By Al Heavens Inquirer Real Estate Columnist Sometime during the last decade or so, Americans began seeing their homes less as shelter and more as a bottomless well of cash. Look in any direction for the results: foreclosures, sheriff’s sales, construction layoffs, mortgage-modification scams. The list keeps growing. But maybe you still see homeownership as an end in itself, as Matt and Judie Schultz of Lansdowne and Suzanne Merrill and Tracy Radler of Titusville, N.J., do. Instead of short-term, moneymaking machines into which you put a little cash so you can take out a lot more, their houses – built at opposite ends of the 19th century – have been challenges with long-term commitments. In…

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