I used to live in a house that had a toilet in the porch. The porch was only about 5x8, so it was impossible for anyone entering my house through the kitchen to miss it. Being as this was an unusual feature I asked why someone had decided this was a good place for a toilet. Apparently one of the previous owners had his elderly mother living with him and she was unable to go up the stairs to use the regular bathroom. So he had a toilet installed downstairs and the only place it could be connected to the existing plumbing was in the porch.
My parents once rented a house way back in the boonies. The house had 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, a small den, a large great room and a large kitchen. And a basement. A basement that was entirely painted black (even the windows) - and the only light was on a pull string in the middle of the room. Creepiest place on earth.
Weirder still. Once we moved in, we discovered that the master bath (a huge bright open room with every possible convenience) was not connected to the water or sewer. So my mom had a huge walk in closet and one toilet for 6 people.
My friend has a closet in a stairwell in his house.
Like many closets, it has a doorknob on the outside only.
On the inside of the door, opposite the doorknob, there is a piece of wood attached.
The only purpose of the piece of wood, as far as anyone can imagine, is to prevent someone who is locked inside the closet from picking his/her way out.
The house I grew up in had a clothes chute from the bathroom down to the basement, as well. It was a ranch-style home from the 1960s or so. A cabinet under the bathroom sink/counter had drawers on either side, and a hinged door in the middle. Open that door and you could get at the pipes under the sink, plus toss your dirty clothes into the square opening which was basically just a hole cut through the cabinet and floor into the basement. A cloth tube/“chute” hung from hooks to funnel the clothes into a basket placed on a table next to the washer. As a kid I used to think about climbing down it into the basement, maybe as an escape in case of some kind of “emergency” that got you stuck/trapped in the bathroom.
Where I live now, there’s a phone jack on the wall in a linen closet in the dining room, mounted about 4’ off the floor. The other two phone jacks in that room (yes, there are three in the dining room) are mounted along the base of the wall, so I have no idea why that one is there.
The kitchen and bathroom here have a “chair rail” (a plain strip of moulding) mounted around 3-4’ off the floor. I have no idea why; normally this was done in dining rooms to prevent the chairs from marking the wall if they were pushed back from the table and bumped the wall.
The last apartment I lived in had a carpeted kitchen. The new landlord was really slack about keeping up the maintenance of the place, so I didn’t feel so bad when I burnt myself on a hot baking sheet after closing the oven door, dropping the sheet on the carpet at my feet and putting a scorch mark on it due to the heat of the pan melting the carpeting material. I dropped a small area rug over it.
My parents’ house is a tract home built in 1962, so it must have been a '60s thing. Their chute is aluminum and ends about 3 feet above the floor, just the right height at which to slide a hamper under.
That’s a cistern. They’re kind of like the old fashioned hand dug wells, but instead of reaching the water table, they were used to store rain water that was gathered from the roof via gutters. The water was used for non-consumable functions: cleaning, washing, watering plants, etc.
These were common in the midwest, and very dangerous because people had a tendency to fall in and drown. Tehy’re outlawed by the building codes now, but still found occasionally.
When I was a teenager, I had a paper route. There was an older couple who lived in a house set back in the woods a bit. In the kitchen, the countertops were all about eight inches lower than normal, and all of the upper cabinets were much lower than normal. The man who lived there explained that the previous owner, who had built the house many many years earlier, had an unusually short wife. So the kitchen was custom-built to accomodate her stature.
I visited a little house during an open house. Wow. The realtor explained that this little one bedroom house had been remodelled to accommodate a family of four or five kids. Basically, each time the wife got pregnant the father renovated a little.
The house had a detached garage on a raised foundation. So he escavated under the garage and ended up with a nice kid of solarium like thingy underneath (surrounded by windows). He built a fishtank in the wall and the little room had shag carpeting. Quite a trippy little space that screamed 1969. So the garage above became his “workshop”, the lower solarium type thing was like a “rec room” (I guess.)
However, as the garage was detached, to go to either space you had to go outdoors… Bummer.
Well, that just wouldn’t do! So now, if you go in to the basement of the house (full of knick-knack in curio cabinets built right into the walls), and look behind the hot water tank, you will find a concrete hallway.
He had tunneled under the backyard… and the wonky concrete tunnel totally made me think of some Silence of the Lambs kind of scenario! :eek: It was bare white with naked bubls dangling from the low tunnel ceilings.
So this tunnel went all the way across the backyard to the “rec room”. Halfway across the yard he figured, “hey, there’s too many kids here might as well add a bedroom…” So halfway down this rabbit-warren-like tunnel, was a rabbit-burrow-like bedroom: really narrow door, really low ceiling (and I’m 5’4", so if I’m impressed by how low the ceilings are…), no windows. Bed was built right into the wall and wasn’t long enough for an adult. It was really dark, despite the lights he built in.
