Strange features in houses

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Towards the end of summer, I’ll be out house-hunting again, this time looking for a place to buy.

I’m reminded of my house hunt when I was living in Denver. I was looking for something very specific – a 1920s-era Arts and Crafts bungalow in the West Highlands neighborhood – and a few of the houses I saw had very … uhh, interesting features.

For instance, I saw not one, but two houses where, in the middle of an unfinished basement, there was a connected, operating sit-down toilet. Literally, just sitting there. Another house had an open, operating toilet in a corner of the basement, up on a platform like a throne.

When it was time to sell, my realtors and I went to visit some houses in the area, trying to get an idea of comps, or what houses like mine were selling for. One house had a room in the basement I called the “death chamber” - there was a working shower head mounted next to a working light bulb socket, with electrical outlet near the concrete floor. W …T …F?

My parents’ house in suburban Buffalo was supposedly a model house when the subdivision was developed in the mid-1960s. There were all sorts of space-age gizmos installed to impress potential homebuyers, one of which is still in the kitchen - a built-in toaster.

Ever see any houses with features that made you go “hmmmmmm?”

2

Well, I have a window in my bedroom closet. The rest of the room is lit like a dungeon, but the closet is as bright as all get-out.

I also have a gutter in another closet. My husband says it’s some sort of breather from the basement (which I know for a fact I’ve seen in many horror movies). We also have horse stables underneath our garage. There’s a trap door leading from the stables to the garage.

3

My previous apartment had a room between the entrance and the living room. Built into the ceiling was a contraption that looked like the upper part of an 80’s style pizza parlor booth. Fake roof with shingles, false ceiling paneled with pebbled, translucent plastic. You could flip a switch and a light would turn on inside. Very odd looking.

In the same apartment, my bedroom and kitchen shared a cabinet. There were cabinet doors on either side. If I wanted to, I could have climbed from my bedroom through to the kitchen.

There was a reason I got it for so cheap, it seems. To say construction was shoddy would have been an insult to shoddy carpenters the world over.

4

I looked at a house once that had a room above the garage that was midway between floor 1 and floor 2. This room had a staircase that you could flip around so that the room could either be accessed from floor 1, OR from floor 2 (not both at the same time). The room had a sloped ceiling and a big hot tub inside. The house was next to a graveyard.

5

I recently walked through a house that had 7 foot ceilings throughout most of the house, with a 6’6" ceiling in the stairway. I felt huge. And I came close to losing my head to the ceiling fan in the master bedroom.

6

My parents house has a tunnel. Yup. You heard right. It’s about fifty feet long, and it dead ends at some plumbing, and a cinder block wall.

When I was looking for houses, alot of the Craftsmans had the lone toilet/oddly placed shower in the basements.

I also looked at a string of houses that had wringer-washers (old style washing machines). In one day, I looked at 8 houses, each one had one. One house I looked at had a noose hanging from a rafter in the attic.

7

This seemed strange to me at the time, but I’ve gotten used to it. I bought my house 4 years ago, and there are no closets in the master bedroom. The closets are in the master bath instead. I’ve gotten to where I like it, since my husband and I get up at different times, whoever gets up first can get dressed without bothering the other person.

8

I have a skylight in my master bedroom closet. I can’t figure out why the previous owners put it there unless they grew pot in there.

In the last house I rented (across the street from the one I bought and live in now) had a sink in the bedroom. There was only one bedroom. It had a door to the only bathroom, which of course had a sink in it. There were two sinks within 4 feet of each other, in two separate rooms.

9

I also knew a guy who lived in a silo. His rooms were stacked one on top of t’other, with stairs connecting them. Cool, but probably rather exhausting. I’d bet you become good at managing the ups and downs you’d have to do to put laundry and stuff away.

10

My friend is currently renting a house that has the weirdest wall I’ve ever seen. In her bathroom, one wall is shingled, like a roof.

11

Elmwood, basement showers are pretty common in the area I live in. My house has the set up for one but the shower head has been removed. My roomie wanted to reinstall the hardware until I mentioned that with the close proximity to the dryer, it probably wasn’t a good idea.

**Nurse Carmen **, my sister’s has a tunnel too, it’s cemented over though. It connects to two other houses in the neighborhood. It used to be part of the Underground Railroad. Those three houses were the only things that survived when the city burned to the ground. There is also a local urban legend that a prominent local who lived in one of the other houses used the tunnels to hide the bodies from a killing spree. But that’s another story.

My house on the other hand, came with a built in safe in what is now my bedroom. It’s older than dirt, but it still works.

12

katie1341, my neighborhood is 4 years old, and just about all of the master suites are set up that way, including ours. Personally, I do like it. In fact, we’ve designed our next house to have the same setup.

The first house I ever bought had a toilet in the basement on a raised pad. Actually, when I bought the house, it just had the drain hole in the floor and a water supply line against the wall. I installed the toilet. Fortunately for all concerned, it was in its own little room.

