The house I grew up in not only had a toilet in the basement, it had a fully functional bathroom with shower, enclosed in this horrible tacky yellow glass. The weirdest part was that it was carpeted. A carpeted shower. With holes where the drain was. There was nothing seperating the shower head from the other fixtures, it was like a giant carpeted shower cubicle with a sink and a toilet in it.
While gutting the second floor in my previous house, I came across a little-known[to me, at least] oddity. After the covering on the party wall in the bathroom[which used to be part of a bedroom] came down, there appeared a very narrow, shallow rounded-top recess in the wall, A niche, I supposed, something you’d be likely to put a statue in, but just above floor level. According to the mason, it was a fireplace. Damned if it wasn’t connected to a long-unused flue.Two logs of small diameter where made to stand in the form of an “X”, so a very hot, very fast heat could be generated. The heat would be of short duration, just enough to start taking the chill off the room, as you prepared for bed, or upon rising in the morning. This style of fireplace was supposed to be well-known throughout the area. Don’t know if the design or concept made it to other cities.
I knew someone who had a round shower in the middle - right smack in the middle - of their bedroom. A round shower with a red velvet curtain. They installed it. I don’t know why since there was a bathroom right next door.
When I was looking at places to buy, I looked at an open-floor-plan condo that had NO DOOR to the bathroom. No door at all. Not just missing a door, but intentionally there was no door. No, there wasn’t a little separate room for the toilet. No, no “hiding wall” to block a view (even if there were, well, um, I like my privacy in all areas of the senses when I use the bathroom - doesn’t most everyone?). It was all out there in plain view of the bedroom and living area.
In the 60’s, I lived in Des Plaines, a suburb of Chicago.
Our house had a huge cathedral-shaped picture window…in the upstairs bathroom.
We used a shower curtain on it, but when the planes from the airport flew low, we were certain that the pilots & aircrew could see in. :eek:
In the wee hours of the AM, I’d sit on the potty to ease myself, & a huge jet would fly in, illuminating me in its landing lights. Messes with a toddler’s sleepy liddle brain!!
While house hunting in Orlando, I was shown a quite large, relatively new house in a nice subdivision. At one end of the master bedroom, there was a toilet, sink and garden tub … just out there, not even in an alcove, with nothing dividing it from the rest of the bedroom.
My parents came to visit during the time I was house-hunting. They thought it was unusual that most houses had doors leading from a common bathroom to the backyard, but in Florida, the feature was practical; if a homeowner built a pool, they could easily tuck into the bathroom to change or shower.
Why so many throne-style toilets in the middle of 1920s-era house basements?
I grew up in another house with a tunnel. The house had a raised brick “well” in the basement, with a wooden lid, and it was fastened over with an old iron bar and lock. When opened, it showed a circular hole that went down perhaps 12 feet below the basement, to a rocky streambed which had old brick tunnel openings at either end - about 2-foot diameter. There would always be a small flow of water in there, and it never smelled like sewage - just a wet, clay-like odour.
The neighbors across the street had a similar opening in their back yard, which had an iron grating on it. It was hard to see down but seemed deep. And down the block, other neighbors had one in their back yard with a solid steel lid on it - 2-3 feet wide, but only 1/2" thick. That one we did open and saw it went down quite far, but to the same, rocky streambed and brick tunnels.
I can’t imagine what they would be, other than a drain for a natural stream. It sure didn’t seem to be a sewer. And I have no idea why our was in our basement.
As you can imagine, such stories as “Pickman’s Model” had an exaggerated impact on me.
As another note, one wall of our basement in that house was earth; the other three walls were cinderblock and brick. The earth wall was dug out by Federal authorities right after we moved in because the previous owners had buried stolen equipment from the National Guard behind it, for sale later on. They put up a half-cinderblock wall to repair the damage, but you still had about 5 feet of dirt exposed. Very, very odd.
When I was growing up, my best friend lived in a house that had a peculiar hole with trapdoor in the finished basement. It was in the middle of the basement floor and was probably about 8 feet long by 4 feet wide and maybe 5 feet deep. The interior of the hole was carpeted in the same carpet as the rest of the basement—we used to put pillows and blankets down in the hole and hide out there with a flashlight. I have no idea what the hole was for, as we didn’t live anywhere where tornados or anything like that were a problem.
My little brother’s closet was also strange. It was fairly deep; the wall on the left hand side extended straight up to the ceiling, but the wall on the right went straight up about three feet, then horizontal (like a giant step) for a couple feet, vertical again for a couple feet, then slanted away diagonally until it met the ceiling. We always tried to climb up and squeeze ourselves into the space between the diagonal and the ceiling but could never quite balance. Looking back, I think it might have been directly above the stairs to the basement, so maybe that affected the design.
