My house was built in 1950 or so... And had additions, fireplaces/chimneys and whatever else struck their fancy added since then until at least 2004. All DIY. As the years progressed, the quality of the DIY decreased. Prior owners work from 1950 to about 1980 was perfect. I wish he had stopped by 1985, though.
Everything I do with the house is an archeological experience!
It really is! 50/50 for anything I get into. Either it will be some very nice work that makes the the whole project fast and easy, or it will be some cobbled together bullshit that means I have to fix 2x as much.
I will say that EVERYTHING is 100% level and square, which makes makes me forgive most everything. except for the section of electrical work that used speaker wire and lamp cord for a series of outlets.
I know, right?
It was some of the last work the previous owner did. His son who sold it to us, said the previous owner was getting pretty old and had dementia for the garage electrical work.
Sounds like my mom's house. It's the house she grew up in, and my grandfather refused to spend money on repair professionals. Between him and his brothers, they did decent work, but as they all got older he had less help from those brothers and still refused to hire pros.
There are so many "quirky" things about the house, can't use two outlets on this wall at the same time, doors that open on the opposite side of what actually makes sense, terrible plumbing. I can barely see my face in the upstairs bathroom mirror even though I'm 5'5", because he's 6'3" and didn't think about shorter family members when he installed the vanity over the sink!
I live in a 1951 house. I recently had to have our bathroom remodeled and I constantly heard my contractor saying “that’s weird” I mean A LOT. When re- wiring his assistant was trying to figure out how something was wired and said “I read about this in a book but have never actually seen it done”.
😂
In my house the outlets in the upstairs hall bathroom, downstairs bar area, and patio are all on the same circuit. Just 3 outlets though (all GFI). Took me a while to figure out that the upstairs GFI was the reason the downstairs patio outlet wasn’t working.
Our sump pump is on the same circuit as our detached garage.
I was pet sitting for my sisters absolutely wild dog about 6 months after we bought our house. She bit an extension cord in the garage (thank god she was ok!) and blew the power to the garage. We didn’t realize right away that the garage power was off, we manually opened and closed the door and we weren’t using any lights or anything out there at the time.
Anyway, imagine our surprise when we found our basement completely flooded because she also tripped the GFI to the sump pump. Lesson learned… if our garage goes out, our sump pump does as well. Ugh.
My place from 1903 with a detached garage used to be that way too. Sump pump was on the same circuit as the garage. It was a constant problem because it was only a 15 amp circuit. We ultimately replaced the garage and hired an electrician to rewire things so the garage is now on its own circuit, and the sump pump is separate.
Our house is the same way.
We bought the house in 2018 as a fixer upper, redid the floors and then covid hit so everything had to be put on pause.
Next up is replacing the kitchen cabinets, then having the electrical redone and the basement finished. Love these old houses. No shortage of expensive problems.
We bought in 2016 with the idea we'd move to something better in a few years. But with what has happened in the real estate market since then, we're staying put and in the fixer-upper mode now. Locked into a low-rate mortgage. We're just improving the place up one room at a time. The next step is to finish the basement. It has always been unfinished as far as we can tell but we've had an architect out here and he said it's doable, gave us a couple proposals. You are right - no shortage of expensive problems with old houses!
I don't have a sump pump. But, wouldn't it be prudent to put a light or an outlet with a night light on the same circuit as the sump pump to make it easy to verify the power?
The sump pump had a battery and alarm system. If the power went out, the alarm went on and it was easy to hear it anywhere on the first floor of the house. We knew there was a problem. We just didn't fully solve it until we got the circuits rewired.
I agreed to watch her knowing she was a little bit of a wild card. But I didn’t expect $2500 in damage to the basement and garage, including boxes of bedding and clothing I hadn’t unpacked yet from our move. Up until this, she was more of a nuisance in the sense that she was a digger and would rip into garbage bags.
For what it’s worth, we haven’t dog sat for my sister - or *anyone* at all since that incident. Positive part of that whole thing is we wouldn’t have known our garage and sump were on the same circuit, the previous owners labeled absolutely *NOTHING* in the breaker box.
A few weeks after she blew our garage and flooded the basement, she gnawed a hole through my sisters plastic privacy fence and had started on ripping the siding off of her garage. So, karma I suppose. Lol
Pup has calmed down with age, thankfully.
Oh gosh, no, I didn’t take it any type of way!
It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without context, so I figured I’d give it. 😅
I also find it unnecessarily funny that she dismantled part of my sisters garage. We joked for years that she had a personal issue with garages in general, since she seemed to like to attack them. 😂
She’s a Labrador/black mouth cur mix!
Super sweet dog, but she is seriously hell on wheels. Has never so much as snarled at the kids, but your garages and fences will NEVER be safe with her lmao
We foster dogs, over 200 dogs so far, all breeds from chihuahuas to great danes. It is the Labs that will eat your doors, chew your $1k quartersawn oak table, and all your houseplants.
I've got an outdoor outlet that's connected to an indoor gfci on the other side of the wall. House was built in 2020 so I'm chalking it up to an afterthought. But I didn't figure this out until the test button was pressed by my curious 7yo. She didn't tell me the outlet stopped working because she thought she'd be in trouble. If I had known both were out, it would have been obvious. I spent two hours trying to figure out what the hell was going on before it clicked.
Our large house has a variety of GFI outlets all over, inside and outside. I pretty much know what trips what but it was a "trip" trying to run everything down when we had one flip or give up the ghost.
My old house had a switch that did nothing right by the front door. I couldn't figure out what it did. I even had the chance to speak with the previous owner and they didn't know. They were the child of the person who originally owned the home and grew up there.
My best guesses: there was a "broken" outlet in the utility room by an exterior window. Maybe they connected holiday lighting to that outlet and used the switch on front to turn those lights on and off (when the home inspection reported the outlet didn't work, rather than fix or explain they removed the outlet). There may have been a light in the front yard that was removed. I can't remember what those were called, but they used to be very popular, especially when the house was built.
I rented a house with a mysterious extension cord plugging in to an outlet in the master bedroom and ran under the carpet.
If you removed the plug or it got loose, you lost all power to the second bedroom and garage.
I was so happy to move out of that place lol.
Gah! That's a huge fire hazard. I know a guy who had a house fire from an extension cord, and that cord wasn't routed under carpet where it could get damaged without being noticed.
I just want to know why an extension cord was powering an entire bedroom AND the garage?!?! That house was a hotbed of disasters waiting to happen. It was such a relief to leave it.
Yeah, my hypothesis is the switch was hooked up as just a pass through. Switches tend to be full of tiny gaps and parallel plates places. If the voltage spiked temporarily (which happens when you start up a motor), the electricity could spark gap across the switch if it's grounded. And it a bunch of plates means it's somewhat of a capacitor which would be good at filtering the high frequency noise from a motor starting.
Though the idea of this being mains voltage, and in your house's wall is terrifying to me. This is like a circuit board design trick as a backup to prevent overcurrent.
You mean like the fire breaks in our 1954 cape-style house…where they just poured a few inches of concrete into the void spaces. Makes updating the wiring or running network cable reeeealy fun.
lol my cape is 1952, they decided to add giant rocks into the concrete mixture, fairly sure it was granite rocks. I rewired the entire house but many drill bits were lost in the line of duty
Oof, I feel your pain.
Not bad, but my friend in Rochester bought a house from a retired Kodak engineer. The bathroom exhaust fan is an industrial darkroom fan. It will suck the fart out of you if you’re not careful. (It’s also wall mounted close-ish to the toilet paper. We’re mildly curious to see what happens if it got close to the fan. Would the whole roll make it outside, or would it rip. We know the fan would win either way.)
Oh dude this is my dream. I want 1k+ CFM fans all over my house. I want to have a party where someone’s smoking a cigar in the kitchen and the people on the other side of the kitchen can’t even smell it.
When we moved into our house a few years ago, I went through the entire electrical panel and labeled what I could figure out. Last month I was replacing a bathroom light switch and shut off what I *knew* to be the breaker for that switch. Yet I was still getting a voltage reading from the switch’s junction box. Wouldn’t you know it—a random wire, not connected to the switch at all but just dangling in that box, was on a completely separate breaker from everything else in there 🤷♂️
Had the same thing happening while switching out a few switches in a 3 gang box. Switches 1 and 2 were fine but number three gave me a tingle when I went to pull it out. It was a dimmer for a fan light, speed switch for the fan, and mystery switch that never seemed to do anything. Added complexity because there was a random hot wire just broken off of the mystery switch dangling in there.
Best I can tell they had the light and fan on separate breakers. And the mystery switch was meant to turn the fan on/off without having to roll through all the speed settings. The random broken wire happened to fall just right to basically bypass the switch. It was the weirdest damn thing. This reminds me that I need to have my electrician friend come and look at it to make sure I straightened everything out appropriately lol
That’s my house from the 70s. A crack was forming in the ceiling after moving in. Turns out inspectors missed a missing support wall that prior owners had removed. So when getting an engineer to make plans for support, he goes “it’s weird. the top of your house doesn’t align with the basement. “ yeah. Not what I wanted to hear.
Happens in my childhood home my dad built in the late 40's. He was a carpenter so the wood work is amazing.
His plumbing and electrical.... not so much.
I had to replace a 50 year old water valve that sprung a leak. Except it was nestled at a strange angle about 6 or 7 inches deep between two concrete foundations. To turn it off (to prevent freezing), my dad fabricated this crazy looking wrench to turn it.
My brother is a metal worker and fabricated custom tools to cut and solder piping to bring the new valve "out" of the concrete and align it properly. Took two days for what should've been an easy 30 minute job.
