Salem's older city houses, remodeled with care

Half the housing in Salem predates 1940

Census figures give Salem a median year built of 1940, which means the typical home here is well past eighty years old. Roughly half of the city's 21,000 homes predate that year, and fewer than one in ten has been built since 2000. That is an unusually old housing stock, even by North Shore standards.

Old houses reward a careful opening. Behind the plaster, some walls are balloon framed, with studs running unbroken from the sill to the roof, which gave a basement fire a clear path to the attic. When those walls are open, fire blocking goes in. Knob-and-tube wiring sometimes turns up during demolition and gets handed to a licensed electrician. Floors that have settled for a century are rarely level, so cabinets, tile and doors have to be set to the room as it really is, not as a drawing assumes it should be. None of this is a reason to avoid an old house. It is a reason to open it carefully and price it honestly.

Every one of these houses was built before 1978, so lead-safe work practices are our default on homes this old, with containment, cleanup and verification written into the scope.

If your house may fall inside one, we check before choosing windows, siding or a porch rebuild.

Two-families, rentals and owners who live downstairs

Only about a quarter of Salem's homes are detached single-family houses, and roughly half are owner-occupied. The rest is two- and three-family houses, condos carved out of older buildings, and apartments. That changes who calls and what they need. A landlord turning a unit over between tenants wants a kitchen and bath that stand up to hard use and a schedule that gets the apartment back on the market. An owner living on the first floor of a two-family may be redoing their own unit while tenants live upstairs. A unit that turns over every year or two needs finishes chosen for that: flooring that takes furniture being dragged across it, tile grout that cleans easily, fixtures a tenant cannot easily break.

Working in an occupied building means keeping dust out of shared halls, keeping water and heat on for the other units, and telling the tenants what is happening and when. All of that goes into the written scope, along with which work needs a permit. For investors weighing a gut renovation against a refresh, we will be straight about what the walls are likely to hide before you commit to a number.

A two- or three-family also raises code questions a single-family owner never sees, such as fire separation between units and egress from each floor. Those get sorted out with the building department as part of the permit rather than guessed at.

A city with more water than land

The census counts about ten square miles of water inside Salem's limits against a little over eight of land. Houses near the harbor take salt air and wind, and exterior work wears faster here than in an inland town. Trim, paint, gutters and the flashing at old chimneys and dormers are where it shows first.

Exterior changes deserve one more question before anything is drawn. Massachusetts allows cities and towns to create local historic districts, and inside one a commission reviews changes visible from the street. If your house may fall inside one, we check before choosing windows, siding or a porch rebuild. Salem is about 40 miles north of Raynham, and with Steve running the job you deal with one person who knows the plan from the walkthrough to the final inspection.

Inside, many of these houses have been cut up and redone several times, and two or three generations of work in one wall is common. We document what we find, photograph it before it gets covered, and tell you about anything that changes the scope.