The core of my house was built in 1913. That, in and of itself, provides for miles of entertainment whenever home improvements are cocnerned (special order everything).
At some point, someone decided to do additions onto the house. In a very half-assed fashion, I might add. Some of you might remember my quest for opinions on how to gain access to my crawlspace, since there is no access to it from either the outside or through the basement.
Since we’re going to replace the carpet in that room anyhow, I decided to pull some of it up and just cut a hole in the subfloor, so I could ascertain how best to improve the heat-retention capabilities of that room (ie add some insulation).
Well looky here! It appears that whoever built a room onto my house, in Michigan, and walled it all up, decided that there really wasn’t any need for insulation under the floorboards at all. None. No wonder it’s so fricking foot-numbingly cold in the room, esecially where it’s got ceramic tile!
Peering through the hole, however I do discover one potential source of the problem…I see an empty beer can. That explains a lot.
To whoever did this, I hope your nuts are slowly drained of blood by a million thirsty, bird-flu carrying mosquitoes.
Old houses are fun, aren’t they? I was pulling ductwork out of the rafters of my cellar, making room for a new heating system, and an empty quart bottle of Nehi soda rolled out and smacked me in the forehead! The installers left it there in the mid-1940s when they put in the ducts.
In 1999, I was working in an office where they were doing construction. They broke through a wall and into a full, unopened gallon of milk. Expiration date 1984.
My house was built in 1928, and we’re afraid of what we might find in the ducts. My nephew dropped a pen down the duct this weekend, my sister-in-law kept apologizing and offering to take the duct off and get it, but we didn’t let her for fear that we might never see her again.
We did find newspapers from 1937 in our attic. That was rather cool.
I can go on and on about my house. At one point there appears to have been a porch, but they decided to expand out onto it. The floor was hardwood in the adjacent room, and they bought more hardwood for the newly enclosed porch. It didn’t match, and they didn’t strip down the porch floor to the subfloor to fix it, they just put the new hardwood down on top of the old porch floor, and then, for some unknown reason, instead of just using a transition piece, they turned the hardwood perpendicular to all the other hardwood, and we have this 3 foot wide strip of hardwood between the two rooms that runs in the wrong direction.
The best thing my house “gave” me was a sealed bottle of Scotch whiskey (complete, including the red tax stamp across the top) that I found on the back of a shelf in the cellar. I researched it and found that the distillery had gone out of business in 1939.
My first impulse was to get a bunch of friends together and drink it, but I was right in the middle of replacing a huge amount of galvanized-pipe plumbing and I really needed cash. I sold the bottle to a collector for $1000. No kidding.
Modern contractors aren’t much better. When my parents added on to their house in the early '90s, the plans included a set of French doors connecting the new family room to the dining room. The doors were positioned in the plans so that the doors could be placed flush against the wall when fully opened. I don’t know what happened, but someone thought it would be a better idea to center the doors with respect to the old dining room instead…this only allowed one of the doors to be placed flush against the wall. It looked really stupid, and you couldn’t do anything with the other door; it just sort of perched against the wall. We always ended up removing that door at Christmas to accomodate the tree.
I hope the contractor got a substantial deduction from what was owed due to that screw-up.
Still, I’m sure there was a building permit issued, etc. I doubt any sity inspector would pass the construction done on my addition. Without a healthy bribe.
Oh, I somehow forgot about my current residence. It’s one of a group of apartments built back in the '80s that were bought out by developers in the '90s and turned into condos. Someone thought it would be a great idea to place the hot water heater and the air conditioner return inside in a small closet adjacent to the living room/dining room. You have to crank the TV up to 38 or so every time the air or heat comes on. And since the building is on a slab, there’s no drain for the hot water heater, so if it decides to leak the water flows into the my dining room, and also over to my neighbor’s (the building isn’t level). The circuit breaker is in a small closet outside (not a good situation if something trips at night). There is little insulation in the walls, and the floors are very thin; when my upstairs neighbors decide to start humping at 4 AM it always wakes me up.
I’m moving as soon as I get a real job. I hope this thing sells. (At least it looks and smells nice; I’ve kept it clean.)
We were going through our grandfather’s stuff a few years ago and found a paper (might have been Washington Post) with the headline “Germany Surrenders”. Unfortunately, having been shoved unprotected into the attic and left there with no protection, for god knows how many years, it was in awful shape and pretty much disintegrated when looked at.
joe have you looked at those radiate heat mats that go under the flooring (tile, ceramic, what have you) since you’re messing with it anyway? Might make the room a little warmer.
Well, I am not pulling up the tile, just the carpet. I considered the heating mat, but it would be expensive both initially as well as ongoing (electricity). I am going to see how well the insulation helps. We’re also putting new windows in those rooms, since the old ones are very old and leaky.
Yep, but I don’t remember how much (I was just a kid at the time, and all I knew was that it looked stupid). I’m pretty sure my parents filed several formal complaints, too.
My house had some do-it-yourself disasters built in my house by the previous owner - I’m not angry about 'em, as they were not a surprise (the cost of the house reflected its condition), but they are pretty puzzling.
Like why would anyone built a nice-looking radiator cover - with no access to bleed the radiator? We had to enact some radical surgery on it when we had the furnace replaced.
Built-in additions over carpet were more understandable (pure laziness that, I assume), but equally annoying when one wishes to replace the carpet.