not ridiculous if done correctly.
when tv sets were consoles and you only had one then you could arrange the furnishings in your living room around the tv set, which might be near an antenna jack.
in modern times, with multiple sets and cable service, you want the freedom to have a set in many rooms and place the set so that you didn’t have to run 30 feet of coax in the room.
Running cable to every room, and to multiple points in the room, isn’t necessarily ridiculous. Doing it while drunk, though, is.
Although, that could explain some of the work I saw back when I was working as an electrician’s assistant. I don’t recall the exact details, but there was one house we fixed where the entire plumbing system was hot.
Wow, makes you wonder how humanity made it this far, doesn’t it?
Our house is over a 100 years old and there are some other good stories, but my favorite is that the previous owners had the dryer vented into a crawl space with no access door. The rodents loved it! Warm, linty goodness. Never mind the window directly next to the crawl space, which could have served, by using one pane for the vent. Which is what we did for awhile, until my husband vented it correctly out the wall.
That’s not ridiculous, that’s a great idea. It took me about 2 hours just two put in the two rear speakers in my living room (up near the ceiling) without breaking any drywall. If there was no drywall/flooring/ceilings in the entire house it would have taken 5 minutes…maybe a half hour if I wanted to to a ‘good’ job and staple all the wires down.
The most ‘creative’ one in my house is my garage door opener. A few days after I moved in it stopped working. When I finally got around to looking at it I found out the moron wired it into one of the porch lights so it only worked when they were on. Took me about 10 minutes and 18 inches of wire to fix it.
What I think happened is that when the house was built they left some electrical up there for the garage door opener should it ever be installed, but the other end of the wire was in a box that got sprayed over by the painters so the wire was white and blended in in with all the other white painted wires and he didn’t see it.
Either way, it would have been better for him to just run an extension cord to one of the other outlets in the garage then to wire it to the porch lights, that was just stupid.
I don’t blame him for not seeing the wire in there, it did take me a minute to find it, I saw it at the top so I knew it had to be at the bottom, but if he (or whoever helped him) was smart enough to tap into the porch light then they were smart enough to use a long extension cord. Hell, they could have even just replaced the light bulb right next to it with an outlet and plugged in there. The door opener has a light bulb built right into it.
He wasn’t the smartest guy. From what I’ve heard from my neighbors, I’m not alone in thinking that.
The previous owner had glued the carpet to what had been beautiful hardwood floors.
Friends bought a house only to find out that the sellers had finished the hardwood floors around the area rugs and and had painted around the pictures on the wall.
When we re-did the middle bedroom a couple of years ago, the carpet had to be pulled up. Someone had nailed down the edges with two rows of nails about two inches apart, about every six inches. And there were random nails away from the edges, just for good measure. After pulling up the carpet, I don’t know how long I spent on the floor, pulling each and every rusty nail.
Oh and my father found out the hard way…
one outlet in each room was wired to a different breaker.
Our pools water level was regulated by a bobber attached to a wire which was attached to the water release by a twist-tie.
Gah, the list of things done to this house before my husband bought it boggles the mind.
Double glass slider doors installed high up on the wall of the vaulted living room, which were operated with ropes and pulleys. The walk-through kitchen rearranged so you couldn’t walk through it, in fact, could only enter it through a small door in the bedroom hallway. Each of the two full baths chopped up into three tiny rooms–so tiny you didn’t have room to brush your hair in front of the sink without bumping elbows on walls.
And then the decorating. Dear god the decorating. And I speak of his ex-wife’s decorating. Like the “stained glass” cling film on all the windows. Yeah, she was crazy.
In my case it was the living room: Red shag fastened to the original oak floors with roofing nails.
Not uncommon to find outlets belonging to an adjacent room’s breaker. If you have a wall between, say, a bedroom and living room, it’s not unusual to find one electrical run to outlets on both sides. I can tolerate a little of this in most setups; individually wiring everything in each room to one breaker can add up in cost and wiring complexity.
Then again, our current house (<- that’s an electrical pun, folks) is relatively new and has a feature from the days when wire was cheap and fixtures expensive. Rather than parsimoniously wiring each bathroom and putting in an expensive GFCI outlet, the builder daisy-chained the three bathroom outlets on their own breaker so he could use ONE GFCI for all. (These days, wire is so expensive using three separate devices wouldn’t have been a question.)
