"I was just talking about this with my sister after noticing the same thing in her 250 year old house. She said that the cracks appear every winter in the plaster and disappear again in the spring (or at least become not noticable)." These are often refered to as 'working cracks' that open and close as the wood in the building swells and chrinks between cooling and heating seasons. There are some claims by various companies of flexible material that can move with the substrate and keep the crack invisible year round, but every time I have tried them they have failed. They bulge during the swelling phase when the crack closes, or pull away from the material when it shrinks, opening the crack again. I have even had cracks that were open near the floor of houses close at the floor and open near the ceiling when layers of roofing were removed. Nothing like taking a few thousand pounds of shingles off the roof to change the loading on the structure. A common problem with molding is using inexpensive 'painters caulk' to fill gaps between the trim and the wall. Better quality caulk has at least a chance of staying attached. I prefer the siliconized acrylics that are not as expensive as full silicone caulks (that do not accept paint) but often double the really cheap stuff. Around $4-5 a tube is what I typically pay.

Abiotlegesse, As the OP who lived through this the last couple of years, my first thought to your post was RUN. For us, our problem only got worse until serious and expensive interventions happened. "Grading" and "scraping" our back and front side yard (done by the builder as a solution to my complaint) DIDN'T work. The developer did nothing to correct our problem - there was a lot of talk, but nothing was actually done by him. The builder tried the scraping and grading. But, by the time we got another heavy rain that proved it didn't work, our one year builder warranty was expired. However, I will say that French drains (multiple) did finally work for us. Late last summer, our neighbor to the west of us put in French drains that wrapped all the way around his back yard and emptied into his and my front yard, with our permission (he did this because his backyard was starting to flood so badly that it was coming into his house). Since a good deal of our water flows downhill from his house (and the houses west of him) his French drains helped the flooding on the west side of our backyard a bit. But, his French drains could't help the water that also was flowing from the houses behind us (south of us) into our backyard. Late this spring, my husband installed French drains along the middle and east side of our back fence line and down the east side of our backyard up to the front yard all the way to street. He also hooked into our western neighbor's French drain that was emptying into the west side of our front yard and he extended that out to empty into the street as well. Since then, we've had two very heavy (days long) stints of rain and I'm happy to say that our flooding problem is gone. We still have some minor puddling issues on the west side of our yard behind our shed (where we didn't install a French drain). But, we no longer have a river flowing through our backyard. And, even better, we no longer have the resulting lake sitting our backyard that then stays for several days to weeks before finally evaporating. I can't say whether or not they would be able to bring legal action against you if you backed out at this time. However, I will say that if you move forward with buying the house, before closing, you should try very hard to get the drainage issue documented in writing, detailing what the developer and/or builder has done so far to correct the issue, the fact that the issue is still not completely corrected, and that the developer and/or the builder will take further actions to ensure the issue is corrected to your satisfaction. Buying the house without some sort of written agreement about the specific existing issue will only make it that much harder for you to get them to correct later. For me, it was clear that we would need to take our developer to court if we wanted him to pay to correct our drainage issues. After a lot of debate and thought, we decided to spend our money on just fixing the problem ourselves versus legal fees that might get the developer to pay to fix our problem. We've certainly learned quite a bit about home buying the hard way with this experience (and it wasn't our first house buying experience). On the bright side, since we don't intend to retire here, we can use what we've learned to hopefully make the next buying experience much better.

We'll be keeping our sons' bedroom furniture and giving our daughter ours. We plan to buy new furniture for our bedroom and the living room, and maybe a couch for our office den. Otherwise, we already have a lovely dining room table with chairs that we've had in the dining room here but have generally eaten at an old table (old, not antique) in the kitchen, with chairs that are falling apart. Our kids have used ratty folding chairs when eating. We will be getting rid of the chairs that are junk and I plan to put that table and other furniture we no longer want into our unfinished basement for the kids to use for puzzles, Lego building, etc. Our living room furniture is quite old and in pretty bad shape, so if we keep anything it'll be going into the basement. We have various pieces of furniture I'm hoping to get rid of. I'm not sure if we'll try to sell it or just set it out by the road with a sign saying "FREE" and let people pick it up. It's amazing what disappears that way! There's one stuffed rocking chair I bought before we were married that my husband has always hated. It fits my build perfectly, but it does scoot back and rubs against baseboards and has destroyed our paint job on baseboards around the living room. It's also falling apart and the springs have sprung. The other night he was in a weird mood and kept trying to get me to pounce on the chair with him and rip it apart. LOL Common sense prevailed as we do still need the sitting space, but I wouldn't be surprised if he takes an axe to it when we finally move.

I don't think anyone has mentioned this but we would like to get a corner chair, possibly with ottoman, near where the Christmas tree is. We would like more seating and to fill the space. Would this look okay and thoughts on color? Room and board has a couple lighter leather chairs we like! Thanks!