Well I definitely got the hammer-swinging retard home.
Built in 1946. Addition done in 1954, turning attached garage on slab into family room, adding bathroom behind it, adding a second attached garage on slab with a big bedroom on top. This could be done well I guess but it wasn’t, particularly.
Stairs to new bedroom are way out of code. Dunno if I’m going to be able to maneuver a 4x8 sheet up the tight, turning staircase when I remodel.
Finally got serious about insulating and poked my head up into the attic. Ye gods.
Filled with random empty cardboard boxes, heaps of what appears to have been a piss-poor attempt at blown cellulose insulation (looks like someone threw a few handfuls in and then just gave up), some random chunks of fiberglass (like they did a lousy job with batts somewhere else and then threw the rest up there), wiring that was evidently done with a harpoon gun, a large old roofmount TV antenna (“Don’t throw that out Hank, stick it in the attic and save it!”) and copious ratshit.
My initial plan of adding recessed lights and increasing the insulation has now turned into a SuperFund cleanup - I’m gonna have to empty the attic of all the shit (literal and figurative), rewire, then reinsulate.
Combined with the other stuff it’s actually going to be best to pretty much gut the place down to the studs, rewire, replumb, insulate and sheetrock. Good think I’m single and like to work with my hands.
Our house was built sometime in the late 50’s and enlarged and remodeled extensively sometime in the early 70’s, by the look of all the dark wood. That work, the bones of the house, so to speak, is fine and it seems sturdy, if dated. The do-it-yourselfer work, on the other hand…well, it was reflected in the price of the house, and most of it is fairly easily fixed.
The downstairs bathroom had a layer of fairly nice vinyl tile that someone carefully measured and cut - and then slapped on willy-nilly. There were half-inch spaces between some of the tiles and others overlapped. Did they move the toilet to lay the tile under, rather than around it? It is to laugh.
The cabinets in the kitchen don’t match. The lower ones are all wood, but the upper ones are cheap pressboard with an iffy plastic laminate covering. Whoever installed the lower ones decided to put boards of a completely different kind of wood over the spaces between the ready-made cabinets. Whoever tiled the floor (average vinyl tile again) also cut tiles to go around the feet of the freestanding stove instead of moving it out and tiling underneath.
The sliding glass doors from the bedroom to the balcony were installed backwards, so the track that should be on the inside is outdoors instead. And the balcony itself was built completely flat, so water stands on it whenever it rains, making the floorboards rot out.
But I think the smallest thing was the most telling. We have hot-water baseboard heat, and layers of latex paint had been slapped over the metal registers. When we were scraping it off to refinish them, we found an odd round button in the middle of the top of one of the living room registers. I scraped carefully around it, assuming it was a rivet or something. Then I hit it with the scraper and it popped off. It was…
After you initiated the hijack–which, I’m sure you recall–is what started this hijack: “Christ, Contra, WTF is it with you and derailing threads with lame semantic arguments?”
Lute, why don’t we take this to e-mail and spare everyone else the sight of our dirty laundry? Or else, open a thread that’s all about me so as to end the hijack?
Guess where I live? Pretty close to downtown My house is not one of the really beautiful victorian or dutch colonials, but it’s sure in a nice neighborhood.
Whoever tiled my floor (with nicer ceramic tile) decided to do you one better. Not only did they not tile under the stove, they slopped grout all over the feet of the stove, permanently affixing it to the floor . It took me half an hour with a chisel and hammer to get the thing unstuck. Finally I pop it loose with a bang and manage to pull it out. The first thing I notice is that something with four legs and a tail has been living back there for quite some time (I’ll spare you the icky details). The second thing I notice is how our furry friend got back there: the drywall just ends about an inch from the floor, leaving a large gap.
Of course, I’m in a hurry to get this gap fixed, so instead of cutting a strip of drywall and spackling it over I just fill the whole gap with Great Stuff. I’m sure my successor will cursing me for that in 10 years. Ahh, the circle of home improvement.
Those peel ‘n’ stick vinyl floor tiles move after you put them down. I’ve seen more than one installation that looked great on day one, but walking on them in the warm summer months seems to move them in the glue. Then dirt sticks to the newly exposed glue and it looks awful.
