Hmmm…my house and my parents’ house were built in the late 60’s here in Cleveland with no insulation in the floors - OR the walls!! 
My dad had no idea, even after 30 years of living there, that the walls were bare.
One time tho he did find like 20 old codeine bottles lining the ducts in the floor. That was telling.
I really do have to count my blessings. Our house is a hundred years old, but underwent a complete end-to-end remodel jsut before we bought it. They did such a good job that the appraisal treated the house as “new” for purposes of evaluation. All new plumbing, electrical, HVAC — the works. New basement. Heated and cooled garage. Every room wired for cable and broadband networking. New whirlpool tub in master bath. Etc, etc. And still, all the great old stuff was retained, including all the original bead board and black gum flooring. We were really fortunate to have found it.
I’m surprised you can even lift a brush that wide, much less paint with it. One wonders how any buildings remain upright these days.
Anyone else read this as peeing through the hole?
Is the beer can at least collectible?
I love the things you find working on old homes. All the things some bastered half assed years ago come back to bite the next person foolish enough to open it up again.
Around me many homes were built before insulation was commonly used. I’m amazed any time I talk to a customer who doesn’t relise their house built over a hundred years ago isn’t insulated at all. They just wonder why their heating bills are so high.
My current 100 year old house, I’ve been slowly been remodeling, I keep finding reason to wish the previous owners(now deceased) ill. My biggest complaint was the floors. When I moved in they’d carpeted everything. I pulled up all the carpeting.
They went nuts with tack strips. Some rooms showed a history of three diferent sets of tack strips. They must have replaced them with every new carpet. The last set the really wanted to stay in place or something. they added screw nails every 6 inches to hold them down.
Their solution for squeeky floor boards was to drive drywall screws in a number of the hardwood boards.
The wood floors were all painted or stained. That in itself was expected but they redid the staining and painting at some point and decided to only do the edges and not the centers of the rooms. Each room had a area rug or something so they saved paint.
Since the horse hair plaster had started coming down their obvious answer was to panel the whole downstairs. They didn’t remove the crumbling plaster, just covered it for me to find when I tore down the awful paneling.
I realize that the eew has already been said, but I just wanted you to know that this description alone had me gagging.
Oh, c’mon. Some contractors were good back then, some contractors are good now. Some sucked then, some suck now. Therefore they aren’t much better.
I don’t think Jeep was saying that every single contractor in the modern era is bad. We just notice them more when they are.
mischievous
Due in part to TV.
I loves me some “Holmes on Homes.” He thinks his catchphrase is “Make It Right,” but it actually is, “This is all going to have to come down.” 
my sympathies.
the idiot who built the addition on our house decided it didn’t need heating ducts. not kidding.
Did you even bother reading my posts? I haven’t exactly had many positive personal experiences here. :rolleyes:
Now, see, I’ve seen Duck Soup 2-3 times, and I’ve been heard to say, for no reason at all, “Rufus TEEEE FIREfly!”
In fact, there’s a Rufus I know, who I some times call Rufus T. Firefly.
And I just now understood your username. :smack:
All hail Freedonia!
I don’t mean to speak for or against the work of contractors - as mischievous rightly points out - some are good and some are double-plus ungood.
What bothers me more, however, are handyman specials. Where the work was done by someone with little knowledge, and less planning. I’m aware that contractors can produce this kind of work, but in general I believe that the more egregious eff-ups in my apartment come from people being ambitious beyond their skill level.
In general a contractor has to at least make things look like they’re up to code. An handyman doesn’t always have to satisfy anyone but him or herself.
Which leaves things like a bathroom with the shower stall in the middle of one wall, the toilet in a very crowded cubby to one side of the shower stall, and then a completely useless void space the other side of the shower stall that can’t be used for much of anything, because the sink for the bathroom prevents access to that space.
I swear boytyperanma is talking about my house.
My ceilings have years of wallpaper on them, paneling over the plaster, painted floors, years of wallpaper on the walls, no insulation.
In one of the “closed off” heat vents we actually found a newspaper for the Titanic sinking. I was so stoked! I ran through the house so excited.
My father in law decided he needed to hold it for safe keeping, and put it in a zip lock baggy and then stuffed it between his matresses. Needless to say I now have a very tattered copy of the newspaper.
In my boys room we tore up the carpet and there was this linolium stuff, but it was like particle board designed to look like carpet. First time I’d seen anything like it. One solid sheet from wall to wall, but the only way to describe it is that it was like particle board. There was three or four layers of it.
My children are the fourth generation to live in this house and I would love to know what it looked like before my husbands grandmother got her hands on it. She destroyed it from what I understand.
In one room we still have wool carpet.
I say “closed off” heat vent because that’s all my father in law did to close them was pack them full of newspapers and such. We have the floor vents and cold air returns that eat everything.
When my parents moved into the house where I grew up, it not only needed some long-neglected cosmetic work, but it had been rather clumsily turned into two apartments, mostly by closing off the open stairwell with plywood and adding an outside door and staircase at the landing. I can’t believe it ever would have passed any kind of inspection, since there was no other exit from the upper floor, other than jumping out the window.