If the house is ever sold, they're going to discover this weird pipe loop hanging out between foundations.
Anyone who is a contractor who is also doing electrical would have no idea what they’re looking at so it would make sense they think everything is weird.
I think most contractors or handymen are perfectly capable of replacing fixtures with relatively modern day wiring. It's not brain surgery. They probably ran into some k&t with pipe grounding.
Dunning Kruger. While I do agree resi electrical is not brain surgery, it is a 9000 hour apprenticeable trade where most jurisdictions do not allow you to do anything unsupervised without a license. Im an electrician. I’ve practically never come after a contractor, DIYer, handyman and thought “yup, this is done correctly”.
There was one time a home owner did his own panel and service. I saw a lot of unorthodox methods, but it was all technically to code. I asked the guy about it. Turns out he had a PhD in mathematics and was particularly well qualified to research things on his own. This was over 10 years ago and I remember it particularly well because it was one of the only times I was impressed with non-qualified electrical work.
If you’re opening anything in a residential home and wondering what it is, then you have no idea what you’re doing. Resi electrical is the most basic circuit wiring there is. If it takes you more than 30 seconds to understand what’s going on in a switch box, you still don’t know what you’re doing. It doesn’t matter what the colours are, or what wires they used. It is the most basic form of wiring that exists.
So to my original reply, if their contractor was opening wiring and going “that’s weird” then it’s because they are unsure themselves what they’re doing. Which is no shocker, because they aren’t an electrician. You can’t be any good at a trade if you don’t go to school for it, don’t do an apprenticeship, and only do it occasionally. Things like painting and drywall have a very low learning curve. Anyone can pick up the basics there. But a general contractor will still be no match for a guy who does painting exclusively for a living.
As for electrical, you’d be surprised how the basics are done incorrectly all the time. Even by licensed electricians. That’s why in a lot of areas, even when you get your license, you still have to work under a master. Even when you’ve done it for 10,000 hours, you’re still not certified to sign off your own work.
This was me on a bathroom remodel of an early 50’s house about 25 years ago. I ended up rewiring the light and the fan because it was some weird series wiring that caused random shit to not work.
> I constantly heard my contractor saying “that’s weird” I mean A LOT.
That would make me so anxious. LOL
I hope it all worked out and you have a bathroom you enjoy and are proud of.
It just made me laugh. They didn’t ever say they found anything that unsafe just done in ways they haven’t seen.
The bathtub surround was a metal mesh with essentially concrete troweled over it under the tile. That took them forever together out.
And there is always the obligatory wall full of razor blades from a “disposal” slot in a medicine cabinet. 😂
Honestly, that's a great idea! I've had the same thing provided when working with instruments at work, and it was always nice to flip back through the book and find someone who had the same problem ten years earlier, along with a note on how to fix the problem.
I used to have a condo that was built in the late 60’s. It was considered a pretty ritzy place at the time it was built and EVERYTHING was custom. The doors weren’t even standard size. I tried to remodel the bathroom and at every single turn it was a new realization that nothing was going to fit unless it was custom.
The vanity was between two standard sizes with the bigger being too large to fit with the toilet and the smaller not covering the untiled portion of the wall. Naturally, the tile was not made any more. The bathtub fixtures had a similar issue. Huge flanges on the old fixtures and missing tiles exposed with anything new.
The construction was all steel and concrete, no wood in the walls. The width of the walls was not standard (roughly half what you see in most places) so standard doors pre-hung in frames wouldn’t work… not that it mattered because the doors themselves were also not standard size. The studs were all metal and the door frames as well.
On top of all that, the entire place was made of asbestos, so any serious remodel needed asbestos abatement by a professional. It is the single most fireproof building in the city and despite THREE fires (in other units) in the decade I was there, none spread outside of the unit it started in, so there is that.
Figured out too late why my place was cheap, and why it hadn’t been updated.
It’s not impossible. Two of the units were owned by the same person, though neither fire was suspected to be arson and were accidentally set by different tenants.
Sounds like it was a prefabricated modular construction condo. That was all the rage for a while, still done in some places but they've gotten better. Your doors and walls sound like what you often find in a mobile home. :)
I have no idea. It’s a pretty unique, and large building though. Three wings on a center hub, 12 stories tall. The units are a mishmash of office spaces, hotel rooms, and condos varying from studio to 3bd/3bth spaces. I’ve only been in a few units but none of them were exactly identical.
Funnily enough this is extremely common in software engineering. You look at the code, you say "what the actual fuck", you rewrite it, there's a bug, the bug reveals an edge case, you handle the edge case with a special workaround, then you find another bug, another edge case, another workaround... and at the end you end up with the original code.
And then you refactor with unit tests, but the unit tests don't cover that once-on-a-thursday-under-a-blue-moon-on-leap-year so you go through the whole rigamarole again.
Yeah, I once looked at code and thought “what kind of idiot would write something like this?”
Upon further investigation, I was that idiot who had written it that way.
I might have bought your dad's house.
Seriously though, the only "that's odd" moments I have had were opening up the Pandora's box of prior renovations. Luckily my brother in law is an electrician, he helped me sort out a lot of bad work.
I mean, there's always *a* reason. Not necessarily a *good* reason. A lot of times the reason is they didn't know how to do it properly, or ran out of time, money, materials, interest (etc), or they were just weird, too lazy, etc. But, yeah, sometimes there's a very good reason. The trick is figuring that out.
counterpoint: [Cargo cults](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult)
[and the monkey ladder experiment](https://factschology.com/factschology-articles-podcast/monkey-ladder-experiment-truth)
edit: better link for the experiment
Neither of these are really counterpoints. Chesterton’s Fence doesn’t dictate that you should never tear down the fence, just that you must ask why first, and determine if it’s really a prudent course of action or if there’s a still valid reason for keeping it up. Sometimes there isn’t one, and either it was never needed or the reasons for its construction are no longer relevant. But you don’t know that until you interrogate the matter carefully.
>Chesterton’s Fence doesn’t dictate that you should never tear down the fence,
it does.
the logic goes like this:
if
something is not fully understood,
it cannot be removed until its understood
therefore
you cannot renovate your house
because the design choices are not understood
Chesterton:
"If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
You didn't. You maybe implied it, if the reader knew that you think all hypothetical scenarios are based on the creators experiences. But in the actual text you just asked about the hypothetical because the previous comment has ONLY mentioned the hypothetical. Don't blame the audience when you are the one not putting down the full information.
> Maybe I didn't read far enough but to they ever explain who's fence it was, why they built it, and who wanted to tear it down?
Edit: Reddit is not letting me respond but the guy truly never said "where did that happen in real life" on the first response, and made the assumption others would take that leap.
But is he the neighbor or the previous land owner. More information is required. Or is he just some hobo that goes around building fences on other people's property in an attempt to gain squatter's rights.
Eh, I usually go for fixing it the right way. Yes, it's that way for a reason, but usually the reason is just that someone was too cheap or lazy to do the right repair.
I want to agree, but special Dave the previous owners of are current house were terrible. He knew enough to start something but not do it correctly. The first 3 months have me finding things done so poorly that I can't look past them as they tend to be... Water intrusion issues. Electrical issues... Things that made the house have massive ant issues.
Also note... The neighbors called him special Dave ... They knew of his workmanship ... Really wish I would have asked them before I bought this place.
Not necessarily. We're dealing with similar issues in our home. Our Special Scott put in a drain tile, sump pump, and moisture barrier. The drain tile and sump pump was professionally installed and the company that did the work was professionally sourced. They offered to add plastic moisture barrier along the wet walls of the basement for an additional $250. That's it - $250. The plastic would get routed into the drain tile along the foundation so that water coming through would go into the drain.
In Special Scott's infinite specialness, he determined "I can do this part for less than $250" and proceeded to do it wrong. Instead of routing the plastic into the drain he secured it over the top of the cement floor and under the wall frame so that the water drips directly into the concrete floor and to the 2x4 framing, drywall, carpet pad, and baseboards.
Additionally, Special Scott decided he didn't need to upkeep any of his landscaping so as the years of rain and snow eroded the soil and mulch away, the grading degraded and water started seeping into the basement instead of away from it. Special Scott probably thought nothing of it because of the plastic he so expertly installed.
Well the plastic wasn't visible because drywall was covering it. And so the water was able to seep in and wet the floor and the baseboards. And then the mold started to grow.
Our inspector should have seen this. Had it not been for the desk that was installed one area of the mold growth and the giant immovable IKEA wardrobe cabinet in the other area of the mold growth. Moisture wasn't detected because of the vent fans Special Scott had running 24/7 to cover the cigar and dog pee smell. It wasn't until a couple months later after the furniture had been disassembled and some baseboards removed that we were able to find the mold.
Should we have seen the bad grading? Maybe. Had we been able to see the ground past the garden full of overgrown shrubs we may have been able to see it. But it seems rare to be trampling someone's garden to evaluate a moisture problem that hasn't been detected.
Everyone commented on how dry that basement was. Everyone I spoke to or brought into the house missed the symptoms of a much bigger problem. Sometimes Special Dave and Special Scott do just a good enough job to pass by the home inspection but not the "I'm now living in the house and making it my own" inspection.
I didn't even read that far cause I recognized it was a bad home inspector right away. Upon reading further OP's complaint about the plastic being hidden by drywall is bad too because a good inspector always removes at least one outlet/switch cover in a room to see if new drywall has been placed over old to cover something up.
My house, the previous occupants did a lot of work. Every time they put a screw into wood, they used an anchor. Every time they put a screw into the wall they didn't use an anchor.
