Interview: A Veteran Carpenter on Working with Old Houses

Sam Carter works out of a barn in upstate New York. His clients are mostly people who’ve bought houses built before 1940 and want to know what they’ve gotten themselves into. We sat on his porch one Saturday morning in early spring, with the coffee strong enough to hold a spoon up, and asked him to talk.

On what new owners get wrong

“They think the house is finished. It’s not. A house this old is always partway through something. The previous owner started it, the one before them started something else, and you’re just the next person in line. The job isn’t to finish it. The job is to keep it moving in the right direction.”

The first year, you don’t touch anything. You just watch how the house behaves through every season. Then you start fixing what the house has been telling you about.

On what he’d never do

“Rip out the original plaster. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Drywall is fine, drywall is honest, but plaster has a quality to it — the way it deals with sound, the way it sits with the trim — that drywall will never give back. If it’s structurally sound, you patch it. You don’t replace it.”