Owners of old homes, any horror stories!?
Our basement is a pit. A literal pit. A trap door with a dug out pit and very rickety, steep stairs leading down to a sump pump and a hot water tank. Everything else down there, like heating ducts and water pipes, are run through tunnels that were dug beneath the house.
As much as we love our high ceilings, we're baffled by the drop ceiling in the kitchen. Why make the kitchen look so squatty with the haphazard cabinets and the random wood trim in the middle of the walls (that's only on one side of the room at that!) by adding a drop ceiling? There are no flourescent lights, but rather a ceiling fan hanging from the middle of this drop ceiling.
And what's with the bathroom? Why is the toilet a mile away from the sink, and why is there a built-in cabinet that's tiled over in a position where now the bathroom door can't be opened all the way?
I don't even want to ponder what idiot painted over paint over paint over paint over paint over five hundred more layers of paint in one bedroom, yet there's only two or three layers of paint in all of the other rooms in the house. There was so much paint on the door, you couldn't even tell there was any detail work to the door. Or the hardware for the door, for that matter.
Fortunately for us (har har) the guy who rented this house before us fixed it up a bit. He ripped up the carpet in the living room and re-finished the hardwood floors. He painted the walls and trim of the bedroom from hell a nice shade of white (five or so layers of it) and put down a plush, white carpet. And to give it extra padding, he just stuck it over the old carpet!
Where to begin, the mould that was not only under the kitchen floor, but the bathroom floor as well. The leaky pipes. I love my hardwood floors, but they need to be refinished. I need a new fence, a new garage, a new sewer system.
And I also have a dropped ceiling in the kitchen/dining room. It is going as soon as I can afford it.
There is more, but that is enough for now.
We bought an old school house built in the 40's, a brick and concrete bunker that was my areas fallout shelter back in the day.
Everything we do here has an extra degree of difficulty due to the 47 inch thick exterior walls, fire breaks in stud walls per commercial code of the time that staggers the stud so there is no "inches on center" to hang cabinets and such with any ease.
The duct work, like yours, runs under the slabbed part of the house and the cellar itself is not a pit but is small, the furnace is twice the size of my first car and it hogs what little space there is down there.
The man who first tried turning the space into a home bought the how-to books but never read them.
We found out the hard way that the fool when rerouting the sump pump out from the septic line he didn't put a freeze plug in the out pipe junction.
Instead he used a burlap bag dipped in roofing tar and stuffed up the hole like a make shift tampon.
Well the tampon broke loose when hubby flushed his morning fin-less brown one day, and while I am loading clothes into the dryer I see this thing shoot out of the pipe and fly across the basement and hubby's crap hitting the floor.
One of many stories, the whole place was/is held together with bailing wire and toothpaste.
ROFLMAO!!! I shouldn't be laughing, but that is a hilarious story, bagga.
*pictures poop-rocket flying right in front of bagga*
We JUST bought our house, so we haven't discovered any hidden catastrophe's yet....but I'm sure we'll find some soon.
We lucked out though. We live in an area that has fairly new houses for a decent price. Our cost of living in the midwest just isn't as high as some places you guys live in. I mean, sheesh! I've seen some house remodeling shows where the owners spend buco bucks to repair a house that is half the size of ours, but they bought it for twice as much.
This caused the floors to be warped, so they were replaced, but because of how the carpet was installed, they're not worth refinishing and keeping. We're going to rip up both layers of carpet, pad it properly, and put down new carpet that way if the owner wants to ever have hardwood floors, he can deal with it.
In our living room it looks like there used to be a partial wall to divide it so it's not one huge room as it is now. One side of the house still has this wall. The other side has a weird dent in the wall where the other half used to be.
We've also got two built in shelves on either side of the big window in the front of the house. They're definitely older looking, and even have the original carpet from this room tucked under the hidden storage. We'd really like these shelves taken out and updated with something that actually matches the rest of the wood in the house.
I hate that our outlets aren't grounded, and to replace them we'd have to re-wire the whole house. The only outlets that aren't grounded are the ones in the two bedrooms that the house was built with. *rips out hair*
Yikes! Don't you just love home ownership?
In my last house, my (ex) husband and I were fixing up, we had it almost complete and he was up in the attic for some reason. I was putzing in the kitchen below where he was and I heard a big thud and a "ahhh" come from above. He came out the attic and down the stairs clenching his chest cause he got spooked. Turns out, he was in there with a flashlight when the circle of light shined onto a skeletal face. After the initial freak out, he looked at it more. It was a poor kitty cat. The fur was around the body and the body was flat and crispy. Blech!!!!
