What Philster says is so true! The stuff behind would gross you out if not actually make some of you sick.
Last Thursday, I was replacing some steel casement windows in a 90 yr old house. I had on my sheilds, gloves, hat, etc… When I pulled down one frame, a pile of spiders, some live some mummified, came down on me. Talk about gross!
An even bigger problem in most bathrooms is rot and mold. Often, we have to rebuild an entire wall or two and part of the floor because of the rot. As for the mold, we have test kits. If it’s the bad stuff, we hire a service to come out to take care of it. Sometimes, even the service can’t help. A friend of mine went into the hospital because of the bad mold. His house had to be virtually rebuilt. Almost every bit of flooring, drywall, etc… had to go, as did about a third of the framing. :eek:
So, razors in wall? Not a huge problem. Yeah, they could’ve figured out a better way. But, with this particular solution, all that had to be done was cut a small slot. The most cost effective solution to a minor problem.
And, now that you know they are in there, be careful.
It’s all cold and rainy today, and all I have is outside work.
A builder called early today to set up a meeting to see if we want to work together. I meet him tomorrow.
We don’t have this in the UK, but after my wife’s parents died and we were clearing the house, we found a dozen or so tobacco tins full of rusty blades on a shelf in his shed. We took them in for recycling, but I wonder if a slot in the wall isn’t actually a better idea.
I always thought the slot in my Grannys bathroom was Gramps’ secret penny bank.
As a kid I used to dream about how much money was in that wall. Gramps was so old he must have saved at least a million pennies, seemed like a lot back then.
I’m regularly using double-edged safety razors, but not dropping them into a slot in the medicine cabinet, because my bathroom doesn’t have a medicine cabinet. But I bet there are blades inside the wall.
My previous house had them (although the medicine cabinet was newer and had no slot), and when I had the plumbers in to fix the sink, they had to extract a crap ton of blades with a magnet before they could get started.
I recall there being a slot in the house I grew up in, which was built in 1977—must have been on the tail end of that practice. My dad showed me what it was for.
A few months ago, a friend of mine at work mentioned finding razor blades when he was doing some remodeling. I think the house I grew up in had the razor disposal slot (it was built in the 1950s). My current house doesn’t, but I’m old enough that I knew what my work buddy was talking about when he mentioned finding the blades.
Nothing in Melbourne. Apart from the fact that it just never occurred to anyone here, drywall was a later innovation: you wouldn’t easily get a medicine cabinet or a slot /in/ hard plaster.
And when I was a kid in Arizona, I lived in a house with simple cinder-block walls. No easy way to get a slot in that either.
You mentioned Motel of the Mysteries. It’s by David MacCauley, and is a wonderful send-up of archeology, lots of references to Carnavon and Carter finding King Tut’s tomb. The Motel is named Toot-n-Come-On, one of the pictures has a wall calendar on the back wall with a picture of King Tut’s mask, and so on. The more you know about the original discovery, the funnier the book is.
The new one comes out the top, and you put the used one in the bottom. To me that makes more sense than hiding them inside your wall.
Or maybe not. Maybe they should have slots for other things, too–anything you don’t want to deal with, or for people to find in the trash: old love letters, unused prescription drugs, empty booze bottles, etc.
I just find this all fascinating. Was this a new question in 2003? Had anybody asked it before? At some point everyone in America must have known about that slot. Did people forget?
I use the razor slot in my chest to hold those disposable nail files. So far, I’ve lost maybe 3 down into the void in the year we’ve been here. Not the brightest idea I’ve ever had.
My house was built in the 1970s and there is a slot for razorblades in the back of the medicine cabinet. I’ve never used it, since I use pink disposable shavers, but I knew what it was for.
Since the only previous owner of the house was also a single lady, I have no idea if there are in fact any razorblades down inside the wall.
