Dating Houses

The hardest house to date is a link home. They appear to be single, but if you do some digging they’re actually attached.

Sorry about that.

Over the years, I’ve figured out some tricks for figuring out the age of a house. In newer subdivisions, you can pick up dates from manhole covers, sidewalks, and curbs. This will give you an idea of when the subdivision was built. This obviously doesn’t work in older neighborhoods.

Double-glazed windows usually have a metal strip which separates the two panes of glass. On that metal strip you will often find the manufacturer’s name and the date of manufacture. Again, this information must be used carefully. It will tell you the age of the window, but not necessarily the age of the house. Check several windows. If they are all the same, you have just figured out how old the house is, or the date when all of the windows were upgraded.

On houses built within the last 30 years, you will often find a sticker on the outside of the electrical panel indicating the possession date of the house. The Ontario New Home Warranty Program (Tarion) places these stickers on the electrical panel so that the warranty period could easily be established.

If you can be sure that the furnace or the water heater is original, the gas inspection sticker on either of these appliances is a good indication of the age of the house.

Porcelain plumbing fixtures usually have a manufacture date stamped into them. The easiest place to pick up a date is off a toilet. If you remove the lid from the tank, the date will often be stamped on the underside of the lid and also inside the tank near the water line. The date is usually on the right hand side of the rear portion of the tank when you are facing the toilet. The date inside the tank is more reliable than the date on the lid because sometimes lids get broken and replaced. Again, you must look for other clues to convince yourself that the toilet is an original one. Otherwise, you have only established the date when the bathroom was renovated.

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Most brick houses in Ontario were solid-masonry construction (two wythes of brick) up until the late 1960’s. Most brick houses built after 1970 were brick veneer construction (one wythe of brick with a wood-frame wall behind).

If you stand in an unfinished basement and look up at the subflooring, you will find that most houses before 1965 used plank subflooring. After 1965, most houses had plywood subflooring, until the early 1980’s, when OSB (oriented strand board) subflooring became popular (with the builders at least).

Aluminum wiring began to be used residentially in about 1965, however, it did not really catch on until about 1970. When was it banned? It was never banned, however, it received so much bad press, that aluminum wiring stopped going into houses in about 1978. To this day, aluminum wiring is still used to bring power into the house from the street!

As you are probably aware, knob-and-tube electrical wiring makes insurance companies very nervous. Knob-and-tube wiring was superseded by modern-style wiring in the late 1940’s. Even though wiring looked modern through the 1950’s, it was not until 1960 that this wiring contained a ground wire. Therefore, houses built before 1960 have two-prong outlets as opposed to modern electrical outlets which are designed for three-prong plugs.

Before 1950, supply plumbing was galvanized steel. Houses with galvanized steel supply plumbing also tended to have cast-iron waste plumbing.

In about 1955, waste plumbing was more likely to be copper than cast iron. In the late 1960’s, the price of copper went through the roof. Waste plumbing very quickly became plastic. (It was this jump in the price of copper that also lead to the use of aluminum wiring.)

Old houses have plaster on the walls and ceilings whereas new houses are built with drywall. When did the change occur? While there was no magic day when plasterers quit and drywallers began, most houses built before 1960 were plaster and most houses after were drywall.

Dating houses can be helpful for a number of reasons; for example, the type of furnaces installed 20-25 years ago have a life expectancy of 20-25 years. Therefore, most houses built in the early 1990’s have a new furnace or will need one shortly. Most houses built in the early 2000’s were built with asphalt shingle roofs that lasted up to 15 years. Again, most of these houses either have a new roof covering or need one.