To clarify, the house is a 1910 cottage that looks like a Fisher-Price barn from the 1960s 
My husband and I just bought our house in August, and it was really easy to tell that the previous owner had been an older woman with waaaaay too much time on her hands: crappy applique paint all over the windows (birds, flowers, victorian ladies), rididulous amounts of nails in the wall (all of which had been painted over), little plaster-molded flowering vines attached to the walls everywhere, etc. etc. etc. She even painted the blinds! (So, uh, now they don’t move - they’re painted shut).
The weirdest part, however, was last night. The lead guitarist in my husband’s band hadn’t seen the house yet, so he came over, and when he got here, he told us he used to be good friends with the previous owner’s daughter! Apparently, he was over all the time, and in fact he and another friend remodeled half the house when they were 16 or 17, and of course didn’t have a clue what they were doing. It was really hilarous (and vindicating) to hear all his stories about how crazy the lady was, and how she got random people from church and her daughter’s friends to do all this remodelling work.
Cistern in the basement, still in usable condition. I live in the urban core but the house is older than city water lines. From time to time we talk about getting it hooked up and saving on our water bill.
Secret room, entrance hidden by a large mirror off the upstairs bedroom. It leads to an attic space but the first 8 feet are tall enough to stand in (I’m 5’3") with two tiny windows for light and air. Wicked cool ambiance.
Beautiful inlaid hardwood floors, which were revealed when we ripped up 40 yr old wall to wall broadloom. Cherry wood inlay, beautiful intricate patterns in the entryway and what was once the livingroom but is now this office. As the house is barely 1000 square feet it seems a little grand and out of place, but I’m not complaining. We were over the moon when we discovered them.
There is also a transom window over the front door, discovered it, intact, when doing some renovating. We didn’t open it up as the porch, (obviously put on at a later date and which I enjoy), obscures it, just covered it over again. Still it’s cool to know it’s there. If the porch ever falls off I’ll open in up and let the sun shine in.
One of the kids’ bedrooms used to have a window in the closet. The idea was for the windows to ‘balance’ the look of the house from the street. So, the second window from the North end of the house ended up right where his closet was.
Later we enclosed the front porch and the windows moved out to the new exterior wall.
… HELLO!.. Is it me you’re looking for… ?
My parents had a house like this: the closet was off a bedroom in the front of the house, and the front needed a window to look “balenced”.
The trend for a while there (don’t know if it still is) was to split the bedrooms up, not have them clustered. This means that at least one bedroom has to be in the front of the house, and the way it works out sometimes means you have a closet with a window.
In order to change the light bulbs, you have to unscrew four tiny philips head screws in the (glass) light fitting. Stupid stupid stupid design.
I once visited a house that had a wardrobe, with no back, fitted over the entranceway that led downstairs. References to Narnia were de rigeur every time it was discovered by people.
The logs you see on the outside of our house are the same logs you see on the inside of our house.
Well…My childhood home, now know as moms house, has only one LEGAL bedroom. It has many other rooms but because of ingress/egress and fenestration issues none of them are technically bedrooms. OK, yes I DID used to be a real estate appraiser.
She also has a fairly old GLASS bottle of DDT on display. She collects anything that might, even remotely have some type of value…2200sqf of obscure, bizzar stuff.
tsfr
You’ve talked about this before. You should quit talking and start doing. WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?? 
My house is only 10 years old so I am patently free from weirdness. Blandness however, I have in abundance.
There’s only furniture in my bedroom and kitchen.
Does the door go ‘Mooooo’ when you open it?
The house we own was moved to the current location around 70 years ago. It came from somewhere just across the state line in Illinois.
The living room, kitchen and one bedroom are all the original house, with other rooms built on around them.
In the original bedroom, there is a 2 1/2’ square trap door cut out of the hardwood floor, and you can hardly tell it is there.
To see it, you must know where it is, or you just won’t find it.
Even knowing where it is, it’s still quite difficult to see.
Some folks that are related to the original owners, have told us that it was used as part of the Underground Railroad, as the house was originally located on a small farm in east central Illinois, and the owners of the farm would let the freedom-seeking slaves hide in the area beneath the trap door during the daytime, giving them food, water and whatever else they might need, for the next part of their journey.
