My wife and I thought about buying an older house too. You know what you need to do Rick is go to the bookstore, purchase your beverage of choice, and look through a book on home repair. See what you can do, see what you really don't want to do. In our case we figured that there was too much way beyond our ability so we junked the idea.
One good thing about a house which was built in the 20's is... no asbestos
But there are so many other things too, like lead solder, lead paint, wet basement, insufficient amps (which I assume you can fix yourself) old city pipes, old septic on the property, old well, leaky roofs, out of plumb chimneys, rotten subfloors, out of code and illegal wiring, man... the list just goes on.
We found out that you can get all that in our area for around 250k. Screw that.
Don't let me discourage you though, I know you engineers are resourceful people. You might be able to do a lot of it yourself.