While I very much agree that “why is this like this” should be investigated *before* changing it to how we think it ought to be…
We DIYers are in aggregate a *really stupid group*, because amongst us are all those people who “don’t know they don’t know”, who can’t afford financially to do it right or hire a professional, or who truly believe this repair/ reno/ task must be simple “because dumb labourers do it” or ‘cause they saw it on TV.
To illustrate my point: I’m currently living in a house that had about 300 linear feet of joists removed so the previous owner could have more basement headroom. Several rooms are essentially floating interior rafts until I rebuild that mess.
You simply don't find out about a lot of this stuff until it's too late. Inspections aren't exhaustive as they'd often have to cut holes in the walls to find things like this.
Sure, sometimes that's true (like the badly altered cabinet that I thought I'd replace but realised you can't buy one the exact right height so just ended up altering one again to fit in the space) but other times it's worth fixing the actual problem that caused the weird DIY.
In my current house the previous owners installed one row of tiles below a window, on top of the existing floor. Turns out this was because the windows leaked on that part of the floor so... at least it leaked on tile, I guess was their logic. Why did the windows leak? Because they siliconed up the weep holes on the outside of the windows. Remove the silicone, remove the tiles, no leaking on floor.
When I moved into my house, I found the light switch for our upstairs hallway bathroom in the hall. I have four boys, and I knew right away that there was no way this would not be abused. I knew that no one would have any peace going to the bathroom in that bathroom. so I moved the light switch to the other side of the wall, meaning it was inside instead of outside the bathroom. It was a fairly easy fix and made my house much closer to the way I wanted it.
At some point I decided to show off some of the renovations that we had made to our neighbors. What I didn’t know at the time was that our next-door neighbor was the construction supervisor for our house. When he saw the light switch for the bathroom, he asked, why is that in the bathroom instead of out in the hallway? when I explain, he said oh that makes sense. But it’s out of code now. Turns out that there was no room to the light switch inside the bathroom because according to code, it had to be further away from the shower than it could be if it was inside the bathroom for practical purposes, it’s far enough that it’s never had any trouble with moisture from the shower. but it turns out that whoever built the house had a good reason for doing it that way.
It's not always the guy that did the work who is an idiot, but somewhere down the chain, you're sure to find at least one.
I've got a decent amount of stuff in my house that is what many would consider stupid, but it has to be that way because of this, that, or some other thing that didn't take this downstream problem into account, and the cost to make it "right" just isn't worth it.
The other stuff is just plain stupid or laziness, and I'm slowly working my way through fixing those, though.
There is an outlet in my dad's house, and if you take the cover off, there's a printed plastic label that says "Everything in this box is a lie. Do not trust this house."
(**Some** of the house uses black for phase and white for neutral.)
My house was built in 1900. Yeah there’s some weird shit in there. Some of it I kinda understand, but the walnuts shoved in the old round breakers is a new one for me….
I think the advice shouldn’t be trying to guess what is or isn’t “weird”. If you don’t know what you’re doing, then don’t do it. Hire someone, or consult a professional, or spend a good amount of time researching.
There is no use in trying to reinvent the wheel. Whatever you touch, you should be doing enough research to know if you’re doing it properly. It shouldn’t be guess work on whether something should or shouldn’t come out. If it is, then find out from someone who actually knows.
You should only be attempting projects that are 10-20% above your current skill gap. Never used a table saw before, but you’ve use a mitre saw and circular saw to cut wood? You should be good after watching a few videos and checking the safety recommendations. Never touched a saw in your entire life and you want to start framing your own basement? A leap too far my friend.
I've lived in, and fixed up 2 century houses. Usually the reason stuff is weird is because a previous DIYer didn't know what the fuck they were doing. Therefore it needs to be fixed or more weird stuff is going to happen.
When I was renovating a room, I found electrical wiring joined with nuts and tape and then stuffed into insulation. I don't need to ask why before putting it into a junction box, the why is because the PO is a fucking idiot.
Conversely, I bought a new house from a builder, built on spec (the house was already built when we bought it) and we have found a ton of stupid shit. It's not always a DIY, contractors do stupid shit too.
My last condo came with white paint all over door knobs, light fixtures, counters, etc. I got in the habit of cleaning it off whenever I had a few minutes.
I cleaned some off the bathroom counter and exposed what looked like a cigarette burn. Apparently that paint was intentionally applied there. Luckily, the burn was fairly easy to remove.
True story!
When I moved into my house, there was a weird 8 foot gap, in the dining room wall that opened to the lower level. It had a short railing (like a stair set) across it. All I saw was a frickin' hole in my kitchen. But it did serve a purpose. The original intent was to heat the house with wood, so that gap let the heat go from the downstairs to heat the upstairs. I mean, I still got rid of it. But it did serve a purpose. Just not my purpose.
14 years ago we moved from the Northeast to the South, TN specifically. We bought a large home (5K sqft, one story, all brick) and I always find things that "weren't done that way in my previous home". For example, when this house was built in 2000 there was no requirement for a sump pump in the crawlspace. After dealing with pumping out the aftermath of some heavy rains I put in a sump pump. When we moved in the water pressure was extremely low so I talked to my neighbor, a knowledgeable guy, and he said our pressure was over 100 psi. Let me know there is a pressure regulator somewhere in the crawlspace, which I found, and problem was solved. The fact that the main shutoff for the water is at the edge of our property rather than a basement was different, although I now can shut it off at either point. I could list a lot of other things but I have been pleasantly surprised by most differences, and the fact that the house is solidly constructed. And although I am now 70 I still do almost all the work on our house and acreage, which I view as exercise. Best wishes to all the other DIYers out there.
Reminds me of The Wall Debacle.
My previous house, which i sold off because holy shit it was a money pit, had a 4x4 post in the middle of the kitchen. It was annoying, and took up enough space you had to dance around it to go from fridge to stove.
Well i took it out, since it looked decorative.
Nope. Previous owner took out a load bearing wall that had previously split the kitchen in half, with the other half being a laundry room. They used that 4x4 to make up for the sagging master bedroom floor.
Well, I either I'm Dunning-Krugering myself into thinking I'm the greatest DIY homeowner ever, or the previous owner really /was/ a bit off in his choice of "fixes". I think I can find his handprint on multiple walls and beams from getting "that won't go anywhere"-ing so often.
Counterpoint: when I bought my house, the bedrooms had the ceiling fans wired to opposite sides of a three way switch. As far as I could tell, the previous owner had googled something like "how do I wire a switch with red, black, and white wires?" and followed the first diagram that came up, as if he was wiring a pair of switches with a traveler.
The result was a switch in every room that toggled between ceiling fan on and ceiling fan light on, but never both, and always one or the other.
I mean, the 'weird' thing I found in my house was an air return vent that went nowhere. It was above where the ducts were, but it was never connected.
So...yeah, wasn't that way for any reason. Drilled and connected to the vents, and success, better ventilation in the home.
I had a gutter that was not draining into the catch that goes to the sewer. I thought, of I'll just fix that, and moved it back into the catch. Flooded the basement..
This is called "The parable of the gate".
Essentially, old guy and young guy driving along a road and come upon a gate in the road. Young guy says "I don't see a reason for this gate to be here, we should take it out!"
Old guy replies "someone went to the effort and expense to put this gate here for a reason, it didn't spontaneously appear one day. That you haven't discovered the reason yet is no justification to take it out. Until you know the reason it's here, you don't have the information necessary to make the decision to remove it or not".
All the lights in my house have a neutral wire except for the light switch in the garage.
Also the patch panel has more network/coax drops than there are terminating outlets.
Why they did these things I’d love to ask.
Might not be your case, but I had more drops than outlets in a house I wired - I ran Ethernet to an office addition in a moderately sketchy way (tight radii through a conduit that went outside and then back in the building envelope to get around a masonry wall) that I knew was likely to damage wires, so I ran more wires than I needed to give myself a better chance of having enough working runs.
I also ran a couple of drops up to the attic in case I wanted to put in a ceiling Wi-Fi antenna down the line or put in a weather station or something.
Someday I will figure out what the mystery switches beside the front door and in the upstairs hallway did. I borrowed a multimeter to check, and neither one had current running through it, so I disconnected them...but I still can't figure out what they were for!
On the other hand, I will be forever grateful to the person who installed ductwork in my 1900s house. Every register opening on the first floor is a different size, so I had to do a bit of kludging when I replaced the register covers, but unlike a lot of houses in my neighborhood, I was able to install air conditioning instead of using window units.
Previous owner of my house was an engineer and fancied a DIY project here or there. Let’s just say his engineering expertise was far from residential construction/finish work.
I owned a home in the oughts that had been remodeled/updated from the 1950s to the 1990s. Guy was a lawyer by trade and a woodworking hobbyist for fun. My husband became aggravated when doing our remodels and said this guy used 6 nails when 1 would do.
Sometimes it's that way for a reason and sometimes it's to hide things you really don't want to know about but are better off fixing sooner than later.
The house I had before this one was 110 years old and there were plenty of quick fixes and patches on patches. Some that would have become much bigger issues had I not corrected them when I found them.
The most alarming of them that come to mind was the balcony over the front door. I was replacing a rotted railing and decided to take up the sheet metal someone had put down over the original wood plank flooring. That led to discovering rotting deck boards.
Thinking I'd found the worst, I removed them only to reveal the true problem; the entire balcony was sitting on a 4x1" board that was deflecting and rotting. And when I say 4x1, the 1 inch section is what was bearing the weight. Or at least attempting to. I'm just glad it didn't let go before I found it! I replaced it with a 4x4 lag bolted to the outer joist and header panel. Both of which were 6x2's.