I popped the master bathroom fault protector the first week we lived here, and it took me two weeks to figure out that the downstairs bathroom held the reset. (It was a busy two weeks and not a priority, but I probably put a good hour into checking breakers, using a socket sniffer, etc.)
I rewired it with three independent GCFIs, cussing the builder all the way.
Man you guys are scaring me. Only been in my house 2 months, and haven’t found anything too weird except stuff I knew before I moved in.
In a small kitchen with two doors the oven is in a corner against an inside wall, with no counter to work on next to it, and 7 feet of empty wasted space above it. The fridge is on the outside wall corner with a small cupboard above it that you have to reach about 8 feet high, and t.5 feet back over the fridge to access. What a miserable waste of very valuable space.
As soon as I can get 220 pulled to that side(or find a sweet deal on a gas oven) The oven is going where there is workspace and a wall I an put a hood vent through, with a microwave shelf and make the cupboards accessible.
The house is also old enough that the growing need for outlets was not done consistently. The main bedroom has 5 outlets, the identical size second bedroom, which is my office has 1 stinking outlet :smack: There is also only 1 in the kitchen, and one in the bathroom, but 6 in the sun room, and 6 in the garage. 
Well at least you won’t lose the shag in a tornado.
The first house I rented as a poor sailor getting to live ‘off-base’ was interesting.
Off the kitchen was a shower stall with a mirror on the wall. For other ‘functions’ you had to go through the kitchen, through the living room, through the back bedroom to a space that had a toilet and a shelf. The kitchen had the only sink.
The fact that the plumbing actually worked was a plus, though.
Someone who wants to make sure that carpet never, ever moves? Yeah, three inch nails for carpet does seem a bit excessive.
That was the weirdest thing in our last house; the basement reno had obviously been done by amateurs (at least, I hope they didn’t pay a lot for it), since there wasn’t a single right angle in the whole of it.
A xeriscaped yard can be a wonderful thing; unfortunately, far too many people think making a xeriscape means take all the grass out and throw a few plants down. Nuh uh.
We took out all the shag carpets in our last house; after seeing the bottoms of those carpets (and smelling them), I don’t think I will ever have carpet in a house again. Those things are FILTHY!
When my grandparents bought their house it had a clothes chute…on the floor…in the middle of the kitchen.
My grandfather eventually moved it to the bathroom and closed up the one on the kitchen floor.
Let’s see, in my 1920 house…
[ul]
[li]The microwave cabinet is so low over the stove that you cannot put a large pot on the back burners. [/li]
[li]The custom concrete flooring is sealed with something that scratches when you look at it funny.[/li]
[li]The holes cut for the recessed light fixtures were slightly too large, and the gap is covered by rings of paper.[/li]
[li]A retaining wall was built by literally stacking bricks on top of each other and then plastering stucco on top. No mortar. No interlocking. Just a pile of stucco’d bricks.[/li]
[li]Part of the roof is insulated with barely more than some balled-up newspapers (which, ironically, are also what was used to keep the dryer hose in place in the too-large vent structure).[/li]
[li]The ducting to the third floor runs through uninsulated wall space completely unnecessarily. Meanwhile, the return duct is approximately twenty times larger than the output.[/li]
[li]The second step leading up to the front door is in fact not a step at all, but a large rectangular stone painted into place.[/li][/ul]
Don’t even get me starting on the plumbing and wiring.
I’ve posted these before, but they still make me shake my head when I think about them…
Previous owners built a wall in the master bedroom to enclose a closet. Trouble is, they built the wall over the existing carpet. Fun times when I tried to rip up the nasty carpeting.
Toilet did not flush right, so we decided to replace it. Taking the old toilet out, we discovered that there was no flange in the sewer pipe, and the toilet was just bolted to the subflooring with 4 inch screws.
One of the joints coming off the water heater was copper into galvanized and was held together with some type of adhesive, wrapped in electrical tape and tightened down with a steel cable.
And the really scary thing - the house passed a VA inspection.
I guess I wasn’t clear enough in my post: the guy and his friends were fall-down drunk when they did it. I guess only Chronos picked up on that.
Of course it would have been great if it had been done correctly. But it was a disaster. Cross-wired, staples through coax insulation, wires that go nowhere, inadequate wires for the application, etc… It took years to undo all the crap he did to that house.
The previous owner of my brother’s home added several additions himself. According to the contractor my brother hired to fix the mess, this guy was “fearless”.
The best example, out of many, was that one addition went around a downspout of the gutter. So he ended up with a downspout running inside of his walls.