Tell me about the quirks of your old house.

[ktzmoh]

Our house is 50 yrs old and we are discovering weird quirks about it as we settle in . Like the fact that our house has settled so the ceilings are not exactly the same height. I'm wondering what else we are going to discover. Tell me about your older homes.

[statlerwaldorf]

We live in an old farmhouse built in 1900, but we haven't lived here very long. When we were digging up part of the yard, we found a foundation to an old stable. One of the bricks goes back to a company that closed in 1905. We also found a squirrel living in our attic. The cellar had this old pantry that was blocked off and when we had it all cleaned out we found a bunch of old mason jars and some charcoal. Also the property map from 1905 does not show a bathroom. We have had some flickering lights and weird stuff happen. I think it's haunted (or needs an electrician to come out, but haunted is much more interesting.)

[vanillahip]

May 18, 2012 0:25:37 GMT -5 statlerwaldorf said:

When we were digging up part of the yard, we found a foundation to an old stable. One of the bricks goes back to a company that closed in 1905.

We have bricks too! Our home is from the 30's but was the first home in our sub (all of the land in our sub belonged to our home.... And now it has the smallest lot ) anyway, we have antique bricks EVERYWHERE! Our driveway and back patio are brick, all walkways are brick, all borders are brick..... because I keep finding more and more buried in the yard, might as well use them, right?

Also (SUCKY quirk IMO) our horsehair plaster walls could probably withstand any natural disaster. Which we rarely have Michigan. The horsehair plaster + wood lathe is layered on top of not one but TWO layers of that steel mesh + plaster upstairs, and I'm absolutely not kidding when I tell you that the builder used a CONCRETE mixture on the lathe and mesh before covering with plaster on the downstairs walls. So hanging curtains requires masonry drill bits and I almost killed myself using my nail gun to install my faux board & batten. Whoops!

[emoflamingo]

Our house has settled uneven too lol. The floor in the kitchen is uneven. It's SUPER fun.

Our house was built in the mid 1950s though, just before tornados took out part of the town, but nothing interesting was discovered. Unless you count 3 stainless steel sinks (none good) in the attic.

[jena]

I have 4 access doors to the attics and no coat closet. There's a light switch in DD's closet (where there is no light), which controls the overhead light in SS's room. Can't wait until she figures that one out!

[mrsacornblue]

We have no insulation. When DH was ripping out the bathroom two summers ago, there was stud and stucco. That's it. In the summer, the downstairs is at least 10 degrees cooler than the upstairs.

We have a bathroom in our dining room that is 3 x 5. It used to be the closet.

[Deleted]

Not too many quirks here now. Before we remodeled, the layout had been changed numerous times over the years and was downright bizarre. The layout probably was originally some version of an American Foursquare, but by the time we got it, the bathroom was on the back of the house, and you had to walk through this weird little 11x9ish room to get to it from anywhere else in the house. The little room was completely useless. It had a window, two closets, and three doors to other rooms. So there was no space on the walls for any furniture, it was basically just a glorified closet called a "second bedroom" in the listing. Because I really want to sleep in a room that is Grand Central station for all the closets in the house and the bathroom. The only "real" bedroom was disproportionately large compared to the tiny house had two doors (one to the foyer, one to the weird room) and no closet. But it's all fixed now!

[GailGoldie]

we have found strange bricks in weird places in the yard, too.

our house was built in the 30s. the kitchen is late 40's vintage (chrome with red formica - we went with it b/c we couldn't afford to change it- and it's in great shape).... deep in the corner of the cabinet under the sink I found a bunch of old milk bottles- like "milk man" delivery bottles- i think they are super cool.

our walls are slopey/uneven, etc.... and when we had the wallpaper taken down in the kitchen we found it was covering a huge hole in the wall... that dated back to the 50s about. Fun times.

[statlerwaldorf]

If you look at the flooring in the kitchen with the light hitting at the right angle, you can tell that there used to be a trap door there.

[brittmk0922]

I blew a breaker the other day in the bathroom (blow drying my hair, running the fan, etc) and realized that the breaker for the bathroom includes half the kitchen.... they are not adjoining walls or anything where this might make sense at all!

[duckduck]

Hi! I'm exploring boards besides the book club since the great migration.