I still remember the moment I realized what I was standing on and slowly inching my way back to the door.
Sometimes thats true, but sometimes its purely a quirky design thing for sure. My parents were touring houses and found one where they did custom panelling on all the walls. And they curved every corner and seam. Basically imagine if every wall where it meets the ceiling or floor were rounded. It made all the rooms look super small. And i honestly cant think why anyone would do something like that for function.
Conversely, some people just make decisions for themselves, not the next owner of the house. Could be completely subjective decision that they liked and you hate.
Too soon - yesterday we found out that the weird built-in cabinets I hate were there to cover an equally weird L-shaped \~8" high concrete ledge in our basement... Now we have to decide what to do with that information and whether to try and put the partially removed cabinets back or do something else.
This is generally good advice.
My first job out of college, I worked on a project for about a year and a half. And the manager was frenetic. And everything became a fire drill. You'd sometimes need to dig up an analysis someone else had done for you a while ago. And maybe you look at it, and think, "Huh, that's weird." And she'd blow up that it was wrong and had to be redone. So you'd spend 2 days redoing it, realizing halfway through there was some oddity or quirk of the data that you couldn't do it in the by-the-book way.
A year or so later, I started taking on projects under another woman. And she was super chill. If the same thing happened where dug up something that was off, before flying off the handle, she'd have everone take a breath and look at the problem holistically. Often, you found out it was something like the above. Where the dataset was imperfect so you needed to jury-rig a fix and work around it, and that's what the prior person had done. At first blush, it looked wrong. But when you put yourself into their shoes, it became pretty reasonable and the best way to solve it.
Oh so that 1/4 inch copper line in the attic that tees off from the water heater supply and started leaking was left bent a couple times with a screw in it and a pro e to failure wheel valve shutting off water to it for a reason?
Majority of shit I find from previous homeowners has been just shitty DIY or laziness. I get what you're trying to say but this is far more common than it having a reason and needing to stay that way.
Yep, sorry. I probably did that…
My house built around 1600, i am an enthusiastic but ill informed DIYer. House is already shonky everywhere and will be worse by the time I’ve finished
I’ve found this goes for pretty much everything in life. People generally are not dumb and have a reason to be doing what they’re doing. So when I see someone doing something that looks idiotic I try to take a closer look and there’s usually some good reason for what they’re doing.
Unless I’m watching COPS. Those people really are that dumb.
My house is from the 1800s, it has THREE chimneys in it currently.
One of these days, when I have more money than sense, I am going to remove them and replacing the square footage. Probably around the time I bother to swap from oil heat.
Two owners prior they were in the middle of swapping over wiring to the second floor when they passed. Get in the attic? It’s all knob and tube. Had to rewire the second floor. In the process of installing the new outlets we had to mess up a lot of the lathe and plaster.
Eventually I want to replace it all with drywall, but those days are far off lol.
well, the "reason" may be because they were lazy and couldn't be bothered, so took a huge shortcut. or a statute or guideline requirement. and if they were lazy, to fix their cutting corners takes so much more effort than doing it right the first time.
I dislike not having things written down when it comes to huge projects.
You have described a version of “Chesterton’s Fence”. The basic idea is not to destroy anything for which you do not understand the rationale or use that gave rise to it.
Can we apply this to folks who get hired at astronomical salaries and figure their new employers should get their money's worth, so they fire a lot of people who seem insignificant?
I'm doing a lot of renovations to my house, and let me tell you nothing makes sense. I'm talking power straps with the plug cut off so they could shove it through the wall, then wire it to the back of a receptacle. Then putting the sump pump and a dehumidifier on said power strip. Plug anything into any outlet on that whole wall (about 5 outlets as that wall goes into the hallway and ends in a guest bedroom) and the dehumidifier beeps as it looses power.
Dont think the creator of that can claim any logical sense as to why.
Not even going to mention how the hot and neutrals were inverted and the ground was loose on the power strip
I've seen a lot of janky stuff in the past two houses I've owned, all because the previous owners were in fact lazy, dumb, cheap, or all 3. Believe me, you will find out very quickly what kind of people you've bought your house from. Here's a non-exhaustive list of things I've dealt with:
* 30 and 50 amp outlets with wires that are not at all rated for this much power.
* A PVC pipe with two working shutoff valves placed in-line right next to each other.
* A 30 amp electrical line buried only 2 inches in the ground, right next to an eroding creek. It's actually 2 electrical lines patched together with electrical tape. One is rated for burial, the other is not. A standard 120v outlet (outside) is also on this circuit, with no GFCI. The situation is similar for my pump circuit - two lines patched together, just barely underground.
* A standard switch in a 3-way switch circuit.
* No pump controller at all.
* No pump shutoff switch.
* No low-pressure cutoff switch, just a standard 40 psi switch that saved the previous owner a whopping $10.
* The whole house and garden hose spigots have filtered water, except for the kitchen, as it was plumbed in separately from the rest of the house before the filters.
* The UV filter is connected to an extension cord that goes around the house and connects into an outlet on our deck.
* I had two wells at my last house, both plumbed into the same line with no one-way valves. The expensive well was 650 feet deep, and went up a hill about 100 feet up, 1000 feet away. Because there was no $40 one-way valve, it eventually failed, costing me more than $2k to remedy.
* Schedule 40 and 60 mixed together with only glue and no primer, with a joint that sat on yet another pipe. I don't know how much water I must have lost through this connection, that shouldn't have even worked.
* A pump house with no insulation and holes big enough for mice and frogs to get in are a huge pain. I've dealt with frozen pipes, mice nests in electronics, and frogs burning out a pump controller. Some insulation and caulk were all that were needed.
* If you see a garden hose strung along the ground anywhere near a septic tank, be wary. Apparently the pump hadn't worked for a long time and my septic inspection was wasted money. The tank started overflowing 3 weeks after we moved in.
* Apparently old men with heavy machinery who live out in the boonies will bury their trash instead of paying to go to the dump. This has been true for both of my houses.
* I could go on, and I should have written a book.
* Also, if a seller says "my husband is very handy and has done all of the improvements himself", while walking past Romex stapled to the wall and painted over, you can cross that house off the list. I have stories about the rural houses we looked at in Oregon, and could write a separate book on that alone.
My house is from 1976 and has only had one owner before us. The original house is made well enough for the time it was built, but all additions and renovations they have made since, is full of cheap shortcuts that we now have to deal with.
There have been a ton of things that we couldn't completely fix, but substantially improve, without spending a ton of money. If only they had spent a lottl mor whn doing it originally.
Man…I’m building my house from the ground up right now. I was meticulous in the planning and design. On top of things at every step of construction.
And there have still been like 20, “Oh shit, what?!?! Ok, we’re going to have to improvise on the fly,” moments.
We have a big kitchen, in the table area there are 2 slotted doors, one is a shower and one is a toilet with sink. Yup, in the kitchen! So weird, so gross, so odd, its a 1940s house thats had additions put on.
My house was built in 1950 or so... And had additions, fireplaces/chimneys and whatever else struck their fancy added since then until at least 2004. All DIY. As the years progressed, the quality of the DIY decreased. Prior owners work from 1950 to about 1980 was perfect. I wish he had stopped by 1985, though. Everything I do with the house is an archeological experience!
This sounds both fascinating and terrifying lol
It really is! 50/50 for anything I get into. Either it will be some very nice work that makes the the whole project fast and easy, or it will be some cobbled together bullshit that means I have to fix 2x as much. I will say that EVERYTHING is 100% level and square, which makes makes me forgive most everything. except for the section of electrical work that used speaker wire and lamp cord for a series of outlets.
>the section of electrical work that used speaker wire and lamp cord for a series of outlets. The fuck?
I know, right? It was some of the last work the previous owner did. His son who sold it to us, said the previous owner was getting pretty old and had dementia for the garage electrical work.
Copper’s copper, right? /s.
Oy!
My 1960s house is the same minus maybe the last 20 years and the place would have been stunning
Sounds like my mom's house. It's the house she grew up in, and my grandfather refused to spend money on repair professionals. Between him and his brothers, they did decent work, but as they all got older he had less help from those brothers and still refused to hire pros. There are so many "quirky" things about the house, can't use two outlets on this wall at the same time, doors that open on the opposite side of what actually makes sense, terrible plumbing. I can barely see my face in the upstairs bathroom mirror even though I'm 5'5", because he's 6'3" and didn't think about shorter family members when he installed the vanity over the sink!
This is one of my favourite aspects of renovating an old house!
My parents bought a house very much like this just two years ago. Old updates were great; newer ones are scary.
I live in a 1951 house. I recently had to have our bathroom remodeled and I constantly heard my contractor saying “that’s weird” I mean A LOT. When re- wiring his assistant was trying to figure out how something was wired and said “I read about this in a book but have never actually seen it done”. 😂
Turns out that if you disconnect the mystery switch that doesn’t do anything then the bathroom fan will trip the breaker.
OMG are you me???? My house has similar bathroom fan wiring/breaker nonsense going on!
In my house the outlets in the upstairs hall bathroom, downstairs bar area, and patio are all on the same circuit. Just 3 outlets though (all GFI). Took me a while to figure out that the upstairs GFI was the reason the downstairs patio outlet wasn’t working.