He just couldn't bring himself to touch it so I got it out of there and his kids and I gave it a proper burial in the backyard. That's the worst I ever experienced.
Why did you buy this house? Maybe it would be easier to move.
Until we started remodeling, it was pretty sweet living here.
Back in 1979, I owned a six bedroom Victorian. It was a wreck when I bought it, very cheap. It had fireplaces and a lot of beautiful walnut and oak woodwork, a beautiful butler's pantry with the original built in cupboards, and bathrooms with clawfoot tubs. Here are some of the "surprises" I got from this house
On a hot August day I steamed off 5 layers of wallpaper from the 9' third floor bedroom ceiling. As I left the room when the job was done, the ceiling collapsed behind me.
I cleared thick ivy from the side of the house and discovered that there was a sidewalk and steps along the side of the house, completely hidden. I found the remains of old fashioned flowers still growing in the yard. The previous owner had just mowed everything down. It was one of the few rewards of fixing up the house.
I insulated the drafty basement and that winter the pipes froze because the heat leaking from the house was the only thing that had kept them thawed out. I insulated the attic and the snow that used to be melted by the heat from the house, accumulated and caused an avalanche that took the roofing slates off.
There was an old gas chandelier, converted to electric, in the dining room. It was too low, so I had someone cut through the pipe thinking to have it rethreaded and rehung. He was up on the ladder (12' ceiling) when he started yelling for help. I ran in and found him holding the heavy chandelier with one hand and the thumb of his other hand over the pipe opening. There was live gas in the pipe! I took the light fixture and handed him putty to stop the leak, then we called the gas company.
They traced the pipes and found that in the basement there was one branch from the meter that went back to the gas stove, furnace, hot water heater etc, and another pipe going straight up into the house. There were converted gas fixtures on all three floors and the attic. One wrong step the the whole house would have blown up. It had been like that since the 1930s when the owners installed electricity. Fixing it was a very expensive job.
The good news is that I sold it in 1993 for a very large profit.
I live in a brick cottage-style house built in 1920. It has beautiful hardwood floors, crown molding, original decorative tile in the bathroom and kitchen countertops, and other details lending it personality. I've never lived in a home this old however, and was unaware of the difficulty in making basic changes to homes so well constructed. The walls are plaster with some kind of pressed board behind them, so when I went to work trying to hang pictures the nails wouldn't go through and I'd end up with big holes chipped out of the plaster.
When a guy came to install my security system, he intentionally brought extras of his super long drill bits, knowing that these type homes are impossible to drill through; he barely made it, having worn out about five drill bits. I almost killed myself trying to hang slatted shades on the 20-some odd windows b/c all the woodwork in the house is some kind of hardwood--drilling above your head into that kind of wood is exhausting, and I also went through every drill bit I had.
When I moved in, the only room in the house that had a standard electric plug was the bathroom--not only was there only one plug per room elsewhere, all the other rooms had old style horizontal slats for the prongs, and no site for the ground prong. I don't know how the previous owner got electricity, b/c when I moved in I couldn't even find adapters to fit the old outlets. We had to rewire enough of the house to add outlets, but it was too big of a project to do the whole thing--now I can't run the dishwasher and washing machine without tripping the breaker.
The house has a huge attic, but the only way to get up there is through a small hole cut in the middle of the ceiling in one room (oh, yeah, and another even smaller hole in the ceiling of a closet). A tall ladder is the only way to get up there, just going straight up, but there are no lights and I'm too afraid of spiders to try it (still haunted by the movie Arachnophobia)--if I saw one I'd just have to plummet to my death through the hole.
The kitchen has some kind of horrible 1950's style cabinets (I painted them white, poorly, in an attempt to make them look better), nasty old linoleum peeling up, and wooden drawers just shoved into the cabinets so that you can barely pull them out.
There's an added on back room workshop/laundry room with the nastiest old carpet I've ever seen--again, one of those things I'll get to one day. Every time it rains, water manages to come in under the door so the carpet always smells of mildew.
Oh, old homes!
My house is 105 years old.
It has bricks halfway up 3 of the inside walls of the kitchen. We cannot figure out what purpose they ever served or why anyone would put them there for cosmetic reasons.
Our bathtub is a claw foot and in it's own room (which is kind of cool, actually). No sink or toilet...just a bathtub.
