Most of us aren’t stewarding a National Historic Landmark. But old houses are old houses, and the choices Wyck’s restoration team faced around windows, paint, and rising damp are ones that anyone in Northwest Philadelphia’s older neighborhoods will recognize.

Here’s what they learned spending $1.23 million getting it right.

Old windows could be fine

The biggest myth in the home improvement industry, according to Andrew Fearon of Heritage Conservation Collective, is that old windows are energy inefficient and should be pulled out. “The commercial window industry would have you rip out your historic windows and replace them,” he says. “Don’t believe it.”

This, he says, is because the original wood is typically old growth and of a much higher quality than what you’ll get in newer ones, which are usually constructed out of finger-jointed pine.

At Wyck, Fearon’s team carefully removed, cataloged, and reset more than 700 individual panes of historic glass, some dating to the 18th century. The window sashes, made of longleaf hard pine, were in remarkably good condition after 200 years. That’s not luck. Longleaf pine is very strong and dense, which is why the original builders used it.

If your windows are loose, they can be restored. Fearon’s team used steam to soften old glazing putty before removing the glass, and didn’t strip the wood down to bare timber. For broken panes, they imported hand-blown cylinder glass from Germany.

Because the original paint was oil-based, they didn’t have to do extensive sanding on the old wood. Instead, they painted right over the early paint layers, documenting each one. “Those early layers,” Fearon says, “are part of the building’s fabric and its history.”

As for energy efficiency, historic windows that are still tight and functioning properly are not as bad as you’d think. With the addition of interior storm windows, you get pretty close to what new windows provide. They’re relatively easy to find and get fitted, they don’t disturb the look of the historic exterior and they eliminate leaks for a fraction of what you’d pay for replacements.

What's in your paint?

If you’ve ever repainted the exterior of an old house and found yourself doing it again five years later, Fearon has a question for you: what kind of paint did you use?

Modern latex paints don’t breathe the way old masonry and wood do. They trap moisture, which causes the paint to chip and peel. Linseed oil paint, which is what Fearon’s team used throughout the Wyck restoration, allows moisture to escape and doesn’t chip. “It works with the building rather than against it,” he says.

Yes, a gallon costs more than you’ll spend on latex. But linseed oil paint lasts three to four times longer than acrylic formulations, and when it starts to degrade, you don’t have to repaint everything. You can just apply more oil directly to the chalky surface, and it renews the surface it’s covering. “You can continually do that for hundreds of years without repainting,” Fearon says.

New research suggests there’s another reason to think twice about latex. According to a 2022 study by the Swiss research firm Environmental Action, paint may be the single largest source of microplastic pollution, accounting for as much as 58 percent of the microplastics entering the world’s oceans. The plastic is in the acrylic binder. Every time it weathers and chalks, those particles are shed into our ecosystem, where they eventually wind up in our water. In a watershed neighborhood like ours, that means the Wissahickon Creek.

Rising damp: what you can do

Anyone who lives in one of the Northwest’s historic homes already knows they were designed to breathe in ways that modern construction is not. Foundations weren’t sealed from damp as they are now.

You can easily spot the result. The exterior and basement walls often show a strip of crumbling plaster, bubbling paint, or deteriorating stucco, usually about a foot or two off the ground.

That’s rising damp. Water in the soil wicks up through old masonry walls via capillary action, the same way a paper towel absorbs a spill. Modern construction uses foundation coatings to prevent this, but most old houses in Northwest Philadelphia don’t have that. “The basement is a damp place at Wyck,” Palewski says, “and it probably has been since the stucco went on.”

Dehumidifiers help, but they don’t solve the problem. For a house like Wyck, the full fix would require waterproofing the foundation. That would keep water away from the walls, but it would require pulling up the historic brick paving around the perimeter. And that would kill the roses.

So Wyck lives with the damp. It manages it with dehumidifiers and repairs stucco damage with traditional lime plaster and limewash when it gets bad enough. That’s critical. Cement is harder than old masonry, so it causes the original lime to crack. It also traps moisture. Over time, it causes more damage than the damp it’s meant to fix.

The bottom line? Whether you’re dealing with windows, paint, or damp: work with your house, not against it. The materials and methods that built it are usually still the best ones for keeping it standing.