He had sealed of the stair that originally went into the loft of the house, so that he could turn the miniscule front room into a master bedroom and the stairs wouldn’t send traffic through. So to access the loft space, which I guess would have originally been the bedroom, he made and extremely, severely steep and very narrow “staircase” (it was more like a carpeted ladder without the benefit of open rungs). I doubt it was more than 24 inches wide. The loft was devided into two teensy weensy bedrooms – the kids must’ve slept on cots 'cause NO furniture could ever get up there and most of the space was lost to the pitch of the roof.
Creepy little place I tell ya.
WAG the door in the closet was for first floor laundry. My ex mom-in-law had the very same set up. I couldn’t understand why the door on the main floor was so small. She said because you wouldn’t put huge things like sheets in it . The biggest thing would be a tablecloth.
The house we’re in now has a very basic laundry chute. A 12" hole in the bathroom floor. It does have a sheet metal duct to guide the clothes, but no door or cover. We always have to warn friends with small children to escort them to the bathroom.
Our cats have each tried once to go up or down it, much to their chagrin, unsuccessfully. Going up, its too narrow & they can’t see where the floor is. going down its too tight for them to turn and land upright.
When I was in college, some friends and I rented the upper half of a house.
My bedroom was a converted porch. All closed in, with a couple of windows in it.
It ran the entire width of the house (so 25-30 ft long) and about 7ft wide. It would have made a good darts alley. This had originally been an outside porch, so it was connected to the rest of the house with a pair of glass french doors.
Because it was actually outside the house walls, it wasn’t connected to the houses heating system. There was an electric heater mounted on one wall. Apparently, the room below had the same setup. Sound would travel between the 2 electic heaters, making them an interesting radio with no off switch. I learned some things about the people downstairs that I really didn’t want to know.
I used to install alarm systems. It’s very common to put the control panel in a closet and install an extra phone jack so it can dial out to the monitoring station.
In my current house, all the rooms except for the living room, have one window and atleast two doorways. You can start in the small hallway and walk all the way around the house. The back bathroom is really just a hallway between two rooms with a little niche for the shower stall and a big niche for the toilet. It was the most normal one we looked at.
One house we saw, was a normal 2 bedroom, 1 bath house with a cellar off the kitchen. The cellar was a string of about seven different rooms. Some of the rooms were partially finished, but some had dirt floors and rock walls. They continued past the property line and out to the street.
One had an unfinished basement with a toilet, a drain hole under a shower head (dirt floor), and a HUGE old freezer. My husband opened the freezer and it was filled with bird’s eye frozen peas.
There’s an old neighborhood in Nashville where all the streets are named after fairytales and the 1930’s era houses look like they were built by Walt Disney on crack. I went to an open house out of curiosity. It was actually cute except it hadn’t been renovated. All the rooms were small except for the Taj Mahal bathroom, it had a domed ceiling completely covered in tiny tiles. And the current owners had painted everything in the livingroom high gloss peach, walls, trim, ceiling, mantel, even the brass gaslight sconces on either side of the fireplace.
The house I live in now has a built-in charcoal grill in the basement. It’s all done in brick, and has venting and a fan to the outside. There’s kitchen cabinets around the brick, but no sink (except the bathroom, in the room next to it). We used it a few times when we first moved in, but it’s so much easier to fire up the outdoor grill than drag all the food and stuff downstairs and then haul it back up. I’m still not 100% convinced that grilling with charcoal inside is safe, but the fan/venting (like a restaraunt fan) seems to work well.
We have a laundry chute, it’s a hole cut into the floor of the bathroom cabinets and it lands in some cabinets right above the washer/dryer in the laundry room I like it, when I undress my clothes go down the chute instead of piling up in a hamper/basket.
We also have a wood bin…for a gas fireplace. When they built our fireplace facing (12’ wide stone) they had a traditional wood burning fireplace put in and built a wood bin into the stone. Then they chaged their mind and replaced the wood burning fireplace with a gas insert. The built-in wood bin is still there, but it looks weird.
My granny’s house had a door between two closets. If you opened the door to the closet in one room, and went behind the clothes and along the wall a little you would find a door behind the clothes. When you opened it and walked through, you’d be behind the clothes in another room. I’m guessing that one of the rooms was added on and it was just easier to build closets around the doors that it would have been to seal up the wall and then build the closets. That, or the rooms were there, with a door between and no closets and the closets were added later, but they didn’t feel the need to get rid of the door.
The house my husband grew up in had a linen closet right next to the bathroom, and in the bathroom wall was a little door, maybe 1ftx1ft, that opened up to one of the shelves in the closet. It was handy for grabbing paper, towels, soap, things you might run out of while in there and not want to run into the hall to grab.
