Well… my house was built in 1903, so it’s probably not the same builder. Could be the same electrician though, they sure didn’t wire this place up in '03.
I’ve seen similar in Brazil. My parents owned an apartment in Rio which had the servants bedroom and bathroom just off of the kitchen. It was a small dark room because it faced into an inner courtyard. My parents used the room as a storage room and redid the bathroom although no one really used it much.
My parents bought a house in Brazil which the previous owner had started to built in 1999 although they had to finish it. It also had a room off of the kitchen storage area and a separate bathroom. They use the bathroom as where you clean yourself from the pool and the room gets used for storage.
Heh - I can totally see that now. Or maybe tap-dance practice studio?
Hee. This reminds me of the rowhouse I lived in, in DC. Three floors, six bedrooms (group house rental), it had been built in the early 1900s (1905? 1911? something like that), maintained pretty well, for all that. We forgot this more than once, but we couldn’t run the microwave and the toaster oven at the same time – it would trip the circuit breaker. Which was unfortunate, because this also turned off all the lights in the (occupied) garden apartment in the basement. Which, IIRC, had no freaking windows at all, except for the one in the door which was underneath the back porch. It was pitch black down there. The breaker box was down there too, so it was a good thing we were on really good terms with our downstairs neighbors. 
My first housse was a 1905ish colonial revival that was in pretty good shape. But none of the doors would shut properly. In the basement we discovered that one of the main uprights that supported the floors was severed for a purpose that I no longer remember maybe something to do with updating of the electric by a previous muldoon.
That house held so many surprises, most of them enchanting, but that discovery was scary.
I was the “house inspector” for a place on the southwest side of Chicago that my sister-in-law had foolishly signed a contract to buy. If you didn’t know much about houses, which my SIL didn’t, the place showed well, I’ll say that - nicely painted, etc. But every time you looked under the hood, so to speak, you saw something that made you cringe. Two things in particular stand out:
(1) The house, which must have been built in the 1920s, had finished front and rear porches - but the porches didn’t rest on proper masonry footings, but rather what I recall as two-by-tens lying on the ground. Worse, someone subsequently had dug out basements under the porches, which meant digging a couple feet below the level of the two-by-tens. They then shored up the earthen walls with a rank of two-by-sixes pounded into the ground. By the time I saw it, the shoring was all rotted and collapsing, and the earth beneath the porch walls was starting to subside. If you looked at the outside of the house, you could see the porches had already sagged a couple inches out of true. I remember there was a vertical crack in the exterior wall where the rear porch met the main house, narrow at the bottom but maybe an inch and a half wide by the time it got to the top of the house.
(2) While looking at the aforesaid crack, I noticed that the electric power line from the alley had the three wires typical nowadays, but only two were connected. Investigating the fusebox in the basement, a corroded hunk of junk, I discovered that all the current for the entire house - a couple with several children lived there - passed through a single 30 amp fuse and a length of 14 gauge wire.
I wrote a lawyerly long letter that got my sister out of the contract, I’m happy to say.
I’m glad you explained this because at first I thought it was an allusion to the stereotype of the Irish cowboy builder.
Anyway, when we moved in in 1988 our house looked like it had been wired by a flying spagetti monster. Under every panel there was a mess of wires, loose ends and the like.
You in turn have intrigued me. I’ve never heard of this stereotype. Is it one prevelant in Ireland itself? Here in Canada, as far as I know, there is no particular knowledge of such a thing re building specifically.
There are negative Irish stereotypes, but they are all about drinking and fighting.
I think it perhaps mainly had currency in England. I don’t know. There are cowboy builders here too but I think in England and perhaps the rest of Britain, Irish builder became somewhat synonymous with cowboy builder. A lot of Travellers are in the building trade so it might be as much to do with prejudice against them or perhaps maybe Irish builders are generally rip-off merchants. I’m tryna dig up some cites for you. I haven’t found much. For example, not proof of anything but there’s an episode of Fawlty Towers with an Irish cowboy builder.
Googling “cowboy builders”, the second link I get is;
MP wants Irish ‘cowboy’ builders blacklisted
From this blog:
“In London people get to meet lots of real Irish people. There are Irish-born police, many lower-rung Labour Party activists are Irish, etc etc. We have reputations in liberal circles for being well read, witty, colorful, and astute. These are broad generalizations and no more accurate than the opposite end of the perception spectrum, wherein we’re drunken feckless dole-scrounging cowboy builders.”
