Dear FCM, may I interest you in an essay by Mark Twain on Political Economy?
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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.
This brings back memories-a friend bought a house that had belonged to a retired Navy Chief Petty Officer. the house was painted (inside and outside) in navy gray! All the fixtures inside were navy regulation; he even had used ship’s wirng in the electric system.
the guy must have helped himself!
LOL, reminds me of our house in Portsmouth VA - it was in Craddock, a small area that was a designed military housing community - the utility room/back door mudroom had exposed knob and wire electrical wiring complete with the old knife switch fuse box … :eek: [that thankfully had been left in place while modern wiring had been run in the house!] and exposed plumbing. The previous owner had actually painted it Navy haze grey, and mrAru and I debated going and painting and labeling stuff in proper fashion mainly for the heck of it. It would not have been difficult to get the proper information for the colors and patterns for hot, cold water, sewage, gas and the like.
I have a guess… It was somehow a personal momento. “My great-grandfather set these, so I’m leaving one behind.” Just a thought.
I’ve never had wall jacks for cable. Rarely seen them either. Only places I have seen them are in condos, actually.
And if anything, the wall jacks are probably a bad idea, as any break in the line is going to drop the signal a little, so it’s better to just have the cord coming out of the floor than up into a jack which you then have to plug another cord into.
Now, if you’re only feeding the signal into one TV in one room, it’s probably not going to matter, but if you’re doing much splitting of the signal into multiple rooms or multiple devices in each room, it can make the difference between being able to watch the TV or just a bunch of breakups in the signal.
Actually, in analog days it wasn’t so bad, you’d just get a slightly snowy picture, but digital is such a pain in the ass with marginal signals that it just makes sense to limit any unnecessary breaks in the line.
The previous owner used the detached two car garage as his workshop. The doorbell (yes, for the garage) is one of those old school eight inch diameter metal deals with the clanger that hits it to ring. There are 30 electrical outlets in the garage. Lighting consists of four different types of flourescent lighting, each controlled by it’s own switch. Out of the fifteen switches I’ve found so far five control nothing. He cut a hole in the wall for a window air conditioner, ignoring the perfectly fine window that could accomodate said air conditioner. The garage door opener was plugged into an outlet AND hard-wired (that’s the first thing I fixed). There is a six inch difference between the garage and the side door threshold. He built a two inch high and a seperate four inch high step to bridge the difference.
That’s just the garage. At some point his workshop was in the basement. An electrician friend came over one time to help make sense of the electrical situation in the basement. He gave me the number to a rival electrical company and I haven’t heard from him since.
Not everyone, although my family is known to refer to those switches as the “FUCK!” switches. As in, you toggle one without realizing that if the door is closed there is someone inside and are rewarded by anything from a question about your eyesight to a detailed description of your ancestry, by someone who shares those same ancestors and can therefore be extremely detailed indeed.
The stairs are there. The bannister is against the wall. I haven’t seen it myself, but from the neighbor’s description it sounds like they bumped out the wall, enclosed the bannister with drywall, and plastered over it.
I’m sure the new owners of my parents house are shaking their heads and talking to themselves.
Dad was a electrician, knew all the tricks and firmly believed in making things easy for himself. For example, all the outlets on the front of the house were split–bottom constant, top on a timer. Why you ask? Christmas lights. 11PM, a click and they all went off, nothing to unplug.
The boiler was another interesting thing–tankless hot water, oil fired. This could get expensive, and a tad crazy in the summer. The solution was a 80 Gal electric hot water tank he found somewhere, plumbed in parallel with the tankless. In spring, shut down the boiler, warm up the tank. In fall, reverse the procedure.
It took 4 hours to show the new owners the little things on transfer day.
Of course this all started when we bought the 42 year old house in 1969, and the first thing we had to address was the 15 Amp service…:smack:
My mother in law’s eldest sister got married in the 40s - and the most expensive wedding present was an electric lamp [you know, plug it in and put it on an end table somewhere] that was given to her by a relative who wanted to do the passive-aggressive thing [nothing like family members for putting the ‘fun’ in ‘disfunctional’] because the house was neither plumbed nor had electricity. They did not have electricity for another 10 years, and in 1964 it still had no more plumbing than a hand pump in the kitchen …
I could go on and on and on with stories about our house’s previous owners and their “repair” and “remodel” jobs. Probably the worst one is that when they remodeled the bathroom and in the process raised the floor about a half an inch or so…which caused the toilet not to sit correctly on the wax ring…which caused a leak.
Instead of figuring out what was wrong, they caulked around the base of the toilet. When my husband figured out what was going on and tore the floor up…well suffice to say that he told me to be glad I wasn’t there to see it, and that he wasn’t going to describe it for me. He replaced the floor and the sub floor that day…all the way down to the joists. Ugh.
