Shit as in . . . shit. Feces. (They also left a lot of documents, which were interesting to read through. Mostly about how to push people through various levels of “programs” and how to get the patient’s families to fund it.
I pulled out orange shag carpet from the main washroom of a house my parents bought. One of the nicer houses in one of the nicer towns in the province, with a bathroom that reeked of urine due to the carpet.
Come to think of it, I pulled out the carpeting and refinished the hardwood floors in the next house my folks bought. It was the home and the after-hours office of a doctor (who died of a heart attack while playing golf). His dog would urinate whenever a patient visited, so the place had a fine tang of faintly scented urine that only Leopold Bloom would appreciate.
Sometimes I think there is a lot to be said for outhouses.
Had we only known! Most of the docs had been stuffed into a bedroom closet. We read through some of them for shits and giggles (well, not for shits anyway – too much on the bathroom ceiling already), and then tossed them in the dumpster. (We gutted the place of most of its walls, floors, doors, plumbing, wiring etc. but then a stop-order was placed against us for having the wrong type of building permit – made for one hell of a cold winter for us living there until we got it straightened out. The fellow who obtained the building permit was a name partner of what then was one of the two top corporate and commercial law firms in the country, but unfortunately he filled out the form for residential rather than commercial, resulting in our winter of discontent. You have no idea how hard it is to keep druggies out of place without doors. One of them had the nerve to complain that the place was too cold.) A couple of the guys attended at the Scientologist’s head office that was a bit closer to downtown, where they spent a day pretending to want to join up, while asking all sorts of questions pertaining to what they had learned in the documents.
Anyway, about a year or two after we tossed the docs, there was a huge raid on the Scientologist’s Canadian head office as part of an attempt to bust the cult. Had I known better when we came upon the documents, I would have contacted the police about the documents rather than pitching them, but being young and naïve, I didn’t realize the significance of the documents (specifically the docs that went into detail about how to get funds from a patient’s family – if the patient were an addle minded cult victim, then this might not be kosher).
Malthus, you might be familiar with the outcome of the police raid. Scientology started maligning the Crown Attorney, who then sued the Church of Scientology for defamation (now there’s a first, suing the Scientologists rather than being sued by them). He won what was then the biggest defamation award ever awarded in Canada. The matter was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of Canadawith a who’s who of lawyers attending (including Hogg for one of the intervenors). The Crown Attorney was later made a Superior Court judge and sits in the Central West Region (Brampton and surrounding area). A few years ago I had the pleasure of appearing before him when he visited the Northwest Region – a very pleasant person and a very astute judge. I have a lot of respect for that fellow for standing up to the cult.
The gas line in my old house came out of the wall in standard black iron gas pipe. As it went up toward the inlet for the water heater, it went through a series of shorter and shorter right angle bends (x,y AND z axis) until it was one loop short of an actual knot. At the end of this mess was a piece of copper water line that snaked between the wall side and the water heater. I have no idea how he even adapted the two to fit together. It belonged in a modern art museum with the title card, “Ah, F*ck It!”
The same moron put the light switches on the neutral side of the circuit in a couple of places. Almost knocked me off the ladder when I decided to take a shortcut in installing a ceiling fan by just turning the switch off. I learned something about wiring that day.
Minor understatement there, I read the Court’s decision as…
“You lied libelously, knew you were doing it, did it on the Courthouse steps in your Barristers Robes, to the press, oh and you are a lying McLiarpants, on fire. Pay Up.”
I live in a house built in the 50’s with 30’s techniques.
A lot of ‘sport wiring’, including uncapped wires we discovered during a kitchen re-do. Also, a half dozen wall switches to nowhere.
The worst was they had put the vertical fuel oil tank on bricks rather than concrete slabs. One month it rained so much the soil couldn’t support the uneven weight distribution, tank fell over against the house. I got a horizontal tank to replace it with concrete slabs under the legs.
We recently bought a house, just over a year old. The previous owners had Sky installed. They had the cable (a massive, thick, white, double coaxial thing) brought in to the living room from outside by the installers right in the middle of one of the walls, rather than having the hole drilled through the wall in one of the corners of the room and having the cable routed for the most part outside of the house from the dish to the corner. This appears to be their only decision to alter the house in the six months or so they owned it.
We went from the prior Hack’ed house to one that was approaching ten years old… but had had three owners who did next to nothing to it. The last family was absentee a good part of their five years. The only changes from brand-brand-new were some very ineptly installed kiddie latches here and there, some Orthodox dietary labels on the kitchen drawers and shelves, and a few quik-install shelving units in some of the closets. The house was so untouched that it still has all the original interior paint (which is rather low-grade contractor flat that has lost its stain resistance, sigh) and traces of construction rubble in the basement corners.
