The previous owner of my sister’s house didn’t want to pay for extra phone jacks and an internet jack for his basement workshop, so he did it himself, and very badly. Where the phoneline came into the house in the basement, he added some kind of old, obsolete piece of telephone splitter - a big chunk of plastic and wires with a metal cover - that hung out of the wall in what was basically a storage room when my sister moved in.
The new lines that split off from this doohickey ran around this storage room, along the half-wall ledge that many basements from house of that age have, up the corner of the walls, across the corner of the ceiling, underneath the drop-ceiling tiles in the hallway, into the workshop room, and again around the corners and ledge. I don’t know if his new phone jacks or internet jack ever worked, because they didn’t when my sister moved in.
My sister had me and my father go down to help her fix up the house after she bought it. The only way we could really clean up the mess of phone lines in that end of the basement was to cut them all down. Although my sister didn’t mind (she would have liked to have had a phone connection in the former workshop, which became a bedroom), she was more interested in getting a clearer phone connection for the lines that did work.
So, she called the phone company, who sent a guy over. The only part of the previous owner’s phone high-jinks that me and my father left was the old phone box that hung out of that one room’s wall. The phone guy quickly pointed out all the now-neutered jacks that were illegally installed, and when he saw the phone box he was floored.
Aside from compromising the quality of the connection, the guy said that, because of what had been done, the phone company had no responsibility to fix any of my sister’s phone problems. What the previous owner had done had basically nullified the contract with the phone company which included free servicing of connection problems.
Fortunately, the phone guy and the company realized that my sister had had nothing to do with it, and bent the rules to fix the problems the previous owner’s fiddling had caused, without charge and without penalty. It didn’t hurt that my sister is a friendly, lovable sort. All the maintenance guys who she had to bring in easily fell into quasi-flirtatious banter with her. I tell you, everyone loves her!
Although there were quite a few other peculiarities with the house, the only other one I can think of off the top of my head was the fact that the electric heaters in the storage room and the former workshop were controlled by one thermostat, which was in the storage room. The storage room has since become a bedroom like the former workshop. If those rooms happen to be occupied at the same time, the occupants will have to negotiate an agreement on room temperature.
Oh, yeah! The workshop. Turning it into a bedroom took forever. The floor was covered in two layers of laminate, and the concrete floor beneath it wasn’t put in properly - it was somewhat porous. Though there may have never been flooding in the basement, enough dampness got through the concrete to slightly damage the baseboards around the perimeter of the room.
Also, the former owner was a smoker, but his wife refused to let him smoke anywhere in the house. At least until he put a fan and vent into the workshop’s ceiling to supposedly suck the smoke outside. It may have been someone successful in that respect, but where all the guy’s toolboxes and equipment had been sitting on the shelving units that were screwed across all three walls of the room, there were wonderful light grey silhouettes, surrounded by much darker walls, obviously the victim of cigarette smoke discoloration. It took many coats of paint to cover up the patchwork stains, and ever more just to cover up the smell of the room.
Shifting the spotlight onto my own family’s questionable renovations, my father, in replacing the washers in our upstairs sink faucets, somehow managed to reverse the direction needed to turn on and off one of the faucets. He’s since put a whole new faucet set in, but for a long time, in order to turn on both the hot and cold water, you had to turn the faucets into each other. And these were simply round knob faucets, not the modern handle ones which are meant to turn in opposite directions.
Back to my sister’s house, in her main bathroom the shower was added onto the bathtub, like many older homes eventually had done. And, like many older homes, the bathtub was right under the bathroom window. So, the wooden-framed bathroom window was in the shower. :rolleyes: Though my sister’s managed to replace most of the older windows in the house, I believe this window is still just covered with that stretched plastic covering you put on with a hairdryer.
The plastic has held up pretty good, but it’s pretty spotty. Of course, even though the window is out of view from any neighbors, this spottiness does provide a further level of comfort for a showerer. Also in the shower, however, in a fan to the outside, for moisture extraction. Unfortunately, it never worked very good and wasn’t very draft proof. But, besides the draft, it also let in a ton of flies in the spring. This fan is also sealed in plastic, on the inside and outside.
So, my sister, of course, needed a new fan for the bathroom. So, we got my cousin, the amateur electrician to help my father out. They had to climb into the very tight attic space above the bathroom (the house has a very flat roof; not truly appropriate for this region, but that’s another story) to put in a ceiling fan and hook it up to the former fan’s switch my the light switch.
However, for some reason, they found it easier to attach new fan to the same switch as the light (while simply cutting the wires to the old fan). So, any time you go to the bathroom, for no matter what, when you turn on the light, the fan automatically turns on as well. And, of course, you have to know which switch to switch, since one of them now does nothing.
Anyhoo, I’ve rambled on long enough. And, looking at the time, I’m not sure I’ll be able to get this message to post at the moment. Hopefully it will, but I’ll save and paste to a text file first…
