>Dragan,
>
>>>But that's the great thing with the 2-by-4 house: you don't get stuck with the same old for two millenia!
>
>The English have a sort of inverse snobbery about old houses. In the UK, very old houses receive a special classification that means that any sort of alteration, even painting, needs to go through an expensive, time-consuming bureaucratic permit process. This is regarded as a "badge of honor" rather than a burden and these houses are sought after. I know the same is true in some areas of Europe as well.

Grade listing. I live in a Grade II victorian house, cica 1863. Most houses in Brighton are victorian or Regency. We got the listing when 2 residents in the street knocked out their front bay windows to make bedroom balconies. Apart from that we can paint and do internal alterations pretty much as we pleas (subject to planning permission where appropriate).

Grade I buildings are "untouchable" except as John says.

You should see some of the travesties of the 60s-80s; at one point Georgian houses became fashionable so people took out perfectly good victorian 4-panel doors and replaced them with Georgian, "unfashionable" bay windows were sheared off and replaced with those "Olde Curiosity Shoppe" multi-paned things (even with the odd "bubble glass" pane). Some angular bays were replaced with curved Georgian bays. Victorian architectural features, such as roof corbels, wee porches over the door, were simply wiped off in a move to "modernise" the look of the property. What you end up with is streets of totally disparate looks, but all obviously having come from the same original structure.

Mercifully the Regency facades (reminiscent of the French Colonial style as in New Orleans) were left untouched (Prince Regent, later George IV, indolent son of George III who lost us the American colonies! :-) A councillor, in the 1930s wanted to knock all these down and "modernise" with Art Deco style bloicks of flats. Again, mercifully, Adolf Hitler intervened.

For anyone who's interested below is a site showing examples:

http://www.duncanmcneill.com/brightonsarchitecturea/?1125654400855

The pride of Brighton, The Royal Pavilion (George IV's "play-house"), hated by Queen Victoria, was donated to the town and was ear-marked for demolition, to make way for a multi-storey car park (for Godssakes). Luckily it survived!