I don’t know who puts a shower head onto a sprinkler riser. I do know that we’ve always had spare shower heads lying around the house. Hell, we probably brought a spare with us when we moved from the house the the apartment 20 years ago.
See, you don’t just replace shower heads when they break (*can *they break?). You replace them when they get cruddy and you don’t feel like dissolving the mineral deposits with vinegar. You replace them when you replace the water flow control knobs and they don’t match any more. You replace them when your spouse sees one of those cool “waterfall” style shower heads at the hardware store and says “Want!”
But, of course, you don’t throw out the old shower head. It works (for certain values of “works”). Throwing it out would be wasteful. Besides, the new shower head might break, and if it does, you’ll be glad you had a spare lying around.
We have a basement door, at the bottom of a concrete stairwell. The door, should be a 30" door, it isn’t. It’s 29". We found a bargain wood cabinet perfect for my glass projects. It had been a floor display, so as a bonus, it was already assembled.
Got it home and found, yep, it was 30" deep. We had to disassemble it to get it in. Two weeks later we found a bargain leather, convertible sofa, perfect for the basement. You got it… it was 31" wide. We took the door frame off, pushed, pulled and finally got it inside. It will be included when we sell the house.
Do you remember Furbees?
I was ready to throw my smoke detector in the garbage because they wouldn’t stop beeping. Only when it continued to beep after I removed the battery did I realize it might not be the smoke detector. :smack: There in the hallway was one of the kids’ Furbees; beeping beeping beeping.
My mother (may she slesydto rest it peace) had to fix my brothers coveralls. He had ripped them at the shoulder so she had to remove the arm of the coveralls to make the repair . When my brother put on his coveralls they didn’t fit right. One arm was too short. It turns out my mom had sewn the sleeve on upside down so it would only fit if you stood there with one arm straight up in the air. We got a lot of teasing mileage out of that one.
I left a 4 year old alone in a room with a wooden subfloor (ready to finish!) and a stack of those nifty peel & stick laminate tiles. “Looky I did! All myself!” What a proud boy he was.
In a similar vein, I left a 4 year old (daughter this time) in the care of her distracted older brother–in the same room as the newly-painted deep red wall. Unfortunately, I also left a partially uncovered tray of lime-green paint. Yay! Bright green handprints all down the hallway!
You’d think I would’ve learned, but no…
The house I grew up in had a ping-pong table in the basement that had been left by the previous owners. It wasn’t one of those fancy store-bought ping-pong tables that fold up in the middle…oh no, it was homemade from a single piece of wood, with non-removable legs. We had no idea how they’d gotten that giant piece of wood in there in the first place, and neither did the neighbors.
It was left for the new owners when my parents sold the house.
Ok. I’ll buy that. I suspect that some former owner was a pack rat, though, because of the ‘solarium’. There was a room in the back that looked like it might have been a porch at one time. All the outer walls were covered with casement windows, casement-to-casement, and no two windows were the exact same size.
The kitchen floor was tiled with counter/wall tiles - the shiny kind with rounded edges.
Reminds me of an incident that happened about ten years ago. One Sunday, as we arrived at the church office before Service, we found the burglar alarm gone from the wall and tightly wrapped up in a towel with duct tape on the chair the pastor usually sat on.
The pastor, who was running late, arrived and sheepishly admitted he had done it. He had entered the office the night before and the alarm went off and he had forgotten the alarm code. The only other people who knew the code were either out of town or were not answering their phones.
Hoping to avoid another,“what did *he *do this time?” story circulating the church, our ever-resourceful pastor noticed a phillip’s head screwdriver on a bookshelf and decided to disconnect the alarm from its power source.
Needless to say, this did not work since the alarm had its own backup battery supply.
Our house has a very narrow stairway to the basement, and a standard appliance geometrically will not turn the corner. Guess where the washer/dryer hookups are?
The previous owners left their broken washer & dryer in the basement, telling us they were an easy repair, “they only broke a couple weeks ago”. After moving in, we saw that the rust and dust build up inside of them showed they hadn’t been run for probably several years. We figure that they inherited the broken things from the previous previous owners and simply never figured out how to get new ones in.
Well, the house has an old coal chute to the basement that would fit an appliance, but it’s a 10’ vertical shaft. We built our own rig and motorized hoist and lifted out the old appliances and replaced them with our own. We have the disassembled rig for when we ever need to drop a couch, hot water heater, whatever.
The rig will be included with the house for the next owners
called out repair service in a panic, fearing a pipe had frozen and caused the flood in kitchen. Tech discovered the cold water supply line fitting had corroded and been leaking very slowly for weeks… into a bin we had under the sink… and the bin had just overflowed that morning.
called out repair service in a panic because the washing machine would not power on. The electrician found a breaker turned off - not thrown - in the air conditioning access closet. I have lived here over ten years and apparently never noticed the breaker switch which is directly in one’s line of sight when opening that door.
we’ve had electricians out twice for what we thought were major electrical problems, and they replaced an electrical outlet and a light switch.
Our address must be flagged in the stupid homeowners file at this service.
This reminds me of what happened to my dad and stepmom in their current house. One year, they were annoyed because their Carbon Monoxide detector wasn’t working properly. It was going off all the time! Eventually they got annoyed and had someone come in to look at it. Of course, as it turns out, the Carbon Monoxide detector was working perfectly. The furnace, on the other hand …
We got a lot of teasing mileage out of that one.
