.

Then you get a written scope and a price for the path you choose, laid out so you can see what is included.

Insulation, air sealing and the energy code

A new house is built to the current Massachusetts building code, 780 CMR, and to the energy code your town follows. Many towns have adopted the stretch energy code, which sets higher bars for insulation and air sealing. The building department inspects insulation before drywall goes on, so the walls are checked while they are still open.

In practice that means walls and attics insulated to today's levels, a tight building shell, windows rated for our winters and mechanical systems sized for the house rather than for a drafty one. Ice dams, a constant complaint in older New England houses, often come from heat leaking into a poorly insulated attic. A well-built new roof and attic make them far less likely, though no house is immune in a hard winter.

Bringing an older house up to that standard is possible, but it usually means opening walls, adding insulation from inside or outside and chasing air leaks one room at a time.

A layout chosen by the people who live in it

The other thing new construction gives you is a plan that fits your household instead of one you have to adapt. Older houses were laid out for how people lived when they were built: small closed kitchens, narrow halls, one full bath upstairs, a front door nobody uses. Opening them up means moving bearing walls and rerouting what runs inside them.

On a new house you decide where the mudroom goes, how the kitchen relates to the family room, whether the primary bedroom is on the first floor and how many baths there are. Closets, storage and outlets go where you need them. Those choices cost very little on paper and a great deal in a renovation.

New construction also lets you plan for the next twenty years. Wider doors and a first floor bedroom for when stairs get harder. Blocking in bathroom walls for future grab bars. A conduit run to the garage for a car charger, space in the panel for a generator hookup and a basement laid out to finish later. Adding any of these to an old house means opening finished walls.

Weighing a renovation against a new house honestly

If you are deciding between the two, start with the lot and the house. Steve walks both with you and points out what he sees: the foundation, the roof, signs of water, the age of the systems, whether a septic system is involved and what Title 5 might require if you add bedrooms. On a lot, he looks at how the land drains, how the driveway will run and whether ledge is likely.

Then you get a written scope and a price for the path you choose, laid out so you can see what is included. If the honest answer is that the old house is the better buy, we will say so. If the house you are looking at would cost more to fix than it is worth, we will say that too, before you sign anything.

Be realistic about timing too. A new house usually takes longer to start than a renovation, because land, design, septic approval where it applies and the building permit all come first. Once it is underway, though, the work follows a predictable order, and there are fewer stops for problems found inside walls.

Whichever way you go, the job runs the same way with us: a written scope, changes approved in writing before they are built and regular word from Steve on what is happening and what comes next.

See the rest of our homes work, or browse the gallery for rooms we have finished.