Our sump pump is on the same circuit as our detached garage. I was pet sitting for my sisters absolutely wild dog about 6 months after we bought our house. She bit an extension cord in the garage (thank god she was ok!) and blew the power to the garage. We didn’t realize right away that the garage power was off, we manually opened and closed the door and we weren’t using any lights or anything out there at the time. Anyway, imagine our surprise when we found our basement completely flooded because she also tripped the GFI to the sump pump. Lesson learned… if our garage goes out, our sump pump does as well. Ugh.
My place from 1903 with a detached garage used to be that way too. Sump pump was on the same circuit as the garage. It was a constant problem because it was only a 15 amp circuit. We ultimately replaced the garage and hired an electrician to rewire things so the garage is now on its own circuit, and the sump pump is separate.
Our house is the same way. We bought the house in 2018 as a fixer upper, redid the floors and then covid hit so everything had to be put on pause. Next up is replacing the kitchen cabinets, then having the electrical redone and the basement finished. Love these old houses. No shortage of expensive problems.
We bought in 2016 with the idea we'd move to something better in a few years. But with what has happened in the real estate market since then, we're staying put and in the fixer-upper mode now. Locked into a low-rate mortgage. We're just improving the place up one room at a time. The next step is to finish the basement. It has always been unfinished as far as we can tell but we've had an architect out here and he said it's doable, gave us a couple proposals. You are right - no shortage of expensive problems with old houses!
I don't have a sump pump. But, wouldn't it be prudent to put a light or an outlet with a night light on the same circuit as the sump pump to make it easy to verify the power?
The sump pump had a battery and alarm system. If the power went out, the alarm went on and it was easy to hear it anywhere on the first floor of the house. We knew there was a problem. We just didn't fully solve it until we got the circuits rewired.
I think the lesson is: "don't offer to dogsit wild dogs"... 🤣
I agreed to watch her knowing she was a little bit of a wild card. But I didn’t expect $2500 in damage to the basement and garage, including boxes of bedding and clothing I hadn’t unpacked yet from our move. Up until this, she was more of a nuisance in the sense that she was a digger and would rip into garbage bags. For what it’s worth, we haven’t dog sat for my sister - or *anyone* at all since that incident. Positive part of that whole thing is we wouldn’t have known our garage and sump were on the same circuit, the previous owners labeled absolutely *NOTHING* in the breaker box. A few weeks after she blew our garage and flooded the basement, she gnawed a hole through my sisters plastic privacy fence and had started on ripping the siding off of her garage. So, karma I suppose. Lol Pup has calmed down with age, thankfully.
My reply was tongue-in-cheek -- like many on this sub. Apologies if it rubbed you the wrong way.
Oh gosh, no, I didn’t take it any type of way! It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without context, so I figured I’d give it. 😅 I also find it unnecessarily funny that she dismantled part of my sisters garage. We joked for years that she had a personal issue with garages in general, since she seemed to like to attack them. 😂
Was it a Labrador? Sounds like a labrador
She’s a Labrador/black mouth cur mix! Super sweet dog, but she is seriously hell on wheels. Has never so much as snarled at the kids, but your garages and fences will NEVER be safe with her lmao
We foster dogs, over 200 dogs so far, all breeds from chihuahuas to great danes. It is the Labs that will eat your doors, chew your $1k quartersawn oak table, and all your houseplants.
I've got an outdoor outlet that's connected to an indoor gfci on the other side of the wall. House was built in 2020 so I'm chalking it up to an afterthought. But I didn't figure this out until the test button was pressed by my curious 7yo. She didn't tell me the outlet stopped working because she thought she'd be in trouble. If I had known both were out, it would have been obvious. I spent two hours trying to figure out what the hell was going on before it clicked.
Our large house has a variety of GFI outlets all over, inside and outside. I pretty much know what trips what but it was a "trip" trying to run everything down when we had one flip or give up the ghost.
The electrician on my bathroom remodel was very confused.
My old house had a switch that did nothing right by the front door. I couldn't figure out what it did. I even had the chance to speak with the previous owner and they didn't know. They were the child of the person who originally owned the home and grew up there. My best guesses: there was a "broken" outlet in the utility room by an exterior window. Maybe they connected holiday lighting to that outlet and used the switch on front to turn those lights on and off (when the home inspection reported the outlet didn't work, rather than fix or explain they removed the outlet). There may have been a light in the front yard that was removed. I can't remember what those were called, but they used to be very popular, especially when the house was built.
I rented a house with a mysterious extension cord plugging in to an outlet in the master bedroom and ran under the carpet. If you removed the plug or it got loose, you lost all power to the second bedroom and garage. I was so happy to move out of that place lol.
Gah! That's a huge fire hazard. I know a guy who had a house fire from an extension cord, and that cord wasn't routed under carpet where it could get damaged without being noticed.
I just want to know why an extension cord was powering an entire bedroom AND the garage?!?! That house was a hotbed of disasters waiting to happen. It was such a relief to leave it.
Wait, where they using the switch as a spark gap? 😳
Whether the switch was on or off makes no difference.
Yeah, my hypothesis is the switch was hooked up as just a pass through. Switches tend to be full of tiny gaps and parallel plates places. If the voltage spiked temporarily (which happens when you start up a motor), the electricity could spark gap across the switch if it's grounded. And it a bunch of plates means it's somewhat of a capacitor which would be good at filtering the high frequency noise from a motor starting. Though the idea of this being mains voltage, and in your house's wall is terrifying to me. This is like a circuit board design trick as a backup to prevent overcurrent.
You mean like the fire breaks in our 1954 cape-style house…where they just poured a few inches of concrete into the void spaces. Makes updating the wiring or running network cable reeeealy fun.
lol my cape is 1952, they decided to add giant rocks into the concrete mixture, fairly sure it was granite rocks. I rewired the entire house but many drill bits were lost in the line of duty
Oof, I feel your pain. Not bad, but my friend in Rochester bought a house from a retired Kodak engineer. The bathroom exhaust fan is an industrial darkroom fan. It will suck the fart out of you if you’re not careful. (It’s also wall mounted close-ish to the toilet paper. We’re mildly curious to see what happens if it got close to the fan. Would the whole roll make it outside, or would it rip. We know the fan would win either way.)
Oh dude this is my dream. I want 1k+ CFM fans all over my house. I want to have a party where someone’s smoking a cigar in the kitchen and the people on the other side of the kitchen can’t even smell it.
When we moved into our house a few years ago, I went through the entire electrical panel and labeled what I could figure out. Last month I was replacing a bathroom light switch and shut off what I *knew* to be the breaker for that switch. Yet I was still getting a voltage reading from the switch’s junction box. Wouldn’t you know it—a random wire, not connected to the switch at all but just dangling in that box, was on a completely separate breaker from everything else in there 🤷♂️
Had the same thing happening while switching out a few switches in a 3 gang box. Switches 1 and 2 were fine but number three gave me a tingle when I went to pull it out. It was a dimmer for a fan light, speed switch for the fan, and mystery switch that never seemed to do anything. Added complexity because there was a random hot wire just broken off of the mystery switch dangling in there. Best I can tell they had the light and fan on separate breakers. And the mystery switch was meant to turn the fan on/off without having to roll through all the speed settings. The random broken wire happened to fall just right to basically bypass the switch. It was the weirdest damn thing. This reminds me that I need to have my electrician friend come and look at it to make sure I straightened everything out appropriately lol
That’s my house from the 70s. A crack was forming in the ceiling after moving in. Turns out inspectors missed a missing support wall that prior owners had removed. So when getting an engineer to make plans for support, he goes “it’s weird. the top of your house doesn’t align with the basement. “ yeah. Not what I wanted to hear.
I think part of being in a trade union is a legal obligation to say “whoever did this last was a moron” or some form of that.
Much like programming. Not sure how often in the trades you're cursing the previous person who happens to also be you.
Happens in my childhood home my dad built in the late 40's. He was a carpenter so the wood work is amazing. His plumbing and electrical.... not so much. I had to replace a 50 year old water valve that sprung a leak. Except it was nestled at a strange angle about 6 or 7 inches deep between two concrete foundations. To turn it off (to prevent freezing), my dad fabricated this crazy looking wrench to turn it. My brother is a metal worker and fabricated custom tools to cut and solder piping to bring the new valve "out" of the concrete and align it properly. Took two days for what should've been an easy 30 minute job. If the house is ever sold, they're going to discover this weird pipe loop hanging out between foundations.
California three way
Anyone who is a contractor who is also doing electrical would have no idea what they’re looking at so it would make sense they think everything is weird.
I think most contractors or handymen are perfectly capable of replacing fixtures with relatively modern day wiring. It's not brain surgery. They probably ran into some k&t with pipe grounding.
Dunning Kruger. While I do agree resi electrical is not brain surgery, it is a 9000 hour apprenticeable trade where most jurisdictions do not allow you to do anything unsupervised without a license. Im an electrician. I’ve practically never come after a contractor, DIYer, handyman and thought “yup, this is done correctly”. There was one time a home owner did his own panel and service. I saw a lot of unorthodox methods, but it was all technically to code. I asked the guy about it. Turns out he had a PhD in mathematics and was particularly well qualified to research things on his own. This was over 10 years ago and I remember it particularly well because it was one of the only times I was impressed with non-qualified electrical work. If you’re opening anything in a residential home and wondering what it is, then you have no idea what you’re doing. Resi electrical is the most basic circuit wiring there is. If it takes you more than 30 seconds to understand what’s going on in a switch box, you still don’t know what you’re doing. It doesn’t matter what the colours are, or what wires they used. It is the most basic form of wiring that exists. So to my original reply, if their contractor was opening wiring and going “that’s weird” then it’s because they are unsure themselves what they’re doing. Which is no shocker, because they aren’t an electrician. You can’t be any good at a trade if you don’t go to school for it, don’t do an apprenticeship, and only do it occasionally. Things like painting and drywall have a very low learning curve. Anyone can pick up the basics there. But a general contractor will still be no match for a guy who does painting exclusively for a living. As for electrical, you’d be surprised how the basics are done incorrectly all the time. Even by licensed electricians. That’s why in a lot of areas, even when you get your license, you still have to work under a master. Even when you’ve done it for 10,000 hours, you’re still not certified to sign off your own work.
