Your House is HOW Old?

Today’s Wall Street Journal teaches a new word…”Dendochronology.” That’s how you find out exactly how old your olde, olde house really is. A technician takes samples from your wood beams and counts and measures the rings to determine when the wood was harvested.

Steve Nicklin bought a $750,000 old home built in Virginia in 1669. George Washington was supposed to have dined there.But after the ‘dendo’ was done, it was dated 71 years younger. So much for the GW legacy.

“It’s very sexy to be able to know the exact year your house was built,” says Walter R. Wheeler, architecture historian in New York.