I refer to our two hundred year old home as a white elephant. I am in the greenhouse business and my husband is a rabid gardener, so the grounds are planted with rare trees and flower gardens and go on for acres. Over the years we have added a large gazebo and a spring fed pond. yadayadayada. Only a person who knows old homes first hand, and has the time or money to hire a professional full-time gardener, should ever buy it. There'll be lots of people to come look when it goes up for sale, but it would not be for the weak of heart. Heating bills. Put that at the top of your list. Even if you let the house fall down around you, they'll just keep coming. We've installed new double-paned energy efficient windows. Caulked. Weather stripped. Built a solarium across 2/3 of the northern exposure of the home for solar gain, replaced the roof, put in a new boiler, converted from electric to gas heat (yes we had to pay to have lines ran), and placed gas grates in strategic spots to take off chill or use when it wasn't too cold. Use reversing ceiling fans to distribute the heat. We've cut our heating bill IN HALF as far as energy consumption. But, rates rise and will keep rising. We still have six hundred dollar a month heating bills in winter. And this is an old farmhouse. It does not have fourteen foot ceilings. It also is nowhere near 6,000k square feet. And, until we put a small fortune in the energy efficiency items, a draft from a window on one side of the room could blow out a candle on the other. It's comfy now, and even cool in summer so we don't need air conditioning, but for the first fifteen years of my marriage you needed a wet suit to take a bath. Think also about the bones of the house. Redecorating is great, but get somebody in there who knows construction really well to look at the skeleton of the house before you even consider buying it. The last two winters, we replaced the beams and joists under our kitchen and dining room. They were logs with the bark still on them, or logs cut on site and hand hewn to nearly square. They were ENORMOUS,and likely dragged into place by teams of horses. We needed to chain saw them to even think about getting them out. We had to gut these rooms clean down to the dirt underneath and after we got new joists up then replaced floors. Moolah. BTW, we never thought about replacing joists and floor beams in this house. After all, they'd withstood two centuries before us. Then termites happened. LOL. The roofer left about a hundred bats homeless when we replaced the slate for modern shingles. We've put in a new entrance box and had to rewire the whole house and it has solid brick interior walls. The logistics of running electricals, and the plumbing for the boiler system were staggering. If you see fuse boxes that should send up a red flag to check out the electricals for modern wiring. Moolah. We had to restucco over the seventy five year old stucco over the bricks. (major, major moolah) We've had to repair or renovate chimneys and it's hard to find brickmasons here who are familiar with the old craftsmanship. That's another thing about very old houses. Nearly everything in seriously old house is done by methods not common to craftsmen anymore and that includes materials. If you have to replace parts of woodwork it's going to be something like oak or mahogany and large. Not box store kickplates. My walls are so old, it's not even plaster on most of them, it's a sandy almost concrete covering. If we put together all the money we have spent in the last two and a half decades breathing life back into our wonderful old home, we could be living in a really fancy new one. We don't want to. We love our old home and pretty much know it inside and out by now. But, it's like a marriage and yes.............we are the volunteer caretakers to an historic old building we couldn't see being left to ruin. But, it's going to take a very special person to want the job after us. Now, ask me about the plastering schedule where the doors and windows are. LOL. Old houses just keep settling. Not a door in this house even resembles a rectangle. They all have been trimmed or had wood added to them to fit the openings. Every window was custom made and no two are the same size. The house is nearly regained its integrity now, and I can see the end in sight of the major issues. But, if we had been forced to sell this at any point along our long path of renovation, and somebody else had to pick up where we'd left off, if they knew up from down, you can take it to the bank our money and sweat wouldn't have left much room for profit. There'd have been no quick sells. The end results perfect for us. It's rustic yet and even has a pitcher pump in the kitchen to pull up the spring water for the house. But you always live with a foot in the past where people lived simpler and made do in some respects. Some people can do that. Some people can't. It fits our lifestyle well.........simple and hard working. But, it was purchased because my husband wanted an old large home in a rural setting. If he'd just wanted "room" it wouldn't have even been in the game. Good luck whatever you decide.

