Buying an Older Home in Goshen, Indiana: What to Check First

The Goshen Historic District — on the National Register of Historic Places since 1983 — covers roughly 45 city blocks, and the housing near the center of the city runs to the late 1800s and early 1900s. Two individual Goshen houses, the William N. Violett House and the Violett-Martin House and Gardens, carry their own National Register listings. Move outward and you hit mid-century construction. Either way, a lot of the most appealing housing here is old.

That's a genuine strength — the craftsmanship, materials, and lot sizes in these homes are frequently better than anything being built now. But the inspection list is different from a newer house, and buyers coming from markets with newer stock often don't know what to ask.

Here's what Lisa tells them.

Electrical service

The first thing. Homes from this era have often been rewired once or twice, and the quality of that work varies enormously.

What matters: the size of the service coming into the house, whether the panel is a type that insurers still write on, and whether any original wiring remains in the walls. Some older wiring types are difficult or expensive to insure, and finding that out during underwriting rather than during inspection is a bad surprise.

Ask early. It's a phone call.

Mechanicals and their age

Furnace, water heater, and air conditioning all have finite lives, and in an older home you frequently inherit at least one that's near the end of it.

This is less about deal-breaking and more about budgeting. A furnace with three years left isn't a reason to walk away — it's a reason to know that a replacement is coming and to plan for it rather than being surprised by it in the second January.

The roof, and when it was last done

Get the age in writing if possible. Roofs on older homes have often been layered rather than replaced, which shortens the life of the current layer and increases the cost of the eventual tear-off.

Windows

Original windows in a Goshen home are frequently beautiful and frequently drafty, and in a climate with a real winter that's a live heating-cost question, not an aesthetic one.

There's a genuine tension here. Replacement improves efficiency; it can also strip a lot of what makes the house worth owning. Storm windows and restoration are often the better answer, and they're not always the answer a buyer expects to hear.

Foundation and drainage

The one Lisa pushes hardest on.

What you're looking for isn't cracks by themselves — most old foundations have some. It's water. Grading that slopes toward the house, downspouts discharging next to the foundation, evidence of past moisture in the basement or crawlspace, and whether whatever caused it was actually fixed or just painted over.

Water is the most expensive problem an older house can have and one of the least visible on a showing. It's also not hypothetical here: in February 2018 the Elkhart River crested at a record 13.2 feet and damaged more than 300 structures in the city. Check the flood map for any specific address — the City of Goshen publishes one — before you get attached to a house.

Insulation

Older homes were frequently built with little and insulated later, unevenly. It shows up on the utility bill rather than the inspection report, which is why the single most useful document you can request is twelve months of utility history. Sellers can usually produce it. Almost nobody asks.

What to do with all of this

Hire a licensed home inspector. Lisa is not a home inspector and won't pretend to be one — what she does is make sure you know which questions to hand the inspector, and that you get the answers before your inspection period expires rather than after.

For an older home, consider specialist follow-ups where the general inspection raises a flag: an electrician, a structural engineer, or a roofer. It costs a few hundred dollars and it is routinely the best money spent in the entire transaction.

The thing worth remembering

A buyer once walked into a 1920s house near downtown that they had specifically told Lisa they weren't interested in — they wanted new construction, nothing older than ten years, no projects. They bought it.

The inspection turned up a furnace on its last legs and grading that needed correcting. Neither killed the deal, because both were known before the offer was final and both got priced into the negotiation. That's the actual point of a careful inspection on an old house: not to find a reason to walk away, but to make sure you're buying the house you think you're buying, at a number that reflects it.

Frequently Asked Questions