DH and I are in the process of restoring the hardwood floors that we found under the nasty pink and cream carpet in our 72-year-old house. We're still learning the quirks since we haven't moved in yet, but we do know that some of the outlets are in horizontally instead of vertically.

None of our floors are level. They go every which way.

[UMaineTeach]

112 y.o. house
I bought shades for 'identical' windows in the bedroom, looking to inside mount.
I only measured 1 window. The shade fit inside the one window perfectly -annnd was 1/4 inch too big to fit in the other.
so they are now outside mounted and look sort of dumb.

[sailorgray]

I grew up in a farmhouse from the 1850's. There's been a lot of weirdness found over the years. It had steps that go nowhere (this was apparent when my parents bought it), a room in the attic that used to hide slaves where we found some old clothing and newspapers (the papers were from the early 1900's) and my mom was just telling me how they took of the siding off of the front and one of the walls on the 1st floor was all windows. They also just had to have the tin roof replaced due to a tornado and the nails in the old roof were all from the Civil War era. That's to be expected, but still pretty cool. When they moved in back in the 80's, they found a huge amount of soap in the attic. I know there have been other weird things, much to my dad's dismay b/c he has to fix it, but that's all I can think of for now.

Oh, and the house is white now, but people who owned it in the 50's/60's sent my parents a pic and it was green. It's a pretty big house, so seeing it green is pretty weird.

[ktzmoh]

This is a great thread. Apparently the slope in the floor upstairs is benign that the bathtub doesn't really drain all the was. There's always a puddle left in the middle.

And when we remodeled our bathroom, we thought the contractor switched the hot and cold water pipes, but apparently they were put in the wall backwards when it was built.

And the peoPle we bought from we're the original owners, as is pretty much everyone on the street. We are the newcomers in a group thats lived in the same houses for 40 or 50 yrs. So we are sensing a little outsider weirdness from the neighbors lol!

[duckduck]

May 19, 2012 16:58:27 GMT -5 sailorgray said:

I grew up in a farmhouse from the 1850's. There's been a lot of weirdness found over the years. It had steps that go nowhere (this was apparent when my parents bought it), a room in the attic that used to hide slaves where we found some old clothing and newspapers (the papers were from the early 1900's) and my mom was just telling me how they took of the siding off of the front and one of the walls on the 1st floor was all windows.

That sounds like my great-grandma's house! We spent a lot of time there when I was little and I loved exploring. Staircases that ended in walls, hidden hallways with loose floorboards. The house had been added onto so many times over the years. My mom's cousin and his wife live there now and when they were remodelling they found so many doors hidden under wallpaper and stuff like that.

[apples21]

We have not moved into our new home yet. (we close on May 31st) However, from the inspection we know that the electrical that was used for the garbage disposal now runs the water fountain on the patio outside. The switch on the counter turns on the fountain and we do not have a disposal.

[brittmk0922]

My fiance bought himself a dart board. He got the level out and took all this time making sure it was hanging level, took a step back and we're both looking at it..... the top of the dart board compared to the roof looked like this: < hahaha, best part is that's on the first floor of a 2 story home where there's a room above it so it shouldn't be sloped....

[sweetpea508]

We have the original coal furnace (1918) in our basement, which is pretty cool besides the fact that it is freaking huge and takes up a lot of space. We also have the original coal delivery chute and milk delivery door in our kitchen. Nothing is square in our house, all the window and door measurements are some obscure number. Contractors just come in and laugh. Luckily we found one who is experienced in old houses. Fun stuff if you have the patience.

[amblor]

We own a 1930 house. Here are a few of the quirks we've found:

The dining room and the living room are the only two rooms with original plaster/boards. All of the other rooms have drywall.

The light switch for the kitchen is behind the only area that the fridge can fit in the kitchen. (Luckily my husband is an electrician and can fix that!)

The sea foam green bathroom tile had concrete metal lathe behind it and behind that was cedar paneling. It also had a cast iron sea foam green tub. We gutted this bathroom down to the studs.

We had to use concrete leveler before we installed our new hardwood floors on the first floor. The middle of the living room had to be raised 7/8-ths of an inch to become level.

[magdala9]

May 19, 2012 17:59:05 GMT -5 ktzmoh said:

the bath tub doesn't really drain all the was. There's always a puddle left in the middle.

Yes. we have this problem too. The other challenge if figuring out the light switches. We always have three or four switches together. For some strange reason, the switch on the far right turns on the light in the left room.