My building used to be a sanitarium! The only thing I ever got out of it are really wide hallways

At my last apartment in the basement of a private house, a pizza guy once looked in and said, oh hey, you changed the place. I was like, ??, and he said, my cousin used to live in this apartment years ago. So weird to think our homes had lives before us! If the walls could talk....

I have a full list of owners of my house since it was built in 1870. It's not a long list. One guy died in the front bedroom in the 1960s but I don't find I'm troubled by that.

More troubling is the huge increase in the price paid for the house since the early 80s! And the flock wallpaper that was (thankfully) removed by the previous owners.

It really strange to be in that pub in Nottingham with the list of past pub owners going back to the 1400s....

I am the first owner of my condo. That's kind of weird, depending on how long we will live here.

My house was a summer cottage. The previous owner added a good foundation, but did a random job of fixing up. Any cottage charm was removed, except for the uneven floors. It looked like a small suburban house that had seen better days. I've been trying to bring back some cottage-y feel, and removing the worst excesses (fake brick paneling - poorly installed, the cheapest carpet possible - well worn, the kitchen cupboards - seeming built like a house of cards; 1 pieces fails, and it all falls apart). Partway there. Next up - the main floor bathroom with the falling-apart tub enclosure.

Persistent creditors still send notices to the previous residents (tenants). I spent large parts of the 1st 2 summers cleaning junk out of my yard, and the lot next to me, which has been used as a random dump. I found (so far) 3 dead cordless drills, lots of bottles/broken glass, an old pint mild container, lots of leaky inflatable toys, a can of frosting - 1/2 full.

The house has a nice feel though, so somebody left behind some okay karma.

I'm the 3rd or 4th owner of my 1961 house -- it's not quite clear how the guy I brought it from got the house. One neighbor is the original owner and the other one has been here 20ish years. I give thanks someone had the hardwood floors carpeted over at one point because they are great shape 50 years later.

We're only the fourth owners of our house built in 1865. The family that we bought it from had owned it from 1905 until 2007. It's almost required that you get a full history of your house researched here, most of our neighbors have had that done, we'll get to it one of these days. One tidbit that I do know about is that the grandfather of the elderly brothers that we bought the place from had been Evelyn Nesbit's driver. I don't have any proof of that but we do know that he ran a livery company out of the house and that the Thaw's lived two blocks away so it's certainly believable.

my uncle's tenant's bf killed himself in the downstairs unit. My aunt never found out....but it doesn't matter now because that house was demolished and they built a new one on the site.

Anita Loos lived in my building, but I don't know which unit.

The man who wrote the Little Prince lived in the building I 1st lived in in NY.....and I was seriously thinking of buying the Clift house(which was also the one Teddy Roosevelt bought for Alice when she got married),but it needed way too much work.

A lot of people who fix up their old houses talk about "restoring" their houses.

Restoring's definitely a different project than fixing up, in the technical sense.

Our apartment, which I love, is fixed up rather than restored. It's lovely, and has lots of original fixtures, but the old cigarette stained wallpaper was stripped away before we left, and the floors redone to a beautiful sheen. The "all original!" kitchen pantry and counter were also torn out, and despite my preservationist ethic, they were nothing special and the owners made the right choice.

What's fun is that the place is a work in progress. Long range plans are to finish out the upstairs attic, which has 3 more bedrooms and a sitting room, to make for a huge 4 BR 2 bath two-floor house-style apartment. But right now, you open the door to the attic and you're immediately back 50 years in time. There are old baseball stickers on one of the bedroom walls, looking to be from the 70s maybe - you all might remember these kinds of stickers we used to have before we really had sticky ones - they were paper, you had to lick them, and they tasted faintly of sweet menthol flavor. Also, there is 1920s linoleum on the floor, and an old marble mantelpiece. It's fun,like having a little Nancy Drew secret mystery chamber in your house. LT thinks it's creepy but I like it. It's my hideout.

NYC building codes make it illegal to "restore" certain features. I had to change some things to make them even less than they had been in the old days in order to pass inspection.

One of the previous owners died in a building fire. She had been smoking in bed.

At least for the exterior, we have to restore our house since it's in a city historic district which means that we have to get any facade changes approved by the Historic Review Board. We just went through that for our side porch rebuild project.

The interior we can do what we want with but we're doing our best to restore the look of the mid-nineteenth century although we've gone with 21st century heating, wiring and plumbing. One big concession to the past is that we're keeping the original windows with their warped and bubbly glass.