Not a super old home, but coincidentally while working on our kitchen, our hot water tank bit the dust. I guess it was 18 years old, but I wanted to blame somebody :)

My house is circa 1953, so not nearly as old as yours, but whenever I touch something to improve.... all falls apart and becomes a much bigger project than planned :(

We have definitely noticed that the drilling and cutting in various parts of our condo shakes loose things in other parts.

Did the reno turn the water on and off? The switch in pressure is a problem for older pipes that have done nothing but hold a constant pressure for years...

You bet. Finally getting around to Phase 2 of our 6 room remodel (primarily kitchen so it's a biggy) and the bath is falling apart. Hoped to repair the bath, after the kitchen install but as it stands right now the tub is going to fall through the floor. It will fall on top of our furnace, with me in it of course. The parameds will come and I will be buck naked. Not a pretty sight for anyone.
And now, the wax seal is starting to leak on the toilet. The whole bath needs to be gutted to fix all the problems. So lots of dollars and time going to the bathroom and not the kitchen.
My kids think I need to get a life alert button.

ok, so it's not just us. GC and plumber were here until after 11pm. they thought they got it working, but i woke at 2am and everything was cold again except our bedroom and DS' room.

it really makes no sense. all radiators on first floor are ice cold. master bed/bath and DS' room on 2nd floor have heat, but DD's does not. and none of the rooms on the third floor have heat.

fun. meanwhile, the actual project of trying to work on the plumbing for the job that has ripped the back off our house is at a total standstill because they have to fix this heat thing

I don't know if this as any relation to your radiator problems, but on an episode of "Rehab Addict" her radiators failed after pipes burst in a house she was not living in full time. I wish I could remember why they were ruined. An interior fail of some kind. Maybe I can Google.

Season 5, Episode 8, that's all I could find. Not sure if the episode can be watched online.

thanks so much, schoolhouse. as an embarrassing sign of just how much HGTV I watch, I actually saw that episode. LOL. her dining room walls were spared, which she was so happy about.

so the good news continues to pour in, and in the middle of mommy & me ballet, I got a call that our boiler is just dead and we need to replace. of course, size of boiler is larger than most supply houses have in stock, so our plumber told us we needed to call gas/electric company to see if they can quote and do it faster. they came about an hour ago and gave me a quote of $20K.

HA!!!! i mean really, what else can i do but laugh.

GC is busting his butt to get us a boiler here today and installed by tomorrow. at hopefully less than $20K.

The workers are often paid by the contractor to sabotage the house so he gets extra work.

1917 house here. Doing the same type of work. Everything is falling apart. I have lucked out, though, in that the galvanized water pipes have not burst yet. That's about the only thing that has not gone wonky in some way. Hang in there!

$20,000? You poor thing. My antique furnace keeps chugging, clanging away, when it comes on it goes "BOOM!". Funny, but not. Hope he manages to find a boiler for less and it gets it installed asap.

I always thought car mechanics sabotaged while making other repairs or just changing the oil, but probably not. But after awhile a person can get paranoid when it comes to contractors as well. Like you say, you just gotta believe them and go with it.

rmtdoug, I slowly replaced the galvanized pipes with copper over the years, moving them to the center of the basement ceiling instead of along the foundation walls! All those years of frozen pipes and mayhem and the solution was as simple as moving them. No one told me. My one friend says galvanized is better and I shouldn't have replaced them but when the pipes were removed, I couldn't believe the rust build-up in them, nearly clogged in some areas.

my theory is that the rest of the house gets jealous if you lavish too much attention on one room.

so you have to keep a casual attitude and not show too much zeal about the new stuff while you keep reassuring the, ahem, older parts that you still love them. more than ever.

this applies to cars and appliances, too.

When did your reno start?

schoolhouse - If your furnace is oil, you may have a serious problem. The boom means the fuel is igniting late after it builds up. This happened to us and the "boom" blew the exhaust duct clean off the furnace and hot gasses started filling the house. Luckily I was home and went down to the basement to investigate and shut it off. The fix was to simply adjust the ignition points on the burner.

Yeah, those galvanized pipes do like to rust. Mine are approaching 100 years and the ones I've peeked inside of to the water heater are almost completely clogged with rust. I just replaced my kitchen sink drain pipe after it quit draining permanently and found the metal in the pipe was so thin at one place I could poke my finger through it. It crumbled like aluminum foil.

In all my remodeling, in the old construction, I've had cracks open up in walls, toilets that start leaking, wiring that mysteriously stops working, cold drafts that suddenly appear, but the new construction so far seems immune to the disruption. Score one for modern building techniques!