In my dorm room, someone put a full length mirror on the inside of the toilet room. So when visitors had lowered their pants and had sat down to do their business, and looked up, they saw themselves likke they had probably never seen themselves before.
Some visitors smiled weirdly when they got out of that bathroom.
Well, my family was always weird…
As I type this, I can look out the window onto the large, spacious back yard. The house that used to be on this plot of land was bigger than the current house. When the previous house burned down, the owner just sold the land. So the contractor just built a smaller house on the land, leaving a relatively large space in back. After my parents built the deck in '99, there was room for a storage shed, a playhouse my parents had built for the Diva when she was 5, a swing set, a propane grill, 3 fruit trees (lemon, pomegranate and guava), 2 rose bushes,and a Nissan that currently doesn’t run. And there’s still room for the kids to run around.
Oh, yeah, also my bathroom has the faucets backward. The cold water is on the left and the hot water is on the right.
Indeed I have. I am actually not afraid of anything except that there is nothing good there and that I cause damage to the house investigating it. I choose to believe that there is a complete armory of Revolutionary War weapons in pristine conditions along with several original copies of the Declaration of Independence not 5 feet from where I am typing.
Actually, I would breech the space in a heartbeat if I had the right technology. I need a tiny camera that can be dropped down from the closet above it and give images on a screen. I know such technology exists but it will cost too much for this investigation alone. I have studied the problem at length and drilling a 1/2 inch hole above to drop a camera down from above should be easy but I need that camera.
We had an expert on true colonial houses come in to assess things a few years ago and he picked on this phenomenon immediately. One of my other fears is that I will pull a Geraldo Rivera and the climax will be nothing. OTOH, there was a church close to where I grew up that renovated a section and bringing down a wall revealed a huge cache of Civil War weapons carefully sealed inside the wall.
Ditto my laundry tub and the bathroom sink at my Mom’s house. But that’s just because my dad was not a plumber.
My house is very normal for a 1948 “Welcome Boys!” cookie cutter 'burb house. One of the previous owners did paint every wall, door piece of woodwork, interior and exterior a lovely seafoam green though. The kitchen, after the seafoam green, was a lovely dark mauve with almost electric blue woodwork.
The attic entrance is smack above the basement stairwell. You need a 2 story ladder to get up there, and even then the ladder has to have adjustable legs as there isn’t any place to lean the top of the ladder against if placed parallel to the stairs. My dad rigged a wooden stepladder to sit with the rungs on a lower stair/back on a higher stair. Completely useless for anything else, obviously. He went up there once. Me? Never.
The house I live in now has some minor oddness in the basement.
There are two entrances to the laundry room, one from the downstairs living room, the other from outside.
There is only one light switch for the laundry room.
Next to the outside door. There USED to be one inside, but it was removed in an (unnecessary) renovation.
The house I grew up in, had, until it burnt down and got heavily remodelled in the rebuilding, 5 bedrooms, 2 downstairs, 3 upstairs. Not strange, in and of itself, of course, but there was one thing outright strange, and one slightly unusual about them.
Unusual: The downstairs bedroom that had its own bathroom was not the master bedroom.
Strange: One of the upstairs bedrooms was only accessible through the upstairs bathroom. This was my bedroom in the last year we lived there.
Those two rooms were assimilated into other bedrooms in the remodel.
We live in a typical Montreal apartment building, and while the weird things aren’t all that weird for this type of home, they were kind of fun to discover.
The first is that all the “modern” wiring is outside the walls. The phone lines and cable lines all run along the baseboards, and you can start from the front living room and follow the wires all the way down the hall, going around the double living room doorways, into and back out from the dining room, through the kitchen and around the bedroom until you reach the outside wall, which is where the phone line is connected to the building. The cable line does the same, entering the building, running all the way down the hallway to the front room, around the portico door, through the wall to the living room, and then around the living room walls (and through the adjoining wall) to where the TV is in the second room, and there is a part that is split off though the living room closet, into the dining room closet, and through that wall, because a lot of previous tenants used that room as a living room.
When we had our phone/cable hooked up, the Videotron guy spent 15 minutes following the lines through the house and outside in order to do his hookup properly. He added a bit of cable line to the living room for our TV, and while it is, of course, visible, he was a real pro at stapling it to the baseboards/door frame in such a way that you really don’t notice it. He said working in this neighbourhood of Montreal, learning to hide these lines as much as possible is a skill you have to master early on!
The other fun little weirdness is that a corner of the front room is sloped, so my husband’s computer chair has a habit of migrating away from the desk, towards the door. We like to joke that it’s trying to escape.
For some reason, the portico door (leading from the portico to the rest of the apartment) has a plastic window, rather than a real one. And somewhere along the lines, someone removed the majority of the covers for plugs and the phone jacks.
There is also a perfect circle scratched into the floor in the living room.
My wife is a year around Halloween fanatic. We have a pretty normal upper-middle-class house, but it’s full of full size props (scarecrow, grave digger, reaper, witch, butler, I’m sure I’m forgetting something.)
I have a resin reaper and bats hung over the bed. I’m not happy with it, but the rest of the relationship is good enough I can overlook her ‘hobby’. Especially when all she needs to do is point out the tools and crap I have in the garage.
Most of the electrical outlets in this house (built in the late '60’s) were installed upside down. It doesn’t matter for most uses, but I can’t use most plug-in air fresheners because they would hang upside down.
When we moved in, we enclosed a two car garage with a small tool room and built a cat suite. The former tool room is now my office.
My bedroom was an irregular septagon, due to a century of uncoordinated renovations. Not terribly fascinating, but the other two bedrooms were normal square or L-shaped.
My grandmother’s old house had a u-shaped stairway (go up, landing, turn 180 degrees, continue going up). There was a door at the very top of the stairs: not particularly common, but not notably weird. There was also a door at the bottom of the top bit of the stairs, right before the landing. No frame or anything, just a door attached by the hinges. No idea why.
One of my favorite ex-apartments was on the third floor of an old mansion that had been subdivided into many apartments. The people across the hall had to walk through their shower to get to their toilet–but I had a working fireplace in my bathroom, and it was neat. In that apartment I took baths lasting hours.
It was a big bathroom, too. I mean, it took up nearly half of a not notably huge apartment–maybe 10x11’. Whereas the kitchen was about 3x5’. Luckily, at that stage of my life I did not cook, all I needed was a place to chill the beverages.
I wish! We’ve joked about installing double-barn doors and a moo-er.
There are no doors anywhere in the house, except for the bathroom. I hung a little folding door to keep the cats out of my sewing room, but otherwise… no doors.
Also, we have all these little hobbit holes, everywhere around the house. Little crawlspaces running the length and width of the house, and one in the bathroom, all with tidy little hobbit-sized doorjambs. No doors, though.