If it was a vented crawlspace, that is how it is supposed to work as shown here. If it was unvented, they screwed up. I have been looking into this since I am going to have to spend some time under my house doing it.
I saw something like that in the house of a friend of mine. The doorknob was solidly screwed through the wall into a stud at the top of the stairs. Completely immovable, opened nothing. Difficult to remove, and left large screw holes in the plaster wall, that needed to be patched.
We eventually learned that this had been an amateur attempt to help the elderly lady who had lived in that house past age 90. It was intended to be an extra hand-hold for her when coming up the stairs.
We figured that they were too cheap to buy one of those grab-bars that are available, so just used a spare doorknob they happened to have around. Can’t imagine that it would have been that helpful to the old lady, given that it was smooth and not that easy to hold onto. Then again, maybe the person who installed it was an impatient heir.
We don’t have a crawl space, per se, but we do have a large root cellar underneath the great room. It’s vented, but the vents open or close automatically depending on the temperature. It’s therefore treated as unvented, with no insulation under the floor.
My dad was a hell of a handyman - there wasn’t a single house we lived in that was the same shape we got it in once we moved. I’m not sure whether his most ambitious project was adding the complete chimney and fireplace (complete with stucco wall) and reroofing the house in Winnipeg, or finishing the basement and completely ripping out and redoing the kitchen and bathroom in Montreal. He was also a very good handyman, if somewhat given to letting his projects expand out of control (“Well, as long as I have to put in the towel rack, I’ll have to paint, so I might as well redo those tiles, and it would be foolish to do that before I finally replace the tub and toilet…”)
Any rate, we had to deal with some very *bad handymanning in our last apartment, which to begin with was this awful basement thing from the 1990s. The ultimate expression thereof was the bathroom floor. Ye gods, the bathroom floor. At one point, without provocation, some handypersons came in and laid a new layer of tiles. Directly over the old tiles. Naturally, these promptly heaved and cracked, and the tiles underneath heaved and cracked and came away too, and then the floorboards got soaked and rotted, and I’m putting a big bath mat over this horrible hole, like that’s some kind of solution… Finally they had to tear the whole damn thing out and completely reinstall it. God in Heaven, I came to hate that place.
Now I live in a much nicer apartment (bigger, more attractive, hardwood floors, etc.) – built in 1922, one of those nice old Montreal triplexes. The main weirdness is that it’s wired so that everything but the kitchen is on the same circuit; besides that, there’s a space for a light in my bedroom, but it’s got no switch, so I would have to find a wall lamp with a switch on it, which Mom has in her house, but which is now apprently nonexistent. That, and the bathroom sink that has shed the knob for the hot water. The landlord (we have a very nice landlord who does his own repairs) tells me that he’ll be in to fix those things in the next little while.
Our plumber, (if we could afford it, we’d keep him on retainer), has been in the business for 50 years. He said he’s seen things at our house that boggles the mind.
My house was built in 1942, the addition was cobbled together sometime in the 70s. Three rooms including a bathroom, with no wall insulation, no sub-floor, the ceiling fixtures are atatched to nothing except the ceiling drywall.
One of the rooms is the laundry room. They forgot to disconnect the old utility lines (located in the kitchen), from the septic system. This didn’t become a problem until the house was put on city sewage, (3 months before we moved in). The old utility lines were also connected to the kitchen sink drain. EVERYTIME we used the sink, it was flushing old crap from the now buried septic tank, back into the drain line. It took us 2 weeks to realize the eyewatering stink coming from the drain wasn’t due to a typical drain clog.
My house is not one of the really beautiful victorian or dutch colonials, but it’s sure in a nice neighborhood.
. It took me half an hour with a chisel and hammer to get the thing unstuck. Finally I pop it loose with a bang and manage to pull it out. The first thing I notice is that something with four legs and a tail has been living back there for quite some time (I’ll spare you the icky details). The second thing I notice is how our furry friend got back there: the drywall just ends about an inch from the floor, leaving a large gap.