In the house I bought 5 years ago, there is a bolt-type door lock on the OUTSIDE of my bedroom closet. I guess if a bad guy goes in there, I can lock him in.
My dad always put carpet on the walls when he was “redoing” a room. I don’t know what that’s about.
My sister’s first house, many years ago, was this tiny little thing with a decent living room, tiny kitchen, other room and the smallest 3/4 bath you have ever seen on the ground floor, and two 8’x6’ bedrooms on either side of the stairs upstairs. Only a crawl space for a basement.
That tiny bathroom on the main floor was at maximum possible distance from the bedrooms. It would have been physically impossible to force you to walk any farther and still be inside the house. It was also carpeted, floor, walls and ceiling, in the most godawful blood red carpet you have ever seen in your life.
In my old house, the wiring was chaos. It made no logical sense which outlets were on which circuit. Different outlets in the same room and even the lights themselves were all on different circuits - but it’s not like there was an over-abundance of circuits, so it was all mashed together in an order only a mad man could appreciate.
papergirl, my parents put a sliding bolt on the outside of their bedroom closet when I was a teen. Made no damned sense to me, since it wouldn’t stop anyone from getting in it and unless there was something strange going on that I was unaware of, nothing was coming out of it.
Heh–we talk about the drunken monkeys that did our house, too.
Lots of problems, from the '70s wood paneling laid down as flooring material downstairs, to the I shit you not cardboard used as a roofing layer just below shingles. But my favorite is the tin roof over one bedroom, to which they nailed shingles with extremely cheap rustable nails. We found out once the nails started rusting through, leaving us with a sort of water sprinkler system into that bedroom.
In the case of our house, it wasn’t previous owner/tenants who effed the place up. It was flippers. And thank goodness we rent. I feel awful for the owners, who apparently had the worst home inspector on the planet.
A partial list of what’s wrong with the joint:
The big luxurious tub in the master bath? Installed without a p-trap.
The plenum chamber (is that what it’s called? The indoors part of the heat pump, with the filter and air exchange?) The door to the chamber is right next to the conveniently installed new toilet in the master bath. The door only opens about 6 inches.
It’s very obvious that zero building permits were pulled and no inspections done during the flip. Evidence: the outlet next to my bathroom sink is a standard, non-GFCI outlet. The county tax site still lists the house as four bedrooms and three baths, but it is currently only 3/3, because the flippers thought that a huge, but crappy master bath was a selling point.
Porcelain tiles were laid in the kitchen, over an unlevel sub-floor. Porcelain tiles crack easily under that circumstance. Did you know?
The front of the house is the original, built in 1968. The rear bedroom, den, and porch were added as an in-law suite in 1975. Wiring in the front is apparently aluminum, which wouldn’t have been unusual in the sixties. Needless to say, the flippers didn’t replace any wiring when they screwed things up. The front porch lights won’t work at all. The water heater for the kitchen and laundry won’t heat water properly. If I push the “test” button on the GFCI outlet next to the stove, the computer’s battery backup beeps due to the interruption. The computer is plugged into an outlet in the dining room, 20 feet away from that kitchen outlet.
The in-law suite porch was enclosed by the flipper to make a sunroom/office. Naturally, no actual insulation was used.
When the refrigerator was installed, it was apparently too deep for the spot. The flippers just cut away the drywall behind it, leaving only backer board and brick. In order to unplug the refrigerator for service recently, I had to uninstall a kitchen cabinet. The fridge was apparently plugged in, and then the cabinet was nailed to the wall next to it. (I did, at least, cut a hole in the back of the cabinet when I reinstalled, so that the refrigerator could be plugged/unplugged without major renovations!
That’s probably not even half… Just the things that have annoyed me lately. If the landlords are lucky, an electrical fire will put them out of their financial misery when this house is vacant. I really think they should pursue legal action against the people who flipped and sold this home!
I know a couple people who have converted closets into safe storage for hazards like guns, which may explain some of the locks-on-closets. In that context it makes sense although I can imagine someone not knowing the closet was, essentially, used as sort of a walk-in safe looks at it and goes WTF? Or imagines something more sinister.
Oh, okay - I got it now.
I guess it could be from a closet door that won’t stay closed, too.
I have a barrel bolt on the outside of a closet door because it won’t stay closed ( old door and the latch was probably painted over before I was born) and used to have hooks/barrel bolts on a couple of doors because I didn’t want my kids to be able to open them.
Oh, that makes me feel a little better and makes more sense than the bogeyman-in-the-closet theory. Thanks!