Quite a difference after the last few “WHAT THE FRACK WAS HE THINKING!” houses…
My favorite puzzling design choice is actually widespread throughout the area. When I first moved to New England, I made a lot of interesting discoveries about the architecture out here, and one of the most baffling was that I kept running into bathroom light switches located outside the bathroom door. It didn’t take me very long to realize that these were all in those late Edwardian houses that have been converted into apartments, and that the electricity had been originally been run into the house long before GFCI was invented – it made perfect sense at the time to keep all the volts as far way from the water as possible, and nobody had ever bothered moving them in subsequent renovations.
(It also apparently made perfect sense to run the telephone, and later cable, into the house via holes drilled directly through the exterior wall, just next to the windowsill. That one may genuinely fall into the category of ‘perplexing things the previous owners did’.)
But the first few times I had to ask and was told the switch was just outside the door, all I could think was that whoever had done that must have been an only child. I have a sister. If the bathroom light switch had been located in the hall in the house where I grew up, I’d have spent half my life showering in the dark.
The man who owned my house before me was a talented amateur. He built the back deck (wonderful). However he wired the well pump himself, not so wonderful. I have his notes on the project – for which I am extremely thankful, because I would have clipped to what I thought was the ground wire. The well inspector and I were going over the well, with the previous owner’s notes, for the home inspection and discovered this gem: the hot wire is the green wire. The inspector and I just looked at each other and said, at the same time in the same incredulous tone, “Green means ground”.
There are quite a few places in the world where switches are outside the bathrooms. I can tell you that, yes, everyone who grew up in those places with siblings has indeed spent a significant amount of time showering in the dark.
A few others I just remembered about our current home:
The hall bathroom had a phone jack and phone in it - a blue princess phone that looked lovely on the back of the blue toilet next to the blue tub. It was truly stunning.
[ul]
[li]Cable for TV came into the basement - no biggie there - and was routed to the various rooms upstairs by drilling holes in the floor. *Wall jacks? We don’ need no steenkin’ wall jacks!*and there were splitters on splitters in the basement to accommodate all the desired cable runs.[/li][li]And evidence of sticky fingers - in one of the yard sheds (not the one with the alarm) we found boxes full of ceiling mounted light fixtures and switches and plugs and I don’t recall what-all. Not that big a deal, except the man of the house used to work for the Feds as a plasterer (he worked at Blair House at one point) and all of the aforementiond items were packaged with Fed stock number labels. Having been a gummint employee myself for 37 years, I knew them well. Apparently he supplemented his pay with a hefty five-finger discount.[/li][li]They didn’t want to heat their whole house in the winter, so they hung insulated curtains in all the doorways of the living room, dining room and den, then they heated these rooms with portable electric heaters rather than use the oil-fired furnace. We found a bunch of heaters in the shed - they wouldn’t need them in Florida. OK, it’s not that unheard of, but they were really ugly curtains - 8 pairs of them ended up going to Goodwill.[/li][li]There were shingle layers literally 1" thick on the roof - we figure it was 3 roofings. Needless to say, we had it all stripped off when we re-roofed 3 years ago.[/li][li]And speaking of the roof - I think somewhere along the line a slicky salesman came thru the area pushing lightning rods for the home - you can see them in this pic. They’re on houses all over the county, regardless of the elevation of surrounding properties, towers, trees, etc. They’re not on our house any longer - all that remains is the grounding post pounded in at the corner of the house and the placque on the wall nearby taking credit for the system.[/li][/ul]
And I think finding light switches inside the bathroom is weird. But then again, I’m from New England
I never showered in the dark. I’m an only.
Weirdest thing I’ve heard: The couple who purchased the bungalow across the street last fall regaled the discovery of a bannister that had been plastered over by a long-ago owner. Everybody they told was like, “Huh?!?”, including myself. Then I remembered that the people who’d bought the house from the original owner never used the upstairs except for storage (IIRC the husband was frail, so they made the living room into their bedroom). Maybe they were the ones who plastered it over so the husband wouldn’t see it and think, “Oh, let me try to go upstairs.”
Our plumbing in the bathtub was totally fucked up. The spigot where water comes out was ABOVE the handles for hot and cold water. So when you you turned the water on, it poured down onto your hands! I seriously for my life cannot figure out why somebody would do that, see that it was wrong, and not fix it.
The bathroom sink was installed on a cabinet base, 10 inches away from the toilet. Placed so that you couldn’t sit straight on the toilet, you had to sit at a 45 degree angle. It was wicked simple to move it over to get some legroom.
It amazes me that the previous tenants just dealt this crap for years on end without ever trying to fix things.
