The exterior walls of a large part are 16 inches thick hand made bricks. No vapor barrier or air gap. The windows in this portion are set in wood frames laid in said walls to lock them in. All single pane with a storm window added. The floor is single layer over hand hewn logs. Insulation added between logs and years of bracing and jacks......like 30 or more jacks. Rooms 10 foot ceilings. Roof has round poles supporting some of the tongue and groove sheathing some is rough cut. Has a blown in insulation of the older type. Crawl space varies from tunnel rats nightmare to hand dug. Has vapor barrier several seasonal vents. The walls in the deepest of the dug out portions were all poorly executed. They are falling, buckled, and cracks with day light and rain water that comes in and floods. The exterior walls of the greater structure have running cracks from top to bottom in three areas, btw all those walls have zero footing. This is the reason for the interlaced wide brick work of 16 inches. The front room we call the TV space and the only bath room was an L shaped front porch. Addition number one. The rear room we use as a mud room and pantry was rolled up the hill and attached. It was an older separate kitchen. You know when cooking fires heated and or destroyed homes. Absolutely Everytime these additions got done it was with the most frugal means possible. Family ancestor was a carpenter, however like two buildings I have had to deal with everything was done with the drops or lefts overs when possible. I've repaired plumbing with cast iron, copper, PVC and CPVC in 24 inches of each other.
My wife nor I want to pour our money into a structure that has out lived it's time. Absolutely nothing is normal about this home. It's a literal patch work of 100 years. To bring it into normal building standards with the age and condition of the whole I could spend an awful lot and still be patching over a foundation of crumbling dry rotted pine and clay bricks. For example the earlier mentioned windows, if I dug into them much they turn into brittle chips. Layers of paint is holding a lot of it together.
Now the biggest issue. The home isn't ours. We live here and take care of it essentially. We have zero ownership of it or the property. It's a mess of a child being promised a portion with the constraints of getting that portion only after death. Setting said child up in a sort of hostage situation of never understanding the commitment to wait out those years. Almost an obligation and a curse. A blessing but a burden. Never entertaining making ones own investment because of the house provided. I married into it. I didn't learn enough about the current to fully grasp relocating to a home that you can't use as equity or make serious changes too without permission. I wasn't mislead but I was ignorant to the long game. I made assumptions and they are wrong. Me and the wife should have walked away and invested in ourselves. This old house could have just sat. Now we are years behind that possibility. The time and money invested here we should have used to build our own home.
. The first winter we lived there after we got married, we ran through the heating oil. I then put in a propane brick heater to supplement but my wife claimed the smell gave her headaches. What worked best for us was space heaters. The light bill was a lot cheaper than that fuel oil bill.