What I Learned About Restoration Living in a Pre-War Building (And Why Your Grandmother’s Furniture Is Probably Better Than IKEA)

Living in a pre-war building has taught me a lot about what lasts and what doesn’t. My studio might be tiny and dark, but the bones of this 1920s building are solid in ways that modern construction just isn’t. The radiators actually work (when they feel like it), the hardwood floors are real wood that’s survived almost a century, and the built-in details have a quality you can’t get at Home Depot.

So when I started following restoration accounts on Instagram – you know how the algorithm works, you look at one vintage kitchen and suddenly your feed is all exposed brick and original millwork – I got fascinated by the process of bringing old spaces back to life. Especially after spending two years stuck in my apartment during the pandemic, I started really noticing the difference between spaces that feel authentic and ones that feel… fake.

The whole thing clicked for me when I found this woman’s story about restoring her grandmother’s 1922 Craftsman bungalow in Portland. She’d inherited this house that had been “updated” so many times it barely resembled what it originally was. Drop ceilings covering original beams, vinyl flooring over hardwood, built-ins painted that awful beige color that landlords seem to love. Sound familiar?

What got me was how the restoration process was basically the same philosophy I’d stumbled into with my plant obsession and apartment hacks – working with what you have instead of replacing everything, respecting the original design, being patient with the process. Except instead of trying to make a terrible studio livable, she was uncovering decades of good craftsmanship that had been hidden under layers of cheaper updates.

The before and after photos were incredible, but what really interested me were the details about how much original material they were able to save. Those beams under the drop ceiling? Perfect condition after nearly a century. The hardwood floors under three layers of different flooring materials? Just needed refinishing. Even the brass hardware that looked completely destroyed cleaned up like new with some patience and the right techniques.

This connects to something I’ve been thinking about since I started trying to make my apartment feel less like a cave. There’s this assumption that newer automatically means better, but that’s not always true. The original windows in my building – the ones that haven’t been replaced with cheap vinyl – actually work better and let in more light. The hardwood floors in units that haven’t been “updated” with laminate look better and will last longer. Even the old brass mailboxes in the lobby have more character than the plastic replacements in newer buildings.

I started researching restoration techniques partly out of curiosity and partly because I was thinking about what I wanted in my next apartment. Turns out there’s this whole community of people doing restoration work who think about sustainability in ways that make sense to me. Instead of throwing everything away and buying new stuff, they’re preserving materials that took decades or centuries to create.

Like, those quarter-sawn oak floors that were under all the vinyl and carpet in the Portland house? You literally cannot buy wood like that anymore because the trees don’t exist. But with careful restoration, those floors will outlast any laminate or engineered hardwood you’d install today. Same with the built-in cabinets that were solid wood with actual joinery instead of particle board held together with brackets.

The furniture restoration part especially caught my attention because I’ve been slowly collecting vintage pieces from estate sales and Facebook Marketplace. Not because I’m trying to be trendy, but because you can get solid wood furniture for less than IKEA prices if you’re willing to do some work. I picked up this 1960s dining table for thirty dollars that just needed the finish redone. Spent a weekend stripping and oiling it, and now I have a table that’ll last forever instead of falling apart in five years.

What I learned from following these restoration projects is that the old ways of making furniture were often better than what we do now. Like, chairs used to have horsehair padding and hand-tied springs that lasted for decades and actually got more comfortable over time. Now everything is foam and particle board that breaks down and needs replacing every few years.

The environmental impact is pretty obvious when you think about it. Every piece of furniture or building material you restore instead of replacing means less stuff in landfills and less demand for new resource extraction. But it also means you end up with better quality materials that don’t need to be replaced as often.

I’ve started applying some of these ideas to my own small space. Instead of buying new furniture that I know won’t last, I look for vintage pieces that need minor restoration work. Spent forty dollars on a solid wood bookshelf at an estate sale that just needed new hardware and some wood conditioner. It’s better quality than anything I could afford new, and doing the restoration work myself was actually pretty satisfying.

Same approach with the bigger elements I can control in my apartment. My landlord was going to replace the original bathroom vanity with some cheap Home Depot cabinet, but I convinced him to let me restore the existing one instead. Stripped the old paint, refinished the wood, upgraded the hardware. It cost less than replacement and looks way better than anything modern in the same price range.

The Portland house project took six months to complete, but the results were incredible. The space went from feeling generic and depressing to having real character and warmth. Natural materials throughout, original architectural details revealed, everything connecting in ways that felt intentional instead of random.

What really struck me was how the restoration work connected to the biophilic design principles I’d been learning about. Both approaches are about working with natural materials, respecting existing systems, and creating spaces that feel good to be in. Both require patience and attention to detail. Both recognize that sometimes the sustainable choice is preserving what already exists instead of constantly replacing things with new stuff.

The woman who restored the Portland house said something that stuck with me: after the project was done, the space felt “alive again.” Not like a museum or a perfect Instagram photo, but like a home that had been given room to breathe. People could sense the difference between authentic materials and synthetic substitutes, even when they couldn’t explain what they were responding to.

I think about this a lot in the context of urban housing and who gets access to well-designed spaces. Restored pre-war buildings with original details and quality materials tend to be expensive now, which means most young people end up in newer construction with cheaper finishes and no character. But understanding restoration techniques means you can sometimes find diamonds in the rough – places with good bones that just need work.

Obviously, most of us aren’t in a position to do full-scale architectural restoration. But the principles apply to smaller projects too. That vintage dresser on Craigslist that needs refinishing. The brass lamp at a thrift store that needs rewiring. Learning to see past surface damage to evaluate whether something is worth restoring versus replacing.

I’ve started documenting some of my smaller restoration projects on my blog – refinishing furniture, reviving brass hardware, simple repairs that extend the life of things instead of throwing them away. It connects to the broader themes I write about around sustainable living in small urban spaces, but with a focus on preservation and repair instead of always buying new solutions.

The economics work out better than you’d expect, especially if you’re willing to do some of the work yourself. That thirty-dollar dining table I refinished would cost at least three hundred dollars to buy new in similar quality, if you could even find solid wood construction. The restored bathroom vanity cost half what replacement would have been and will last decades longer.

More importantly, working with your hands to restore something that was well-made decades ago creates a different relationship with your living space than just buying everything new. You understand how things are constructed, why they last, what makes them functional. It’s the opposite of the disposable mindset that treats everything as replaceable.

Whether you’re working on a whole house or just refinishing a single piece of furniture, the approach stays the same: respect what was done well originally, use appropriate materials and techniques, and remember that the goal isn’t perfection – it’s preservation of what works while making it functional for how you actually live.