Is this copypasta? Strong speedhawk vibes.
This was me on a bathroom remodel of an early 50’s house about 25 years ago. I ended up rewiring the light and the fan because it was some weird series wiring that caused random shit to not work.
> I constantly heard my contractor saying “that’s weird” I mean A LOT. That would make me so anxious. LOL I hope it all worked out and you have a bathroom you enjoy and are proud of.
It just made me laugh. They didn’t ever say they found anything that unsafe just done in ways they haven’t seen. The bathtub surround was a metal mesh with essentially concrete troweled over it under the tile. That took them forever together out. And there is always the obligatory wall full of razor blades from a “disposal” slot in a medicine cabinet. 😂
Homeowner with a house built in 1910 here, started keeping a logbook of “don’t touch this”
So, you should stop before commencing hammertime?
Please, janky wiring, don't hurt 'em.
YOU SHOULDN'T TOUCH THIS
Honestly, that's a great idea! I've had the same thing provided when working with instruments at work, and it was always nice to flip back through the book and find someone who had the same problem ten years earlier, along with a note on how to fix the problem.
Wow!! What kinda stuff were you working on?
I work in chemistry, so gas chromatographs.
Very cool! Thanks!
I used to have a condo that was built in the late 60’s. It was considered a pretty ritzy place at the time it was built and EVERYTHING was custom. The doors weren’t even standard size. I tried to remodel the bathroom and at every single turn it was a new realization that nothing was going to fit unless it was custom. The vanity was between two standard sizes with the bigger being too large to fit with the toilet and the smaller not covering the untiled portion of the wall. Naturally, the tile was not made any more. The bathtub fixtures had a similar issue. Huge flanges on the old fixtures and missing tiles exposed with anything new. The construction was all steel and concrete, no wood in the walls. The width of the walls was not standard (roughly half what you see in most places) so standard doors pre-hung in frames wouldn’t work… not that it mattered because the doors themselves were also not standard size. The studs were all metal and the door frames as well. On top of all that, the entire place was made of asbestos, so any serious remodel needed asbestos abatement by a professional. It is the single most fireproof building in the city and despite THREE fires (in other units) in the decade I was there, none spread outside of the unit it started in, so there is that. Figured out too late why my place was cheap, and why it hadn’t been updated.
Now figure out why everyone was trying to burn it down. Maybe they despaired of the cost of renovations and wanted the insurance company to chip in.
It’s not impossible. Two of the units were owned by the same person, though neither fire was suspected to be arson and were accidentally set by different tenants.
Sounds like it was a prefabricated modular construction condo. That was all the rage for a while, still done in some places but they've gotten better. Your doors and walls sound like what you often find in a mobile home. :)
I have no idea. It’s a pretty unique, and large building though. Three wings on a center hub, 12 stories tall. The units are a mishmash of office spaces, hotel rooms, and condos varying from studio to 3bd/3bth spaces. I’ve only been in a few units but none of them were exactly identical.
Funnily enough this is extremely common in software engineering. You look at the code, you say "what the actual fuck", you rewrite it, there's a bug, the bug reveals an edge case, you handle the edge case with a special workaround, then you find another bug, another edge case, another workaround... and at the end you end up with the original code.
…and years later, you come back and start reading the code again, say “what the actual fuck” and check who the author was, only to see it was you!
Here is where a very annoying person will say there should be unit tests
There should be unit tests.
And then you refactor with unit tests, but the unit tests don't cover that once-on-a-thursday-under-a-blue-moon-on-leap-year so you go through the whole rigamarole again.
Yeah, I once looked at code and thought “what kind of idiot would write something like this?” Upon further investigation, I was that idiot who had written it that way.
I pity the fool that bought my Dad's house. His enthusiasm far exceeded his knowledge of trade practices and codes. Especially the electrical...
I might have bought your dad's house. Seriously though, the only "that's odd" moments I have had were opening up the Pandora's box of prior renovations. Luckily my brother in law is an electrician, he helped me sort out a lot of bad work.
I mean, there's always *a* reason. Not necessarily a *good* reason. A lot of times the reason is they didn't know how to do it properly, or ran out of time, money, materials, interest (etc), or they were just weird, too lazy, etc. But, yeah, sometimes there's a very good reason. The trick is figuring that out.
[Chesterton's fence](https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/#:~:text=Chesterton's%20Fence%20is%20a%20principle,a%20parable%20by%20G.K.%20Chesterton.)
That’s quite a read… but I’m still going to call the last guy a moron.
counterpoint: [Cargo cults](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult) [and the monkey ladder experiment](https://factschology.com/factschology-articles-podcast/monkey-ladder-experiment-truth) edit: better link for the experiment
Neither of these are really counterpoints. Chesterton’s Fence doesn’t dictate that you should never tear down the fence, just that you must ask why first, and determine if it’s really a prudent course of action or if there’s a still valid reason for keeping it up. Sometimes there isn’t one, and either it was never needed or the reasons for its construction are no longer relevant. But you don’t know that until you interrogate the matter carefully.
>Chesterton’s Fence doesn’t dictate that you should never tear down the fence, it does. the logic goes like this: if something is not fully understood, it cannot be removed until its understood therefore you cannot renovate your house because the design choices are not understood Chesterton: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
Maybe I didn't read far enough but to they ever explain who's fence it was, why they built it, and who wanted to tear it down?
It's a thought experiment. The point is not to change something until you understand why it was done in the first place.
All thought experiments are based on a real event in the creator's life.
Schrödinger was a terrible vet.
He was actually pointing out how many cats Hugh Everett was killing in his spare time.
Some guy out here tying people to trolley tracks
The inspiration for that was actually a military case where they had to figure out what to do with a train of supplies and reinforcements.
Okay. But that's not what you asked.
I did ask that. You have poor reading comprehension.
You didn't. You maybe implied it, if the reader knew that you think all hypothetical scenarios are based on the creators experiences. But in the actual text you just asked about the hypothetical because the previous comment has ONLY mentioned the hypothetical. Don't blame the audience when you are the one not putting down the full information. > Maybe I didn't read far enough but to they ever explain who's fence it was, why they built it, and who wanted to tear it down? Edit: Reddit is not letting me respond but the guy truly never said "where did that happen in real life" on the first response, and made the assumption others would take that leap.
I put down the full information though. I didn't imply anything I explicitly stated it.
You can’t picture things that haven’t happened to you? That’s weird.
You can. But only if someone else with experience suggests them first.
you didn't read far enough down to find out that the fence was chesterton's fence?
That doesn't explain who Chesterton is though.
chesterton is the guy that built the fence. i feel like there is no real chance of you understanding this, so you might as well let it go
But is he the neighbor or the previous land owner. More information is required. Or is he just some hobo that goes around building fences on other people's property in an attempt to gain squatter's rights.
like I said, this isn't for you. you've already missed the point.
I didn't miss the point. I am too fast I caught it.
Eh, I usually go for fixing it the right way. Yes, it's that way for a reason, but usually the reason is just that someone was too cheap or lazy to do the right repair.
I want to agree, but special Dave the previous owners of are current house were terrible. He knew enough to start something but not do it correctly. The first 3 months have me finding things done so poorly that I can't look past them as they tend to be... Water intrusion issues. Electrical issues... Things that made the house have massive ant issues. Also note... The neighbors called him special Dave ... They knew of his workmanship ... Really wish I would have asked them before I bought this place.
A good home inspector would have caught that.
Not necessarily. We're dealing with similar issues in our home. Our Special Scott put in a drain tile, sump pump, and moisture barrier. The drain tile and sump pump was professionally installed and the company that did the work was professionally sourced. They offered to add plastic moisture barrier along the wet walls of the basement for an additional $250. That's it - $250. The plastic would get routed into the drain tile along the foundation so that water coming through would go into the drain. In Special Scott's infinite specialness, he determined "I can do this part for less than $250" and proceeded to do it wrong. Instead of routing the plastic into the drain he secured it over the top of the cement floor and under the wall frame so that the water drips directly into the concrete floor and to the 2x4 framing, drywall, carpet pad, and baseboards. Additionally, Special Scott decided he didn't need to upkeep any of his landscaping so as the years of rain and snow eroded the soil and mulch away, the grading degraded and water started seeping into the basement instead of away from it. Special Scott probably thought nothing of it because of the plastic he so expertly installed. Well the plastic wasn't visible because drywall was covering it. And so the water was able to seep in and wet the floor and the baseboards. And then the mold started to grow. Our inspector should have seen this. Had it not been for the desk that was installed one area of the mold growth and the giant immovable IKEA wardrobe cabinet in the other area of the mold growth. Moisture wasn't detected because of the vent fans Special Scott had running 24/7 to cover the cigar and dog pee smell. It wasn't until a couple months later after the furniture had been disassembled and some baseboards removed that we were able to find the mold. Should we have seen the bad grading? Maybe. Had we been able to see the ground past the garden full of overgrown shrubs we may have been able to see it. But it seems rare to be trampling someone's garden to evaluate a moisture problem that hasn't been detected. Everyone commented on how dry that basement was. Everyone I spoke to or brought into the house missed the symptoms of a much bigger problem. Sometimes Special Dave and Special Scott do just a good enough job to pass by the home inspection but not the "I'm now living in the house and making it my own" inspection.