Anyway, the living room walls had been painted and wallpapered in several layers. I remember my mother on a plank on ladders, with a steamer in her hands, taking off wallpaper in pieces. She later told me that when they got the paper off, the wall showed small gouges all over, like someone had dug into it repeatedly with a putty knife.
My brother is a construction foreman. One of the common problems on site is people losing their tools. There’s a particular guy he thinks may have left a dozen hammers inside the walls, all over the 122-apartment building…
I read this part.
Which is an idiotic thing to say. I agree that it is made even more idiotic by the rest of your post, in which you cite one part of one experience with one contractor; however, it is still idiotic all on it’s own.
If you have had little personal experience you would be well advised to qualify your statements or STFU.
This I take it has been pulled out of your ass? Or can you back it up? I mean, some doctors sucked back then, and some doctors were good, so modern doctors aren’t much better than the ones 100 years ago, right?
I think they do this deliberately.
When we bought our townhouse in 1989, it was spring. So we weren’t running the furnace. We turned the furnace on in the fall and BANGbangbangbangbangbang. Sounded like there was a very small person stuck in there, trying to kick his way out. In a panic we called the furnace company (who had installed the furnace) and scheduled an appointment to have it fixed. I asked the person on the phone “Is this likely to be something that will blow up the house? do we need to turn the furnace off?”. She responded “No, construction workers often leave soda cans in there as a joke”. When the repair guy got there the next day, he said “Nah, that doesn’t happen, it’s likely something that needs to be fixed”.
The “repair” consisted of removing a quart-sized plastic jug - empty - that had once contained one of those garish-colored “fruit” drinks sold at the supermarket. No way could it have gotten in there by accident. The person on the phone was dead-on correct. (Oh, and the former owner of the townhouse had lived with that banging for an entire year and evidently thought nothing of it).
See I have the best of two worlds in my house.
We had a professional contractor doing handyman work on his own place! That he built himself!
That’s some of the shittiest fix-it work I’ve ever seen.
Every goddamn window was painted shut with the paint of at least five paint jobs. When we went to redo the walls (because the last time the paint/paper was freshened was (I kid you not) 1964 and the reflective jungle-print wallpaper was peeling off in giant strips, we discovered that there were three layers of wallpaper stacked on top of each other and no paint. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, the first layer of wallpaper was put up directly onto the sheetrock without the unneccessary bother of a layer of primer underneath.
For some reason I don’t fully understand, he’d installed absolutely beautiful oak flooring and then immediately slapped aqua-blue shag carpeting on it - using tack strips and screws at random intervals to hold it down. And by screws I mean he randomly screwed through the carpet into the flooring. The heads were visible if you looked closely (it was shag after all).
Whoever wired the house was obviously a crack monkey, because you cannot run any four appliances at the same time anywhere in the house without blowing a fuse. Hence, if you’re doing the laundry and dishes, you’d better not expect the fridge to be functional. Or the vaccuum. Or the TV. Unless the appliance in question is either the toaster oven or the microwave, then no other appliance is useable. This does not help my housecleaning at all. We’re not going to talk about the placement of outlets. Okay, maybe we are. There are only two outlets in my kitchen - one located in the corner behind my sink, waaaaaay back in the nether regions of dead space far from any counter space and where one cannot plug in anything expected to remain there and just far enough from the regular counter to make it functionally useless for plugging in temporary electrical appliances. The other one is all the way across the kitchen halfway up a wall that has no counters under it. We stuck a table there, but otherwise that outlet would be just hanging out uselessly. For reasons I don’t understand, there are seven outlets in my bedroom, including one in the fucking closet (why, God, why?) but only three in the entire basement (one of which is dedicated to the laundry - but only one in the laundry area, so if you want to iron, you must take it away from the laundry area to do so).
Also, there is a hole in the bathroom floor which is covered by the bathtub. We discovered this when my husband nearly gave me a heart attack by looking up through the holes in the dropped celing tiles in the basement while doing the laundry and thinking “Hmmm what in the hell is that there?”, knocking on it and discovering it was the bathtub where I was having a shower. When the tub makes a huge clanging noise and vibrates while you’re showering, it gets your attention post haste. I don’t know why there’s a freaking hole under our bathtub, but I’ve bathed nervously since then.
None of the windows or doors were sealed outside or inside, so when we went to redo the walls, we discovered that the sheetrock around the windows and doors was generally rotten and/or eroded away to nothing and all the exterior walls were water damaged around any window or door. That was a spackle job from hell, since we a) don’t own the place and b) can’t afford to have all the repairs done anyway. We told the owner (my husband’s mother) who immediately had a hissy-cow of denial and untruthful poor-mouthing of epic proportions, so did the best we could to stabilize the situtation and punted.
We are so not going to discuss the fact that there isn’t enough room in my kitchen (even if I clear every single object off the counters) to roll out a pie crust so I have to do it on the dining room table.
So, Contrapuntal, since this seems to be very important to you, can you tell us that modern contractors are much better now than they used to be? I’m not being snarky; I really would like to know.