My grandma has an odd closet kinda like angelicate’s. When you’re in the bathroom, there’s a door opposite the toilet. If you go through the door you’ll walk into a facefull of clothes - its the “back enterance” to the master bedroom’s closet. There’s a door to the master bedroom on the other side obviously. It’s quite unreasonable considering that the bar to hang clothes on goes straight over the door so you kind of have to duck to go under it, otherwise it would be nifty.
I found a weird box in my closet when we first moved into this house. It’s the size of a shoebox and attatched to the floor in a closet, complete with lid. I thought maybe I’d get lucky and find some jewelry or money in it but it was empty.
A friend of a friend has the weirdest house I think I’ve ever seen. It’s a large two-story house and - I kid you not - every single room had a door on EVERY wall (that wasnt an outside wall) leading to an adjoining room. Some rooms even had 2 doors on the same wall. So from the master bedroom you could walk directly to the living room (via two different doors of your choosing!) or to the bathroom, or to another bedroom, or to the kitchen, or into the closet (which could lead you elswhere) etc etc. The upstairs was the same way. I don’t think there was 5 feet of wall in one place without a door in there somewhere.
My house is pretty weird. It was built nearly a hundred years ago, and has gone through a whole bunch of owners. Downstairs is normal. Go up the stairs, and you end up in our pentagonal hallway. Doors on all sides - hall closet, bathroom, my room, master bedroom (same size as the other ones), third bedroom. Originall it was one big bedroom. My bedroom is septagonal - 7 walls, because of the way the closet (shallow and long) was added. Our attic has two entrances - a ladder you can pull from the hatch in the ceiling of the hallway, or a hidden ‘hatch’ in the middle of the ceiling of the hall closet. We’ve got ancient steam radiators for heat, and they conduct sound very oddly. I can hear someone perfectly from the basement, much better than from the next room.
My grandmother’s old house was amazing. Five bedrooms, finished attic, etc. The basement, though, was scary as hell. Dimly lit, no windows, scary old furnace. There was this odd trap door in the wall of the basement, that we finally got open when I was about nine. There was a mini-room, square, about six feet on a side. There was a window in there, but it was covered with black paper. When we opened it, the only things in there were coconuts (about 3 dozen!) and a stuffed dummy with a paper maiche head.
After we found that, I did not ever go back down there, or ask questions about the eccentric folks my grandmother bought the house from.
Let’s see what I can remember…
Growing up in upstate NY our best friends lived in a house parts of which dated to 1775 or so. It had been added onto several times. The kitchen was at the back and was one of the more recent additions. There was a doorway off of it, if you stepped through you were in a hallway type thingy. To the left was the outside door to the back yard. To right was a trapdoor that opened to the basement stairs. Above the trapdoor there was a window that led into…the bathroom, which was on the same floor as the kitchen. The trapdoor was always open, but the bathroom window (which basically led into the kitchen) was always open too so if there was especially noisy business going on in the bathroom anyone eating in the kitchen could hear it.
Along the same lines we rented a vacation house in Maine which was someone’s real house during the rest of the year. The laundry room was right off the kitchen, and had a toilet in it, a couple of feet from the kitchen table. The door separating them wasn’t a solid door, just a light louvered door. Again, noises or odors could go either way. This same house had only one other bathroom, on the second floor. The only door to the master bedroom was in the bathroom. Basically, the only full bathroom in the house doubled as the hallway to the master bedroom.
My wife and I looked at a house for sale in a fairly expensive suburb of Boston this weekend. This old farmhouse was being sold at a bargain price, “as is” as the ad pointedly said. There was a half bath on the first floor which had been built in under the stairs, eliminating the stairs to the basement. Therefore the only way to get into the basement was to go outside and through the bulkhead door, which could be a real pain if you happened to blow a fuse or whatever in a raging blizzard or driving rainstorm.
I don’t think I have ever been in a house with a full basement that you couldn’t access from inside. You would think they would at least put in a trapdoor or something.
This same house apparently doesn’t have a town sewer hookup or a septic tank, which are the two usual setups around here. According to the realtor, it has a cesspool. I have to say I don’t know the difference between that and a septic tank, and I don’t think I want to know…it doesn’t sound good.
Are you certain about that? Every cistern I’ve ever seen did not have large pipes in the bottom, and a flow of water through them. They tended to be brick or concrete sumps. These “pits” had water flowing through them, and never accumulated any. 
It’s possible that those pits to running water were just used for cold storage.
Our 1890’s farmhouse used to have a springroom, really just a shack off the kitchen which enclosed a cold spring, and used to store milk, butter and other stuff before refrigeration. The spring is still there in what is now the yard (properly covered, of course) with the remains of the stone foundation.
The parents of a very good friend have a house that was built on the site of an abbey (one of those demolished by Henry VIII). They have a well in the living room. It’s covered by glass and you walk on it.