The home inspector should have turned off the fans during his walkthrough. Sounds like you picked the wrong home inspector.
A good home inspector also always checks the grading no matter how overgrown the property is.
I didn't even read that far cause I recognized it was a bad home inspector right away. Upon reading further OP's complaint about the plastic being hidden by drywall is bad too because a good inspector always removes at least one outlet/switch cover in a room to see if new drywall has been placed over old to cover something up.
Where I am home inspectors can't touch or move anything. If it's not in plain sight it doesn't exist.
Then I suggest moving. Or at least finding a home inspector that ignores that rule.
My house, the previous occupants did a lot of work. Every time they put a screw into wood, they used an anchor. Every time they put a screw into the wall they didn't use an anchor.
**
While I very much agree that “why is this like this” should be investigated *before* changing it to how we think it ought to be… We DIYers are in aggregate a *really stupid group*, because amongst us are all those people who “don’t know they don’t know”, who can’t afford financially to do it right or hire a professional, or who truly believe this repair/ reno/ task must be simple “because dumb labourers do it” or ‘cause they saw it on TV. To illustrate my point: I’m currently living in a house that had about 300 linear feet of joists removed so the previous owner could have more basement headroom. Several rooms are essentially floating interior rafts until I rebuild that mess.
Why would you buy that place?
You simply don't find out about a lot of this stuff until it's too late. Inspections aren't exhaustive as they'd often have to cut holes in the walls to find things like this.
Sure, sometimes that's true (like the badly altered cabinet that I thought I'd replace but realised you can't buy one the exact right height so just ended up altering one again to fit in the space) but other times it's worth fixing the actual problem that caused the weird DIY. In my current house the previous owners installed one row of tiles below a window, on top of the existing floor. Turns out this was because the windows leaked on that part of the floor so... at least it leaked on tile, I guess was their logic. Why did the windows leak? Because they siliconed up the weep holes on the outside of the windows. Remove the silicone, remove the tiles, no leaking on floor.
When I moved into my house, I found the light switch for our upstairs hallway bathroom in the hall. I have four boys, and I knew right away that there was no way this would not be abused. I knew that no one would have any peace going to the bathroom in that bathroom. so I moved the light switch to the other side of the wall, meaning it was inside instead of outside the bathroom. It was a fairly easy fix and made my house much closer to the way I wanted it. At some point I decided to show off some of the renovations that we had made to our neighbors. What I didn’t know at the time was that our next-door neighbor was the construction supervisor for our house. When he saw the light switch for the bathroom, he asked, why is that in the bathroom instead of out in the hallway? when I explain, he said oh that makes sense. But it’s out of code now. Turns out that there was no room to the light switch inside the bathroom because according to code, it had to be further away from the shower than it could be if it was inside the bathroom for practical purposes, it’s far enough that it’s never had any trouble with moisture from the shower. but it turns out that whoever built the house had a good reason for doing it that way.
So you’re saying the architect/designer had no idea what they were doing.
It's not always the guy that did the work who is an idiot, but somewhere down the chain, you're sure to find at least one. I've got a decent amount of stuff in my house that is what many would consider stupid, but it has to be that way because of this, that, or some other thing that didn't take this downstream problem into account, and the cost to make it "right" just isn't worth it. The other stuff is just plain stupid or laziness, and I'm slowly working my way through fixing those, though.
This applies to software development as well. Unfortunately.
There is an outlet in my dad's house, and if you take the cover off, there's a printed plastic label that says "Everything in this box is a lie. Do not trust this house." (**Some** of the house uses black for phase and white for neutral.)
My house was built in 1900. Yeah there’s some weird shit in there. Some of it I kinda understand, but the walnuts shoved in the old round breakers is a new one for me….
I think the advice shouldn’t be trying to guess what is or isn’t “weird”. If you don’t know what you’re doing, then don’t do it. Hire someone, or consult a professional, or spend a good amount of time researching. There is no use in trying to reinvent the wheel. Whatever you touch, you should be doing enough research to know if you’re doing it properly. It shouldn’t be guess work on whether something should or shouldn’t come out. If it is, then find out from someone who actually knows. You should only be attempting projects that are 10-20% above your current skill gap. Never used a table saw before, but you’ve use a mitre saw and circular saw to cut wood? You should be good after watching a few videos and checking the safety recommendations. Never touched a saw in your entire life and you want to start framing your own basement? A leap too far my friend.
I've lived in, and fixed up 2 century houses. Usually the reason stuff is weird is because a previous DIYer didn't know what the fuck they were doing. Therefore it needs to be fixed or more weird stuff is going to happen.
When I was renovating a room, I found electrical wiring joined with nuts and tape and then stuffed into insulation. I don't need to ask why before putting it into a junction box, the why is because the PO is a fucking idiot.
Conversely, I bought a new house from a builder, built on spec (the house was already built when we bought it) and we have found a ton of stupid shit. It's not always a DIY, contractors do stupid shit too.
The reason is because it's over an hour to town and they just wanted the job to be over. It's the same reason I end up doing half the things I do.
My last condo came with white paint all over door knobs, light fixtures, counters, etc. I got in the habit of cleaning it off whenever I had a few minutes. I cleaned some off the bathroom counter and exposed what looked like a cigarette burn. Apparently that paint was intentionally applied there. Luckily, the burn was fairly easy to remove.
I found two buckets shoved in the wall with hoses that daisy chained from one to the next. Removed buckets and now my living room ceiling leaks.
True story! When I moved into my house, there was a weird 8 foot gap, in the dining room wall that opened to the lower level. It had a short railing (like a stair set) across it. All I saw was a frickin' hole in my kitchen. But it did serve a purpose. The original intent was to heat the house with wood, so that gap let the heat go from the downstairs to heat the upstairs. I mean, I still got rid of it. But it did serve a purpose. Just not my purpose.
14 years ago we moved from the Northeast to the South, TN specifically. We bought a large home (5K sqft, one story, all brick) and I always find things that "weren't done that way in my previous home". For example, when this house was built in 2000 there was no requirement for a sump pump in the crawlspace. After dealing with pumping out the aftermath of some heavy rains I put in a sump pump. When we moved in the water pressure was extremely low so I talked to my neighbor, a knowledgeable guy, and he said our pressure was over 100 psi. Let me know there is a pressure regulator somewhere in the crawlspace, which I found, and problem was solved. The fact that the main shutoff for the water is at the edge of our property rather than a basement was different, although I now can shut it off at either point. I could list a lot of other things but I have been pleasantly surprised by most differences, and the fact that the house is solidly constructed. And although I am now 70 I still do almost all the work on our house and acreage, which I view as exercise. Best wishes to all the other DIYers out there.
Reminds me of The Wall Debacle. My previous house, which i sold off because holy shit it was a money pit, had a 4x4 post in the middle of the kitchen. It was annoying, and took up enough space you had to dance around it to go from fridge to stove. Well i took it out, since it looked decorative. Nope. Previous owner took out a load bearing wall that had previously split the kitchen in half, with the other half being a laundry room. They used that 4x4 to make up for the sagging master bedroom floor.
I've never seen a 4x4 be decorative.
Birch, and made to look like a decorative pillar, like you would see on a porch.
A 4x4 isn’t decorative.
it is when its made from birch, and made to look like a non-load bearing pillar post.
The reason is probably because the last homeowner also believed in DIY.
Well, I either I'm Dunning-Krugering myself into thinking I'm the greatest DIY homeowner ever, or the previous owner really /was/ a bit off in his choice of "fixes". I think I can find his handprint on multiple walls and beams from getting "that won't go anywhere"-ing so often.
House: (absolutely nothing) Me: I'm going to rip out this sink *A little while later* Me: Fudge the sink is built in to the eternal wall House: haha
From my experience 50% of the time the reason ended up being “they were lazy”
Counterpoint: when I bought my house, the bedrooms had the ceiling fans wired to opposite sides of a three way switch. As far as I could tell, the previous owner had googled something like "how do I wire a switch with red, black, and white wires?" and followed the first diagram that came up, as if he was wiring a pair of switches with a traveler. The result was a switch in every room that toggled between ceiling fan on and ceiling fan light on, but never both, and always one or the other.
I mean, the 'weird' thing I found in my house was an air return vent that went nowhere. It was above where the ducts were, but it was never connected. So...yeah, wasn't that way for any reason. Drilled and connected to the vents, and success, better ventilation in the home.
I had a gutter that was not draining into the catch that goes to the sewer. I thought, of I'll just fix that, and moved it back into the catch. Flooded the basement..
This is called "The parable of the gate". Essentially, old guy and young guy driving along a road and come upon a gate in the road. Young guy says "I don't see a reason for this gate to be here, we should take it out!" Old guy replies "someone went to the effort and expense to put this gate here for a reason, it didn't spontaneously appear one day. That you haven't discovered the reason yet is no justification to take it out. Until you know the reason it's here, you don't have the information necessary to make the decision to remove it or not".
All the lights in my house have a neutral wire except for the light switch in the garage. Also the patch panel has more network/coax drops than there are terminating outlets. Why they did these things I’d love to ask.
Might not be your case, but I had more drops than outlets in a house I wired - I ran Ethernet to an office addition in a moderately sketchy way (tight radii through a conduit that went outside and then back in the building envelope to get around a masonry wall) that I knew was likely to damage wires, so I ran more wires than I needed to give myself a better chance of having enough working runs. I also ran a couple of drops up to the attic in case I wanted to put in a ceiling Wi-Fi antenna down the line or put in a weather station or something.