My kitchen was last remodeled 22 years ago by a group of friends from my church. (Friends of mine used to live in my house.) When my carpenter (also a friend from church) tore down some cabinets yesterday, he found a note on the sheetrock, in his handwriting, that said: "You know that nice older lady who lives at 184 Forestry Lane, across the street? Well, when she was young and supple, she helped to build this wall!" The "older lady," who's all of 55, still lives across the street, and got a big kick out of seeing this. None of us knew we'd be here when the kitchen was remodeled again!

So, from Pedro's graphs, it appears that the steam oven has a wobble of about 3-4 degrees, which is about what I'd expect from the discussion. Plenty good for making dinner, but not precise enough for when that's the difference between different levels of doneness. I think this is where the immersion circulator is revolutionary and wipes out a lot of the assumptions in the existing texts. Given the assumption that they really are as accurate as they're supposed to be (I tested once with my instant read, because I was using a big roasting pan and wasn't sure about the large volume, and it was fine, but that was nowhere near a scientific test), and have had tremendous results, but haven't had a fail to investigate. When looking at the old style commercial circulators with tanks and commercial or the original high end only CSOs, many thousands of dollars for either, for a specialty piece of equipment, it's a debate worth having. With an inexpensive immersion circulator and a $10 pot or bucket or cooler, easily gotten for free, as well, it just throws those arguments out. The immersion circulator can be classed with the torch, infrared thermometer, and grill press, as a kitchen gadget that's slightly pricey for a limited use item, but is just another tool in the kitchen. It's the price of sous vide grade vacuum bag rolls that's the kicker, nowadays, when a circulator costs about the same as any other countertop oven. I reuse the water for the washing up. :) Well, that paragraph is a mess. What I meant was that a lot of the discussions are from before the immersion circulator (and from a professional perspective) and I think it really changes things, especially for home cooks who already have a vacuum sealer. I didn't find what you were referring to in Cooking Issues, but it was very interesting. I did find the discussion of the pickling in vacuum interesting, but I don't know enough to know if the vacuum chamber is necessary or just what they had? Perhaps it builds a truer vacuum, and the pickler was talking about the pressure and pressure release boiling, so maybe that is different with a chamber than just sucking out the air. If so, that would be a reason for the small vacuum drawers, as well. I've been looking at sous vide turkey breasts. I did the roulades last year, and they were great. I found a lot of recommendations for on the bone, but they still remove the ribs. I don't want to fiddle around with that, though I could probably get the butcher to do it. Some of those drawers don't look like they'd hold a whole turkey breast on the bone, though I'm pretty sure it would fit in my bag material. Chanop, many thanks, again, for the great discussion and for providing so many interesting sources of input. It's a real treat!

"Sadly, our current home meets 90% of the requirements in your suggestions: one story, easy access, plenty lighting both indoor and outdoor, wide hallway & door way, wide space in the kitchen, all 3 bathrooms designed for aging...etc. We love our neighborhood. It seems we do not have sufficient reasons to move if it is not because the house and yard are too large for us." Do you want to move, or do you think you should move just because you're aging. If you love the neighborhood, love the house and it's designed for aging, there's really not a big argument in favor of moving. As someone above suggested, can always hire out the lawn work, and if you think the house is too big for you, just close off some rooms, leave them empty or use them for storage, that way you won't have to clean them, and you can shut off the vents to conserve air conditioning costs (heck, a lot of people do just that with a basement...). Not a big deal in my book. Filling in a pool would probably cost less money than paying a commission on the sale of your house combined with closing costs on a new house and the other associated costs with a new house (paint/decorating, minor repairs, etc). DH and I did think about the ability to age in place when we purchased our current house, although not to the extent of the some of the suggestions above (which are great and definitely things to think about down the road - our house is adaptable to a lot of the above). I had a tri-level for a long time, and we were adamant about a ranch. Period. I didn't care about a basement, but DH wanted a basement - man-cave and all that. We did think about ability to access necessities (grocer, drugstore, etc) when we're older and driving becomes more difficult. But, I wonder if that even matters -- in the next 10-15 years or so (if that) self-driving cars will be the norm, so if you're not at the point now where you can't see yourself driving in the next 10 or so years I wouldn't worry about transportation as a criteria for housing for seniors.