My house/ My Neighborhood

Row houses create the perfect density for city streets.  Not a little city unto itself like a condo tower and not a little piece of farmland like a 1/4 acre detached house.

Where I live, we have a couple hundred houses in a two block radius, with a few hundred people living inside.  It gives us the perfect critical mass to have a lively neighborhood with lots of activities and yet we all have our own direct access to the outside with no elevators.

The houses themselves are attached or semi-detached homes, built from 1850 up to about 1910, in several styles.  Some are two story and some are three.  Some are pretty small but the largest are 2500 square feet.  Mine is a three story house with about 1750 square feet.

Inside the houses live single people, couples (both young and retired) and lots of cats and dogs.  There aren't that many kids in our neighborhood.  I don't know if that is because people think the city isn't a wholesome place to raise a kid, or they just can't fit a modern family into these narrow, closetless houses.

The shape of the row house makes it very adaptable over time.  People have moved walls around, finished basements, closed in porches, added bathrooms and combined rooms.  Mostly they have left the footprint alone, because there is no more room on the lot to expand.  Mostly they have left the window openings alone, which is good because these narrow houses would be so dark without big Victorian window openings.  I have visited houses with the modern approach of opening the whole thing up into a single space, and I have seen houses which have reproduction Victorian wallpaper.

My house comes equipped with some of the typical positive features of old homes in general: 5-panel doors, original wood windows, moldings, plaster walls, wooden floors (both hard wood and pine) and some slate tiles on the roof.  I also have the typical problems: narrow hallways, no closets, oddly added bathrooms, an old kitchen, not enough insulation, lead paint, flaking plaster and a plumbing problem in every room.

When I think about living here in this house, I think about how to fit all 5 of us in here without going crazy and I also want a manual about how to decide when the plaster needs to be replaced.  Is it safe for the kids to go outside?  Should I have the doors stripped?  When prepping a wall for painting, seriously, should I really bother spackling when the whole wall is as pock marked as a dart board?