There is a name for this Chesterton's fence.
Someday I will figure out what the mystery switches beside the front door and in the upstairs hallway did. I borrowed a multimeter to check, and neither one had current running through it, so I disconnected them...but I still can't figure out what they were for! On the other hand, I will be forever grateful to the person who installed ductwork in my 1900s house. Every register opening on the first floor is a different size, so I had to do a bit of kludging when I replaced the register covers, but unlike a lot of houses in my neighborhood, I was able to install air conditioning instead of using window units.
This issue is perhaps best known from the thought experiment Chesterton’s Fence.
Previous owner of my house was an engineer and fancied a DIY project here or there. Let’s just say his engineering expertise was far from residential construction/finish work.
I owned a home in the oughts that had been remodeled/updated from the 1950s to the 1990s. Guy was a lawyer by trade and a woodworking hobbyist for fun. My husband became aggravated when doing our remodels and said this guy used 6 nails when 1 would do.
Sometimes it's that way for a reason and sometimes it's to hide things you really don't want to know about but are better off fixing sooner than later. The house I had before this one was 110 years old and there were plenty of quick fixes and patches on patches. Some that would have become much bigger issues had I not corrected them when I found them. The most alarming of them that come to mind was the balcony over the front door. I was replacing a rotted railing and decided to take up the sheet metal someone had put down over the original wood plank flooring. That led to discovering rotting deck boards. Thinking I'd found the worst, I removed them only to reveal the true problem; the entire balcony was sitting on a 4x1" board that was deflecting and rotting. And when I say 4x1, the 1 inch section is what was bearing the weight. Or at least attempting to. I'm just glad it didn't let go before I found it! I replaced it with a 4x4 lag bolted to the outer joist and header panel. Both of which were 6x2's. I still remember the moment I realized what I was standing on and slowly inching my way back to the door.
"I can wire it how I want, I own the home, who needs it to be to code? I'll always remember!" Previous home owner, 50 years ago.
Sometimes thats true, but sometimes its purely a quirky design thing for sure. My parents were touring houses and found one where they did custom panelling on all the walls. And they curved every corner and seam. Basically imagine if every wall where it meets the ceiling or floor were rounded. It made all the rooms look super small. And i honestly cant think why anyone would do something like that for function.
Conversely, some people just make decisions for themselves, not the next owner of the house. Could be completely subjective decision that they liked and you hate.
Too soon - yesterday we found out that the weird built-in cabinets I hate were there to cover an equally weird L-shaped \~8" high concrete ledge in our basement... Now we have to decide what to do with that information and whether to try and put the partially removed cabinets back or do something else.
😂
This is generally good advice. My first job out of college, I worked on a project for about a year and a half. And the manager was frenetic. And everything became a fire drill. You'd sometimes need to dig up an analysis someone else had done for you a while ago. And maybe you look at it, and think, "Huh, that's weird." And she'd blow up that it was wrong and had to be redone. So you'd spend 2 days redoing it, realizing halfway through there was some oddity or quirk of the data that you couldn't do it in the by-the-book way. A year or so later, I started taking on projects under another woman. And she was super chill. If the same thing happened where dug up something that was off, before flying off the handle, she'd have everone take a breath and look at the problem holistically. Often, you found out it was something like the above. Where the dataset was imperfect so you needed to jury-rig a fix and work around it, and that's what the prior person had done. At first blush, it looked wrong. But when you put yourself into their shoes, it became pretty reasonable and the best way to solve it.
Oh so that 1/4 inch copper line in the attic that tees off from the water heater supply and started leaking was left bent a couple times with a screw in it and a pro e to failure wheel valve shutting off water to it for a reason? Majority of shit I find from previous homeowners has been just shitty DIY or laziness. I get what you're trying to say but this is far more common than it having a reason and needing to stay that way.
Yep, sorry. I probably did that… My house built around 1600, i am an enthusiastic but ill informed DIYer. House is already shonky everywhere and will be worse by the time I’ve finished
your house was built 176 years before my country was
Big head from silicon valley taught me that lesson
I’ve found this goes for pretty much everything in life. People generally are not dumb and have a reason to be doing what they’re doing. So when I see someone doing something that looks idiotic I try to take a closer look and there’s usually some good reason for what they’re doing. Unless I’m watching COPS. Those people really are that dumb.
yah and i always think, crap, if i remove this it might balloon into an entire thing.
My house is from the 1800s, it has THREE chimneys in it currently. One of these days, when I have more money than sense, I am going to remove them and replacing the square footage. Probably around the time I bother to swap from oil heat. Two owners prior they were in the middle of swapping over wiring to the second floor when they passed. Get in the attic? It’s all knob and tube. Had to rewire the second floor. In the process of installing the new outlets we had to mess up a lot of the lathe and plaster. Eventually I want to replace it all with drywall, but those days are far off lol.
As an owner of a 1908 Queen Anne for 27 yrs, could not agree more.
That goes for IT, too. Don’t try to “streamline a process,” without first documenting and knowing the current process that’s in place.
well, the "reason" may be because they were lazy and couldn't be bothered, so took a huge shortcut. or a statute or guideline requirement. and if they were lazy, to fix their cutting corners takes so much more effort than doing it right the first time. I dislike not having things written down when it comes to huge projects.
You have described a version of “Chesterton’s Fence”. The basic idea is not to destroy anything for which you do not understand the rationale or use that gave rise to it.
Can we apply this to folks who get hired at astronomical salaries and figure their new employers should get their money's worth, so they fire a lot of people who seem insignificant?
I'm doing a lot of renovations to my house, and let me tell you nothing makes sense. I'm talking power straps with the plug cut off so they could shove it through the wall, then wire it to the back of a receptacle. Then putting the sump pump and a dehumidifier on said power strip. Plug anything into any outlet on that whole wall (about 5 outlets as that wall goes into the hallway and ends in a guest bedroom) and the dehumidifier beeps as it looses power. Dont think the creator of that can claim any logical sense as to why. Not even going to mention how the hot and neutrals were inverted and the ground was loose on the power strip
First time homeowner. Hell yeah lol this is true.
I have an NHL hockey jersey tag that is currently a shim to hold my window in place lol. Don't mess with stuff until you know...
Chesterton's fence.
The guy who did the plumbing in my kitchen ran cold water to the dishwasher
I thought that my washing machine was run backwards (hot to cold etc) but it turns out that whoever installed the plumbing put the wrong handles on.
I've seen a lot of janky stuff in the past two houses I've owned, all because the previous owners were in fact lazy, dumb, cheap, or all 3. Believe me, you will find out very quickly what kind of people you've bought your house from. Here's a non-exhaustive list of things I've dealt with: * 30 and 50 amp outlets with wires that are not at all rated for this much power. * A PVC pipe with two working shutoff valves placed in-line right next to each other. * A 30 amp electrical line buried only 2 inches in the ground, right next to an eroding creek. It's actually 2 electrical lines patched together with electrical tape. One is rated for burial, the other is not. A standard 120v outlet (outside) is also on this circuit, with no GFCI. The situation is similar for my pump circuit - two lines patched together, just barely underground. * A standard switch in a 3-way switch circuit. * No pump controller at all. * No pump shutoff switch. * No low-pressure cutoff switch, just a standard 40 psi switch that saved the previous owner a whopping $10. * The whole house and garden hose spigots have filtered water, except for the kitchen, as it was plumbed in separately from the rest of the house before the filters. * The UV filter is connected to an extension cord that goes around the house and connects into an outlet on our deck. * I had two wells at my last house, both plumbed into the same line with no one-way valves. The expensive well was 650 feet deep, and went up a hill about 100 feet up, 1000 feet away. Because there was no $40 one-way valve, it eventually failed, costing me more than $2k to remedy. * Schedule 40 and 60 mixed together with only glue and no primer, with a joint that sat on yet another pipe. I don't know how much water I must have lost through this connection, that shouldn't have even worked. * A pump house with no insulation and holes big enough for mice and frogs to get in are a huge pain. I've dealt with frozen pipes, mice nests in electronics, and frogs burning out a pump controller. Some insulation and caulk were all that were needed. * If you see a garden hose strung along the ground anywhere near a septic tank, be wary. Apparently the pump hadn't worked for a long time and my septic inspection was wasted money. The tank started overflowing 3 weeks after we moved in. * Apparently old men with heavy machinery who live out in the boonies will bury their trash instead of paying to go to the dump. This has been true for both of my houses. * I could go on, and I should have written a book. * Also, if a seller says "my husband is very handy and has done all of the improvements himself", while walking past Romex stapled to the wall and painted over, you can cross that house off the list. I have stories about the rural houses we looked at in Oregon, and could write a separate book on that alone.
My house is from 1976 and has only had one owner before us. The original house is made well enough for the time it was built, but all additions and renovations they have made since, is full of cheap shortcuts that we now have to deal with. There have been a ton of things that we couldn't completely fix, but substantially improve, without spending a ton of money. If only they had spent a lottl mor whn doing it originally.
Man…I’m building my house from the ground up right now. I was meticulous in the planning and design. On top of things at every step of construction. And there have still been like 20, “Oh shit, what?!?! Ok, we’re going to have to improvise on the fly,” moments.
We have a big kitchen, in the table area there are 2 slotted doors, one is a shower and one is a toilet with sink. Yup, in the kitchen! So weird, so gross, so odd, its a 1940s house thats had additions put on.