Looking at a seriously old house and need some input

[Joel Colvos]

We have a line on a 100 plus year old historic log cabin in our target area in our target price range.  It has some minor structural issues and all systems would need replacing/developing however I'm a bit afraid of opening up this can of worms with the local building dept and really I need to make sure I'm asking the right questions.

We are not intimidated by the repairs needed and have some innovative solutions to be able to retrofit newer systems into the cabin.  Even structurally I feel pretty confident that we can make some minor tweeks that would make it much more structurally sound (replacing a few rotten logs etc).  However none of this is going to be up to contemporary building codes and frankly bringing it up to code (how could you even do that?) would ruin the beauty of the cabin.

We would want to discuss this with the local planners before we proceed but I'm not even sure how to start the discussion.  I know that the rules will be different for different areas, but in general what would our rights be as a contractor taking on a historic structure like this?  Clearly its not going to be up to the International Building Code but it would be safe and we could install the various systems up to code with a little flexibility from the building dept.

I know this is kind of wrong and weird but I'm wondering if anyone out there has any experience with something like this?  How do modern building codes get applied in this type of situation and how could I avoid any pitfalls?  Our local building dept is not known for their creative and out of the box thinking.