There is also a room in one corner upstairs that is about 12ft by 6 1/2ft, with a severely slanted ceiling (slants from 10ft at one end to 4ft at the other). It has a window but no lighting or electrical outlets of anykind. We call it the hobbit hole.
I think the doorknobs must be originals and frequently fall off. There are key-holes under the knobs on all the inside doors...which is also kind of cool. No idea where the keys are though. None of the doors shut right, so we often have to use a good amount of force to open one door while another will decide to swing open on it's own. The windows all have to be propped open.
Oh, I see. I have always wanted an old house, but this is making me question that... and it IS extremely annoying when the outlets aren't grounded.
As I'm reading all of these stories, I'm thanking my lucky stars that my SO is an electrician and his father and my father are both in construction.
I don't have any personal horror stories but a friend of mine lives in an old apartment complex with her fiancé. She has never been able to use the oven because the gas can't connect to it properly and her landlord doesn't know how to fix it. The house is connected through 110V so it won't run heat for her dryer, it'll only tumble. Her pipes are leaking and the house would have to be torn to pieces to fix them. It's a hell hole, but like CD was saying, the rent is cheap and the neighbors aren't bad.
In the late 80's I owned a home that was built in 1918. It had beautiful hardwood floors and lots of woodwork. The woodwork was solid chestnut. It was built before the chestnut blight. Talk about hard, OMG trying to put up curtain rods was a nightmare, even with an electric drill.
Fortunately the only place in the house that had painted woodwork was the kitchen. Unfortunately, the renters that had been in the house for 5 years before we purchased it worked for the city. So they painted the built in cabinets and woodwork in the kitchen with bright teal industrial paint, the kind used to paint pipes and stuff like that at water plants and other outside buildings. Not only was it oilbased, it was industrial strength, lead based and designed to be resistant to chemical peeling. I didn't realize it was lead based until after I had resorted to using a heat gun to scrape it off the wood. Fortunately with the high ceilings and having all the windows open I didn't breathe in too much of it. I did have to be tested for lead exposure, but never had to undergo treatment.
One day the downstairs bathtub was draining very slowly. Before I went to bed I poured some drain opener down the drain. My ex and I were in bed and heard a loud boom. It was summer so we thought someone in the alley had let off a firecracker. Then we smelled a terrible smell. We went downstairs to discover black thick crud all over the bathtub and up the wall. Fortunately the shower curtain was completely pulled closed so the crud didn't go all over the other walls. What happened you might ask. The pipes were lead. I used Dove soap which is high in glycerine, plus I use a lot of conditioner. There was a lot of my long curly hair in the pipe along with years of built up crud. The hair provided organic matter, the acid from the drain opener reacted with the disolving hair and the glycerine to form a pipe bomb. It exploded. Most of the damage went up and all over the tub. We only had to replace a fairly small section of pipe. The acid crud mix destroyed the finish on the bathtub and it had to be re-enameled.
I'm with huggitbear. I always thought it would be cool to buy an old Victorian and fix it up....Now I'm not so sure.
These stories sound expensive!
Screw it. Later, I'm taking pictures of that bathroom.
Speaking of tiles. There was a ceramic tile gas fireplace in the living room of that old house. The tiles had multiple layers of paint. I could tell because some had paint was chipping off and I could see beige (top coat), light yellow, light green, and pale blue. I decided to strip the fireplace down to the tile.
Not only did I get through those layers of paint, I got through several more colors. There was an entire white layer. There was a pink tile layer with maroon painted on the grout lines (the grout lines were about 1/2 inch wide). The pale blue tiles had navy blue grout lines. There was a grey layer, another white layer and I can't remember the rest.
I had to use chemical stripper because I didn't want to crack the tiles with heat. I must have used 2 gallons or more just on that fireplace. Eventually I got down to the tile. I was expecting the tile to be some really nice color since the house was so old. BUT NO, the tiles were green with dark grey grout. The inside of the fireplace was a beige smooth brick.
After getting all the crud off the tiles and literally nitpicking out every last little bit of paint out of the edges of grout, I was left with this green color to deal with. I went to a tile expert and he recommended a neutral glaze. He told me I'd probably never like the color of the tiles, but that the glaze would make them tolerable and they'd still look better with the natural tile than umpteen layers of paint. He was right. After glazing and buffing the tiles took on a forest green color which looked nice with the golden oak stain I put on the woodwork.
It did look better than the paint.
**still shudder to think of that fireplace painted pink with maroon grout lines**
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