Cool, thanks. That I can truly say is something I’ve never heard of; it’s quite interesting - here in Canada stories of crummy contractors and scamming builders abound, but they are not so far associated with any particular nationality - all creeds, nations, races and religions unfortunately co-operate in that venture! 
Anyway, as far as I know the Muldoons were fine upstanding citizens (I presume from the name of Irish descent) who happened to own a nice house, but had lousy home-renovation skills. 
Ever since we bought the house, we’ve had trouble with the master bathroom sink draining slowly. We put Drano down it and tried one of those tools for grabbing hair out of a drain. Sometimes that would make it a bit better for a little while, but it didn’t fix the problem. Dad Neville took the U-trap out, and it was clear. He poked his finger in the pipe in the wall, and said, “There’s no opening in here!” Someone had almost completely sealed the pipe shut with plumber’s putty at some point (he thinks this was done many years ago). The opening was only about the size of a pencil lead. He filed out a lot of the putty, and now the sink is working a lot better.
The person who did that has since moved to California. S/he moved out of the apartment in Livermore that I moved into in 2002. The phone wires were a similar mess in that apartment, done by some previous tenant. I had quite a time getting home phone service, and that was what made me finally surrender to the 20th century and get a cell phone.
The guy who built my house in 1930 made doors of different widths. All non standard. I can not go to the store for a door. Every one is special order.
Go back into the laundry room - above the dryer is the first electric panel. Look to the left a few feet is another electric panel from when the house was rewired sometime in the 50’s. Wander back into furnace room, look 3’ off the floor and see another electric panel from the 70’s rewiring. Now look up and a little to the left and see the electric panel from 5 years ago.
When the real electrician (aka my brother in law) rewired the house 5 years ago he put the kitchen and family room (now my office) on the same circuit. After a week of living here I made him rewire the basement. I couldn’t work on the computer, have a lamp on, and turn the dishwasher on with out popping the circuit.
We live in a two flat and rent out the upstairs (which violates a major rule of landlordship: Always rent below you, as you will eventually rent to someone who doesn’t understands the purpose of ankles and stomps around with such force that it convinces you the tenants have been removed and a camel herder and his flock have taken their place). One afternoon I was embarking on a simple project to relocate an electrical outlet in preparation for a new built-in refrigerator. As I cut into the wall at the new location site, I was curious as to why the wood framing and drywall seemed a bit damp.
It was July in Chicago and I was about to write it off as the 100% humidity interacting with cool air moving up from the basement below when that little nagging voice finally convinced me that it couldn’t be that simple. Since the wall I was working on was going to be blocked by the fridge anyway, I poked another hole in the wall a bit further up. Uh-oh. Definitely damp. Hmmm, this is the wall that has the main stack in it that services the tenant’s bathroom. Let’s go upstairs and check things out. Everything upstairs looks fine- I leave the water running in the sink for about 5 minutes while I inspect all the connections I can see. I flush the toilet and all still seems fine. Heading back downstairs I’m now horrified to see water pouring out of my kitchen wall……
Fast forward past the hole I cut at the top of the wall in our kitchen, past the hole I cut in the ceiling of our kitchen, past the ripping out of the tenant’s vanity, past the hole I cut in the wall behind the vanity and past the hole I had to cut on the other side of the wall behind the tenant’s fridge, all in the name of trying to locate the source of the leak. And what was the culprit?
Apparently the previous owners had decided relocate the kitchen sink. It had inhabited the spot that was on the other side of a wall from the bathroom sink. Located within the wall was a 4 way-tee that handled the drains for the 2 sinks. In the course of the “remodel”, instead of replacing the tee, or capping the tee, or one of a thousand other alternatives that would have made sense, they simply hacked off the connection to the old sink, stuffed a rag into the opening and then drywalled over it. Out of sight, out of mind. It stayed this way for some unknown amount of time until, finally, the drain pipe built up enough gunk that the outflow from the bathroom sink was restricted, and the water backed up the pipe and came flying out of the rag-blocked opening. A $4 expansion stopper cured the problem, followed of course by a whole lot of drywall work.
