Document Your Claremont House Before You Change It

The cheapest thing you will ever do to an old house takes a weekend, costs almost nothing, and every single owner who skipped it wishes they had not.

Document the house before you change it.

Not after the walls are open. Not once the trim is already in a pile. Before. While the building still contains all the evidence of what it originally was.

Why bother

Four reasons, in ascending order of how much money they save you.

You will need to match something. Halfway through a project you will need the exact profile of a piece of trim, the exact dimension of a window opening, or the pattern a tile ran in. If you photographed it, you have the answer. If you did not, you are guessing.

You will need to prove something. Design review, permits, insurance claims, and disputes with contractors all turn on what the condition was before. A dated photograph settles arguments that words cannot.

A future owner will need it. Somebody in 2070 may want to restore what you altered. Your record is the only thing that will make that possible.

It is worth money at resale. A binder of documentation is one of the most persuasive things you can hand a buyer of an old house, and it is central to the case made in telling a home's story.

The photographic record

Be systematic rather than artistic. You are making evidence, not a portfolio.

Every elevation, from a consistent distance. Front, both sides, rear. Straight on, whole building in frame, on an overcast day so the shadows do not hide detail.

Every room, from every corner. Four shots per room. Boring, complete, useful.

Details, close up, with a scale in frame. Put a ruler or a coin next to the thing. Trim profiles, hardware, hinges, tile, light fixtures, built-ins, the transition where two materials meet.

The ugly parts. Photograph the damage, the failure, the previous bad repair. That is the before that makes your after meaningful, and it is what an insurer or a reviewer asks for.

The hidden parts, as they open. Framing, old wiring, what is under the floor, what is behind the plaster. This is the only chance anyone will ever get to see it. Newspaper stuffed in a wall cavity, a pencil signature on a stud, a date scratched into concrete: photograph all of it.

The measured record

Photographs distort. Numbers do not.

Sketch a rough floor plan and put dimensions on it. Room by room, wall by wall. It does not have to be beautiful; it has to be right.

Then measure the things you might have to reproduce. Window opening sizes. Door sizes. Ceiling heights. Trim widths and thicknesses. Baseboard height. The spacing of anything that repeats.

For a trim profile, the trick everyone eventually learns is simpler than measuring: cut a short offcut and save the piece. A physical sample beats any drawing, and a millwork shop can grind a knife straight from it.

The paper record

Gather what already exists before you add to it. Permit history, prior drawings, old photographs from family or archives, and whatever the title and disclosure documents contain.

The research trail for an older Claremont house, including where the records tend to live, is laid out in researching your home's history.

And ask the City of Claremont what documentation it expects if the property is subject to any review, because if there is a submittal standard you may as well shoot to it the first time.

Keep a running log while you work

The project itself is worth recording. Date, what was done, who did it, what was found, what was decided and why.

Nothing elaborate. A note on your phone the same evening is plenty. The value is entirely in it being contemporaneous rather than reconstructed two years later.

Record what you removed and where you stored it, because the salvage box only helps if somebody can find it.

Storing it so it survives

Two copies minimum, in two places, at least one in the cloud. External drives die, phones get lost, and a house fire takes the paper binder along with everything it documented.

Name files so a stranger can read them. Date first, then what it is. A folder of files called IMG_4471 documents nothing.

And put a printed summary in a folder with the deed and the permits. Digital archives are wonderful right up until nobody knows the password.

Hand it forward

When you sell, hand the whole record to the buyer. Photographs, plans, the log, the salvage inventory, the receipts, and the names of the trades who did the work.

It costs you nothing and it does two things. It gives a serious buyer real confidence in a house they are otherwise nervous about. And it means the next chapter of the building starts from knowledge rather than from scratch.

The honest summary

Old houses lose their history one undocumented project at a time. The demolition is not usually the tragedy. The tragedy is that nobody wrote down what was there.

Spend the weekend. Take four hundred photographs. Measure the trim. Then go ahead and change the house, which is your right as its owner, with the difference that the change is now recoverable.

More across the whole subject in the historic homes hub, and the argument for keeping the record clean as you go sits alongside reversible change. Anthony Grynchal has been licensed in California since November 2009.