Let me explain: The house was given to my father by his uncle, my Great Uncle. I have no idea who built it, but whoever did was a complete fucking moron.
Whoever dug the basement was too lazy to dig it deep enough. The clearance space from the floor to the ceiling is approximately 5 foot 8 inches. If you are above that height you have to bend your knees slightly in order to avoid hitting your head. Adding to the joy are the support beams that in some places lower the clearance even further and visitors frequently bump their heads on.
The bathroom has 3 doors. THREE DOORS! Plus it is at a crucial juncture in the house. It is the only way to get to the stairway that goes to the third floor which currently serves as a bedroom. It is also the easiest way to get from the Office (we run a business out this house) to the Living Room Area. It is the fucking crossroad of the house!
Anyone who wants to use the bathroom and have any semblance of privacy has to either wait until the house is completely vacant (a rare occurance) or jam the doors shut with a knife. If you take the latter option, chances are you’ll forget to unjam the door and someone will be seriously hindered from moving around the house. Jamming the bedroom door shut is not an option as it would lock my little sister upstairs with no way of getting out other than climbing off the roof.
There’s no easy way to fix these problems either. Digging the basement deeper would require a lot of time with a jackhammer, a shovel, and concrete.
The bathroom can’t be fixed either without doing some serious plumbing work. But then we’d have to cordon of a small section of the living room and make THAT the bathroom, and we’d be left with a small in between room that could do nothing but take up space because it’s too tiny to do anything else.
When my sister and I inherit this house many years from now, we should have it bulldozed and build a new one in its place. I’m dead serious. Grr!
I really ought to check out the county records. Maybe the Deed to the house will say when it is built? I’m rather curious about it. My Great Uncle passed 18 years ago so I can’t ask him.
I guess now I know what happened to whoever designed my family’s house - they moved west to try to see how much worse they could do next time.
This was, we’re pretty sure, originally a single family home that was converted to two apartments at some point before the 1950s when my grandparents bought it. There’s a sort of storage closet in the living room which appears to have possibly once been a dumbwaiter or something, seeing as it goes straight up into the identical closet upstairs, there is no floor. You look up and see the bottom of their bottom drawer. The bathroom made for midgets, it has what purports to be a full tub but if I sit down my knees are up to my chin (I’m 5’4"), and the water and gas pipes in the kitchen are exposed. There are hardly any cabinets in the pantry, either upstairs or down. There are no counters whatsoever. It has a sink on one side and linen drawers on the other, and that’s it. In fact I’m pretty sure the whole bathroom/kitchen end of the house was added on when they split it into two units. My parents’ bedroom has no closet at all; they have to use the closet in the living room. The rooms really should have been the other way around, but then you’d have to go through my parents’ bedroom to get to the kitchen.
Not that it’s much better now. You have to go through my bedroom to get to theirs. When I was five, I asked to at least have doors put on my bedroom. My grandmother said no, because I might have boys over. (At 5?) I finally got a door on my room when I was 23, shortly after grandma croaked. My room does have a closet, but because my room is half of what used to be a much larger room, the closet is not deep enough for hangers. The other half of the big room, which is between my bedroom and the living room, is essentially my closet, since it contains a clothes rack as well as the rest of the stuff that would normally be in my bedroom if it wasn’t the size of a postage stamp. My parents knew I desperately wanted to move into the upstairs apartment after my grandfather passed on, but rented it to someone else without even discussing it with me. By the time the tenants from hell moved out, I was living with my then-fiance. Post-breakup, came back, moved out again, moved back in when roommate revealed hitherto undisclosed major issues. Every time I come back, the gopher tunnel that runs through the living room when it’s humid due to poorly fitted floorboards gets bigger.
The basement ceiling is a bit higher than yours, but whoever put in the stairs did so in such a way that I have to duck to make it all the way down. Ex-fiance and I did look at a house once that had a very low ceiling in the basement because it was originally a lake cabin that was converted for year-round living, and therefore wasn’t designed with the expectation of storage, etc. Yours may also have originally been seasonal?
Mom often says there’s nothing wrong with this place that $400k and a backhoe wouldn’t fix. I am so not looking forward to inheriting it (I’m hoping for a promotion at work so I can afford to get out again for good!) but as an only child I don’t see what choice I really have unless they get rid of it first.
The kitchen in the house in which I grew up was 12x10. Why? Because my great-grandparents didn’t need a kitchen that was 12x18 so they took a saw and cut off half the kitchen.
Grampa’s brother - same family - had a two story house. He was an old bachelor farmer and didn’t need a second story, so he took a saw and cut off the top half of the house.
Gramma - same family - came home from work one day to find her bedroom split in half and her in-laws (those would be the same people who cut the kitchen in the other house in half) moved in.
Gramma came home from work another day, shortly after those in-laws died, to find the wall torn out and a huge pit under the house because grampa decided to put in a basement.
When gramma and grampa’s kids moved out they decided they didn’t need a second story, either. So they took a saw (chain-, this time) and cut off the second story. The crane they hired to haul off the roof tipped over mid-lift.
Wow, chicque. I thought my family had weird hobbies, but cutting houses into pieces on a whim with a saw is way stranger than putting reindeer antlers on the cat.
[sub]nevermind![/sub]