UCGal: Wow, you went for a major seismic retrofit … usually when I want to talk about that I have to seek out my friend the structural engineering postdoc. The house I hope to own 45 days from now was built to UBC 94 so I’m not worried. But I’ve seen even some post-Northridge houses that lacked, shall we say, a visible means of support.
DWCAP: Nope, that Depression-era dining room set was stripped and refinished once when my parents bought it. Just a bit of dusting now and then. I do think that my grandmother’s old North Korean dowry chest could use another coat of perilla oil and lampblack, but I should probably leave that to a professional antique restorer.
sdduuuuude: The old ’60s dining-room set now graces my aunt’s home … looks like something out of an Austin Powers flashback sequence but it’s still in great shape.
cantab: I agree that in many ways standards have improved. Certainly I’m not nostalgic for knob-and-tube wiring.
Russell: There’s a huge middle ground between “legacy style” and the sort of crap construction I see when I’m out house-hunting. I don’t demand kitchen cabinets that last a century. That said it’s obvious that an unpainted particle-board sink cabinet won’t last a decade, yet builders use them and some consumers accept it.
I’m not sure that oversight and regulation of construction has increased all that much. Certainly the development process has been regulated to death, but I’m not sure how many times the average tract home has been graced by a city inspector’s shoes.