The other wonderful example of quality work comes from the electricians who at one point switched the electrical system from fuses to breakers. I’m not sure if this was done at the same time as they upgraded from the knot and tube wiring the house was built with or not. But what I am sure of is that some knucklehead decided to either reconnect, or at the very least not disconnect, the knot and tubes, even though some of those wires were simply hanging in the wall voids. That explained why we couldn’t figure out what some of the breaker switches controlled. It didn’t explain, apart from sheer dumb luck, why the house hadn’t burned down.
Those are some impressive “finds” pipper. I particularly enjoyed the rag-stuffed pipe.
Just one small correction: it is not “knot and tube” wiring, it is “knob and tube”:
Another impressive muldoon from our house: when we moved it, it had horrible shag carpeting in the basement, a truly obnoxious orange colour and rife with mildew. That was not in itself a muldoon - the muldoon became apparent when we tried to remove it and discovered that the folks had built in a bunch of closets and shelving, right over the carpet - so we had to pull the capet bits out with pliers from under the nailed in components to get rid of all of it. 
I looked at a house in Dutchess County, New York, that seemed oddly cheap for the area, the size of the house, and the amount of property. (Warning.) The realtor hadn’t seen it, as it was a new listing, but thought that it was “partly gutted.” I went to look anyway since I was in the area. Not only was it completely gutted – every bit of plaster, plus wiring, plumbing, radiators, and furnace – but they had also taken up enough of the subfloor in an addition to make it obvious that it was built not on a foundation but on pressure-treated 6x6s laying on the ground. Like you would do with a shed.
A friend of mine once delivered a truck full of new windows to a rural property adjacent to a trailer park. The owner of said park was apparently having 2 20-year-old meth addicts built him a “trailer” on top of two flatbed trucks parked parallel. And because of an incline – the property was at the top of a ravine – the downhill end of both flatbeds were held approximately level by two 4x4s under each truck that were placed on top of big, flat rocks. Despite this amazing foundation of truck tires and air, the two freaks had managed to frame most of a recognizable house in an oddly incoherent manner (I think he said the rafters were 4 feet on center). They wanted him to bring the windows inside the “house,” but he refused to enter the thing.
Oh, and the bottom of the hill was a river. I suppose pieces of this house have drifted to the Hudson River by now.
You reminded me of another one in the house I did end up buying – they put ceramic tile on the kitchen floor, but worked around the fridge and washing machine, leaving two big gaps with the old floor showing through. (And the fridge was blocking the only window.)
I knew a guy who not only had operating knob-and-tube wiring, he had operating gas lighting with gas mantles (which worked remarkably well, I might add). He’d finally abandoned the coal furnace, though, mainly because he couldn’t get the coal.
I remember when the last coal dealer in Toronto stopped selling coal–believe it or not, it was the late-80s or early-90s, and it made the news. And if I recall correctly, they still had some customers at that time, but not enough to make coal sales profitable for the company. You can still see some coal chutes on the sides of houses in Toronto’s older neighbourhoods, though of course, their heating systems have all been switched over to oil or natural gas. But the chutes remain.
My Dad lives in an older Toronto house that once had a coal furnace. Its chute has been turned into a basement window, but there is an odd little alcove beneath it that once held the coal bin. When I was younger, Dad would often tell me that it was a good thing we had a gas furnace; otherwise, I’d be down there on cold winter mornings, shovelling coal into the furnace like he had to do when he was a kid.
Now that many fireplaces are gas-fired, I suppose that someday, I’ll be telling kids how I once carried wood into the house for the fireplace. Right before I tell them to get off my lawn. 
Our house had gas lighting at some point. I know because I discovered that the trusty electricians “re-purposed” some of the gas pipe as electrical conduit.
I also could have supplied some coal to your acquaintance: In addition to some real coal left in the old chute, I must have vacuumed up a couple of shop vacs full of coal dust out of the basement rafters. Despite wearing a respirator, I’m pretty certain black lung symptoms will be appearing any day now…
Heh, I think I know the place - it was on Mt. Pleasant near the cemetery, there was some old silos there that sold coal, I think.
My grandmother had one of the last party telephone lines in Toronto I think - it got so that she was the only person on it.