The slaves would then leave during the night, to move northward.
I’ve never looked in there yet…not in all my 45 years of life.
My grandpa would never let me open it up.
I know it opens, because he had it open a couple of times when I was young, that I can recall.
I’m sure there’s nothing there now, as the house is in an entirely different location. Still, I think it would be really interesting to go through that trap door, to experience, somewhat, what the slaves must have felt while they were hiding, awaiting nightfall, so they could move on to their freedom.
This house has an attic, also. There is no way to get into it from the inside, which I thought was odd.
The only way in, is through the attic door, which is on the outside of the house.
I’ve never been up there, either.
Now it’s bugging me.
I really need to go check these things out one of these days soon.
My house is a hovel built in 1954. Somewhere along the line, some idiot owner got the bright idea to be a DIY contractor and added on to the house. The way he designed it, you had to walk through a bedroom in order to reach the other bedroom and bathroom. He closed off a bathroom door which would have allowed you to reach the other bedroom without having to pass through the first bedroom. He took something akin to a fire axe to the roof when connecting to the addition. I removed part of the roof while remodeling and there is a busted up hole in the roof with the shingles still on underneath the addition’s roof. There is no access at all to the crawl space above the addition.
He was too cheap to buy a piece of plywood when roofing the addition and used an old gate with the hinges still on it. He tossed a few sofa cushions into the bathroom wall for insulation. He left a hole in the wall where the old roof and the new roof meet that is about big enough to allow a 50 pound animal to crawl through from the outside. This also kind of compromises the water shedding capabilities of the roof.
Despite all this, I still love the house.
Go, please check it out and report back.
tsfr
ThisSpaceForRent, when I do, I’ll let you know. The trap door is in the bedroom that my grandma is using. There is carpet over that beautiful hardwood floor, and I don’t see getting everything out of there till she passes.
Of course, she’s 91, headed to 92 in a few months, so we might not have to wait too long before we can check it out! :dubious:
I’ll wait for my husband to check out the attic first. I don’t relish climbing the ladder that high by myself! He’ll be home sometime Sunday, so I may just ask him about going up to get a look.
My kitchen cabinets are weird. The ones over the sink are well above my eye level and I’m over 6 feet tall. Odd? When you consider this kitchen is in Japan…Everything else in the place I have to bend down to use, but almost on my tippy toes for those cabinets.
The bathroom vanity is in the kitchen, too. Even here, that’s strange. Next to the vanity is the clothes dryer. The location isn’t unusual but the dryer itself is. It has no vent. I don’t mean “no hose to the outside.” No exhaust vent anywhere. I’ve looked. It doesn’t blow the hot humid air into the apartment, either. I don’t know where it goes. I’m guessing the dryer is either infested with evil spirits that inhale the exhaust or it’s a portal to a south Florida. Anyone in Miami notice a few extra socks dangling in the trees?
Neither closet in my apartment has a door.
According to the manager, all of the closet doors in this complex originally had bi-fold doors, but they had to be replaced too often from damage and wear and tear. Now, only a few apartments here have them.
This doesn’t bother me much for the bedroom/bathroom clothes closet, but I’ve put a decorative screen in front of the door to the coat closet in the living room.
I live in a two-apartment building in San Francisco. Each apartment has a bathroom, with a bathroom window that opens into an enclosed space. This space has access from the roof, from each apartment, and (as near as I can tell) from the backyard that belongs to the building next door. Thus, you can’t vent steam from a shower without giving the neighbors the opportunity for an eyeful.
I worked on a house in Red Bank that had a secret entrance to the attic. The woman’s (now dead) husband was a plumber by trade and converted a bedroom into a closet and bathroom for the master bedroom. The man actually made a slide-out linen closet to get to the existing attic stairs. It was amazing, and aside from the obvious age of the slide out, it worked PERFECTLY. This is going on 25 years later when I saw it. The widow totally forgot it was there, and the attic was made into a workshop of some sort, with all manners of hand tools, books and all the fold-up furniture this guy could bring up. Even his sons had no idea it was there.