When I was a kid, my parents bought a house with no bathroom. The person living there was still using an outhouse in the back yard. Before we moved in they made a bathroom out of two closets between the two bedrooms. To put the tub in they cut a hole in one of the walls and pushed it in but the room wasn’t wide enough so we only had about a 3/4 tub. They also left the light switch outside the door so it was great fun to turn the light off on people.
When we finally tore down the outhouse we found a ton of old whiskey bottles down in there.
I found an uncapped off, live wire in the basement loose, free, rarin’ to go, unrestricted, spreadin’ electricity around in the open air, after I’d lived in the house for a couple of years when we were rewiring the kitchen.
Also, I had telephone wiring in the house from the 40’s.
Slightly OT, I almost bought a house with 3 basements; a half basement (that is the house was built on a slope and only part of the basement was underground), then there was a totally underground basement under that, and hidden behind a concealed door behind the full underground basement. Just soooo, tempted, but the back yard had definite suckage and a broken hot tub on the patio, so I said screw it and bought a bungalow.
A huge walk in closet in a studio apartment which was bigger than the bathroom:smack:
I love the apartment but I am taller than the bathroom mirror and have to bend down in the morning when I am brushing my hair. A closet should never ever be larger than the bathroom
While preparing to install a ceiling fan in our living room, which had no overhead lighting, I was in the attic looking for somewhere logical to tap into the electricity. I noticed a wire hanging from one of the trusses near where the fan was to be installed. It wasn’t a severed wire running to another part of the house, it just ended right there, ends cut, no tape or wire nuts. I thought “Huh, if that were a live wire it would be ideal”. I put my tester on it and, lo and behold, it was live! I have no idea where that wire was put there for, nor how long it had been hanging there, dripping electricity (good thing it doesn’t stain!). I put in a junction box and used that wire to power the fan/light.
Electricians cringe when they see my poorly designed overly complex circuit panel, but after 20 years I’ve got it marked out properly—what happens when multiple wires enter the crawl space? We’ve mostly sorted that out–it’s now to code. There is a switch in the basement that we have no idea what it’s to. I think it’s capped at the other end because nothing happens when you flip it. One electrician called my wiring ‘Sport wiring’ done by a previous owner.
My grandfather, after my grandparents had lived in their house in a small town in Northern California for years and years, found a knife buried in the back yard. It’s a nice looking knife with silver trim, probably worth some money, with “xxx xxx Me Ha Hecho” (xxx xxx made me). My mother has it squirreled away somewhere. I’d like to get my hands on it eventually. They also had a room at the top of a flight of stairs in their house that they never used, not really an attic, just an empty room, and it was full of old movie posters. Those would probably have been valuable if anybody had kept them.
I had friends who boight an old farmhouse in rural Virginia and were remodeling it. The kitchen cabinets were painted a garish bright turquoise color, so they stripped it off and found lovely natural wood, so they just varnished the wood.
In the first house they lived in after they got married, my sister and brother-in-law had a master bedroom that could be entered from the outside. They kept the door locked. The previous owners said the house had been built during World War II and the bedroom was rented out to factory workers.
When I was in the Air Force, we lived in an old dormitory that had a utility closet that had an unused phone circuit board on one wall with live phone lines. The dorm had apparently been an office building at one time, and nobody had bothered to shut off the phone lines. Somebody dug up a lineman’s utility phone, attached it to the connections, and made free phone calls.
When I was about 6 we moved into the upstairs apartment of an old duplex. There was a door that led to a full-size attic, but unfortunately this attic wasn’t insulated. Picture just the inside of the wood peak of the roof. The interesting thing about this attic though was that a previous tenant had stapled a collage of pictures all over the peaked roof walls - pictures of everything, like a big homage to 70’s pop culture. I don’t remember what all the pictures were, but they were all out of magazines. All over the walls right up to the ceiling. It was pretty impressive.
I went back about 20 years later - the house had since been renovated back to a single home - and the current owner took me upstairs and showed me how the attic had been renovated into a family room and the walls had been made square. But there was a crawlspace between the new wall and the peaked roof where you could still see some of those pictures stapled to the wood. I guess whoever renovated just left them up.
My uncle’s ca-1900 farmhouse caught fire and burned so fast my cousin went from sitting on the couch and smelling smoke to having to run flat-out through a door in a burning wall. It burned to ash before the FD could get there from 4 miles away.
75-year-old wood… and completely insulated with corn husks.
We’re preparing my parent’s house to be sold, and I found something I thought would count in this thread for whoever buys it.
There’s a pool table in the basement, that we’re planning to sell. Of course, we installed lights over the table, with a switch placed high up on a column near the table. I was telling my dad how these lights would make no sense without the pool table there (they’re hung quite low, like 5 feet off the floor), and told him about this thread. He then told me that those lights actually are just plugged into a socket in the ceiling, and I should make sure to give them to whoever buys the table.
So now, the next owners might find a fully wired socket, connected to a weirdly placed switch, that is hidden in the suspended ceiling of the basement!
Things I saw in houses when I was looking to buy 12 years ago:
a bathroom with a Jacuzzi tub, but placed so close to the toilet that there was maybe 1 inch of clearance on each side of the toilet bowl. High price to pay for a fancy tub…
a two-bedroom bungalow, but one bedroom was only accessible by passing completely through the other bedroom. Not even an extra outside door like Rick Kitchen describes above.
We bought back the house my wife’s grandfather and great-grandfather built and that her dad was raised in. Even though another family had been in it for like 30 years we found odds and ends of her “roots” different places. The nicest was the clock her “greats” had bought her “grands” as a wedding present. It needed some serious love and attention after being in the garage attic for Lord knows how long but we got it running again and its been on our mantle ever since.
For odd I would say a crude strongbox built into the sandstone foundation and hidden by boards. All that was in it once I managed to break in (and it wasn’t easy) was a rosary which we left in place for good luck.
But did any of these have a built in lotion dispenser in the room?
At one apartment I lived at, a previous tenant had dug up the walkway bricks from around the complex, and built a patio by the back door. Then they let dirt cover it ,and grass grew on the dirt. I ended up rolling it up, sod like, so I could use the patio.