My aunt has a very cool house made of two stone barns; the passageway between them is the kitchen. It’s a beautiful house but surely must be a pain to heat/cool efficiently; the kitchen in particular is icy cold on winter mornings.
While house hunting in Orlando, I was shown a quite large, relatively new house in a nice subdivision. At one end of the master bedroom, there was a toilet, sink and garden tub … just out there, not even in an alcove, with nothing dividing it from the rest of the bedroom.
My parents came to visit during the time I was house-hunting. They thought it was unusual that most houses had doors leading from a common bathroom to the backyard, but in Florida, the feature was practical; if a homeowner built a pool, they could easily tuck into the bathroom to change or shower.
Why so many throne-style toilets in the middle of 1920s-era house basements?
The strangest place I lived in was a farmhouse in upstate NY. It had a smallish corridor to the bathroom that was only around 3 feet wide, then you had to make a right turn to get into the bathroom (which was also very small).
The top floor had two bedroom, but the stairs opened up on a large room…with a walk-in closet. This entry room was larger than either bedroom (about 20 by 15 according to memory), so my theory was that it used to be a separate bedroom, but someone knocked out the wall to make it into a communal room.
And here is the really strange part. The entrance to the basement was a greenhouse-style row of panels that abutted the actual wall, and the entire basement smelled like dirt. The only thing I can recall in the entire basement was some plumbing. BUT, you could climb from the plumbing into a crawlway below the kitchen…the kitchen was raised several inches from the ground, with the crawlway below it. The crawlway had an exit into the garage (which didnt open up into a road, originally I think it was a tractor garage.)
I saw the strangest house when I was house-hunting last summer. We nicknamed it “The Fortress”, because it appeared to be built out of a solid three feet of concrete. It’s hard to explain some of the odd things about the immediate interior, but everything struck me as just odd! Some of the easier things to describe include:
a staircase that went NO WHERE! Along the hall was a door that when opened, had a staircase that simply went into the exterior wall. We spent some time examining the area, and could not come up with a single explanation that made sense. The room had a window, but why would you need a staircase to go up to a window? It didn’t look as though it was meant for an addition. There was no place to expand out in that direction. And if an addition or second floor had been planned, the staircase clearly should not have pointed in that direction. If it had been meant for storage, using up the floor space for a staircase wasn’t a very good use of space either.
a series of small, strange rooms that seemed to serve no purpose. They were all connected, and ended in an odd room that had a partition built diagonally across. Why would you want to turn one square room into two right angle triangles? And what was the purpose of the maze of corridors leading there? And nothing would have fit well into either triangle. Not storage, not a bed, nothing.
the place was full of little corridors that led nowhere, or simply led you in a circle back to where you started. We must have spent an hour just trying to figure out what kind of purpose any of the rooms or corridors must have served. What kind of weird renovations had taken place to leave the kind of design that was there?
the place also had an extremely eerie feeling to it, which I found more intriguing than frightening. The dead ends, weird spaces and overgrown yard contributed heartily to the feeling. I swear that I half expect to drive back there and find that the house had never been there.
the home next door was also the smallest home I’d ever seen. I don’t know if it was originally connected somehow to “The Fortress”, but it wasn’t much bigger than my girls playhouse. It had signs of obvious habitation and a neatly kept yard, but it looked like it had been built for a single midget. Even the real estate agent was startled to see it.
Sadly, the basement of “The Fortress” was off-limits due to construction. I almost went back just to see what wonders that might hold. Would there be more doors to nowhere? Staircases that go into the wall?
Add another house with a toilet in the middle of the basement. In the suburb of Cleveland where I grew up, our neighbors across the street had one. They used it as a water bowl for the dog.
My parents’ house has a clothes chute in the main floor bathroom that goes into the basement - I don’t know of any more recently-built houses that have this feature, and I’ve often wondered why not. You still have to lug the clean clothes up from the laundry room in the basement, but at least you don’t have to lug dirty ones down.
They also have a milk chamber in the garage - the milkman would open the door on the outside, put the milk on the shelf there, and my mom would open the door on the inside to take it out.
The oddest thing about our current house is that there are phone jacks in every room, including the bathrooms. I don’t know who would want to talk on the phone while taking a dump, but you can if you want to at my place. Two of the bathrooms are also carpeted.
Now it puts the lotion in the basket?