13

A friend has a house built on a steep hill. It was built in the 1920s. It has 7 sets of stairs all in different parts of the house. It also has a room without a doorway. The room is a little bigger than a walk-in closet. It has a pass-through window into one of the bedrooms. It as a window to outside. The bedroom its attached to has a closet, There doesn’t appear to be any patches indicating an old door. :confused: :confused: :confused: The house is very Art Deco. Lots of glass. Some of the stairs are sweeping curves, some are narrow & steep. I thought it might be a series of additions, but the owner says no. It has had some remodeling, but the square footage is the same as when built.
The house we own has a working toilet all alone in a corner of the basement. In fact, its under the outside stairs. the basement has a little “appendix” 3’6" X 4’.

14

Oh! I almost forgot my husband’s parents house. It has no right angles. There are triangular rooms, but, most are trapezoids. The living room has one glass wall in a V shape, like the prow of a ship, that looked out to the Olympic Mountains. The other 6 or 8 walls in the living room have narrow, high windows like a basement. The master bathroom has a HUGE walk in shower, the doorway in the shape of an old time coffin. (I think its supposed to look Ancient Egyptian. To me it looks like a coffin)

15

What’s the purpose of the tunnel? What’s on the other side of the brick wall?

16

I’ve lived in quite a few places, so let me see…

When I was quite small, my family lived in Cleveland, and our house was built in the 19th century and had a secret chamber behind the closet in the master bedroom – you had to open a panel in the wall at the back of the closet to go though a small crawlspace with a door at the end, and then there was a windowless room about four feet by six feet. I think we figured out that this room backed up on one of the fireplaces, so it would have been heated. (This house had a fireplace in every bedroom.)

When we lived in New Orleans, our house had a huge living room with like a twenty foot ceiling. I was still a kid then, and I always secretly thought of it as the Ballroom. This room was probably seventeen by thirty-five feet, easily. The staircase up the second floor was actually inside this room in a corner, and the upstairs had a sort of balcony that looked down at this space, and the ceiling of the living room was the same height as the ceilings on the second floor of the house. Next to the stairs was a fireplace that took up the entire wall, and at the other end of the room was a pair of French doors – the kind that are all glass and lattice, and usually open onto a terrace or something. These opened onto thin air – there was about a five or six foot drop down to the yard. The rest of the house was had normal ceilings and room sizes, and it wasn’t an old house – it had been built in the 1970s, and the living room was not an addition.

This one is not a house I lived in, but when I lived in (rural) Florida, there was an odd family living near me. The community referred to the patriarch as “The Warlock.” He was a sculptor and his yard was full of his, erm…art. One installation of which involved thirteen life-size heads on pikes surrounding the house, and a mailbox that had concrete molded sculpted around it to look like a dragon. The mail went in the dragon’s mouth. (Apparently, this was done in retaliation after some kids blew up the warlock’s mailbox with M-80s a few times. The concrete dragon wouldn’t be damaged by the firecrackers, and afterwards you’d see a small puff of smoke come out of the nostrils of the dragon, but I never personally observed this. ) The warlock’s son lived next door to him in a house built underground. There was just a grassy hill with a front door and no windows, at the end of a long driveway lined with Buddha statues on one side, and statues of the Virgin Mary on the other.

My last apartment had some strange acoustical properties. It was in an old house on the third floor of a building next to an alley, but with no windows facing the alley, and the acoustics were such that any time people were in the alley talking it sounded like they were in my living room – I could hear even soft whispers. It was really creepy. I never had any problems with hearing the neighbors or street noise, just things in the alley. This apartment also had a room that wasn’t a foyer, per se, because you had to walk through another small room to get to it from the front door, but it was a room of nothing but doorways to other rooms, not big enough for anything else (maybe four or five feet square, with a door in the middle of each wall), and you couldn’t get from any one room in the apartment to another without passing though the Room of Doors – the nexus of the apartment. (And then there was that five-and-a-half minute hallway… :stuck_out_tongue: )

When my dad moved into the house he currently lives in, the room that was to be my sister’s bedroom had one wall that was painted black and the opposite wall was mirrored. There were glow-in-the-dark stars all over the ceiling and the black wall.

My mothers’ current house has a toilet in the middle of the basement – I’m glad to hear this isn’t as strange as I thought it was.

17

My guess is a bank vault filled with vast riches. That’s the way it works in movies, anyway.

18

That is awesome. I don’t know why, but a silo house just sounds really neat to me. I wonder if there are any around here…

19

I’m in Suburban Chicago, and there’s actually one on my street (but I don’t know the people).

I think it’s probably pretty easy to convert one. It’s finding a silo that’s hard these days.

20

Well, the house was originally, in the late 1800s, a well house. As time went by, additions were put on top of additions. The attic has a few old roofs, and the basement has crawl spaces and two levels. My guess is that dirt is on the other side of the brick wall, but I never tested that theory. I don’t know why additions to the pump house were away from the pump, but I suppose it’s better thats having it sprout up into the center of the basement.