For my own house oddity, I lived in an apartment that was in a former duplex that had been divided into 4 apartments. I lived in the upstairs apartment on one side. The stairs connecting the upstairs/downstairs apartments were still there (envision the apartment setup in The Seven Year Itch), but there was a door at the top of the stairs that had been sealed shut. They accomplished this by plastering over the door from the upstairs apartment side…except they neglected to remove any of the door hardware, so you could see the phantom shapes of a sliding thumb-bolt and the hinges under the plaster, as well as a non-plastered doorknob just sticking randomly out of the plastered-over door. Whackos.
A throne-style toilet in the basement usually has a practical purpose - it raises the toilet above the house’s sewer line enough that gravity will drain the bowl.
When I was looking at houses, I saw one from the era when built in appliances were the big thing. A toaster leaned out of the wall. A big motor was embedded in the countertop, and it would drive a blender, a mixer, and God knows what else. An electric cooktop folded up into the wall. I might have bought the place, except that I insist on cooking with gas.
I briefly considered buying the house across the street. It has a huge glassed in patio room, and behind that is an outdoor patio with a big fire pit sunk in the floor.
In 1958, when I was 9, my parents had a house custom built. It was a tri-level (the living room, kitchen, and dining room were at ground level, and off to one side, the bedrooms were above the pool.) Yes, a pool, inside. It had a row of narrow closets near the garage for everybody’s coats. It had a passthrough box for firewood from the garage to the living room. The front door’s knob was smack dab in the middle of the door. In the dining room, there was a recessed plug box over the pantry door so we could hang a clock there without trailing a cord. We’re tall people, so all the countertops were higher than standard. Upstairs, two of the bedrooms had big built in cabinets and desks. In the upstairs hallway, there was a little door that led to a niche for…cardtables! My brother Ted and I were into showy demonstrations of anger, so my parents eventually had oversize door strips screwed on the frames. No matter how hard we slammed the doors, nothing broke.
Shhhh… don’t tell anyone but I have a secret room in my house.
It’s true, I swear. Of course, it was just attic space until I concealed the entrance, a piece of plywood two feet of the floor of the bed room wall, with a lovely old mirror in a wooden frame.
And it’s not just any attic space either. the first ten feet are tall enough to walk about (okay I’m a little height challenged I admit it freely), and the real saving grace is two very small windows through which light streams in the mornings. It’s the smoking lounge at my house.
We got your ambiance right here, old trucks, couple of futons, an old iron bed, old photos stuck on the walls (?), sure it’s cold it the winter but it’s better than going outdoors. And, so you know, it is always refered to as, the Secret room.
Of course, now I’ve told all of you it’s not such a secret anymore. But I know I can trust you all not to tell. Shhh…
The house I grew up in had a fairly conventional layout (notwithstanding BRIGHT RED shag carpetting all over most of the main floor. However, in the backyard there was a corrugated metal silo, about 15 feet in diameter and 25 feet high, with a conical roof and a plastic dome at the tip about 2 feet across. The silo sat on a poured concrete base and had a heavy double door with large sliding bolts and beefed-up hasps. The sections were held together with threaded studs about 1" in diameter, and every 6th nut had been soldered on to the threads. The steel was probably 1/16" thick at least.
This was not in farm country - this was in a 1960’s era residential neighborhood of large-ish floor plan ranch homes. Because of zoning peculiarities the lot was very narrow and VERY deep (probably 150’ of frontage and a 250’ backyard) so the silo didn’t look out of proportion to the yard, necessarily. We used it for yard storage, mostly. I made out with gf in it once or twice but the notion of being locked in there was too creepy to maintain the vibe…
Oh, and it was painted in alternating red-and-white horizontal stripes, about 2 feet thick.
Our house has a laundry chute in the upstairs hall closet. The closet is about a foot deep and two feet wide, and it’s full of shelves. Instead of a floor, there’s a box made of metal fretwork on the left side and a hole on the other. I assume the metal box is some kind of air intake for the furnace or something, I’m not really sure.
The laundry chute is just a straight drop into the basement from the second floor, but in our coat closet downstairs, there’s a little door with the latch in the side of the closet. If you open it up, it leads to the laundry chute. I don’t think it has any practical purpose. My friends and I would drop toys down the chute and try to catch them as they fell.
Our house also has a room that used to be a screened-in porch, but whoever lived here before us enclosed it. Now it’s our computer/TV/guest room. Part of the wall is the same texture of stucco as the outside of the house, and the backside of the brick fireplace takes up most of the wall. Next to the fireplace is a window that still has glass in it–you can look watch the TV in here from the living room if you want to stand there. The doors into the room are the original french doors that went to the porch. They still have latches and weather stripping on them.
