For fun - What made you go "hmmmm" in your new home?

[lightbulbsun]

When we moved in there were some weird privacy fence panels mounted just around the patio, not the whole yard. Our neighbor told us that the guy who lived there used to sun bathe naked, and that's why the fences were there. 

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[nessness]

In this house, mostly just some light switches in weird places.

Our last house was a custom build (by the previous owners, who lived there 35 years), and there was a huge (like 4'x4') clear window in the shower. The owners probably realized pretty quickly that the neighbors could see directly into the shower. There solution was to build a fence around the window on the outside. I guess that wasn't enough, as they also put honeycomb blinds in the shower, which naturally got super gross. We took the blinds down and put privacy film on the window.

Also, the tile floor in the bathroom had tons of cracks in it. When we replaced the tile, we discovered that was because they had (a) used wall tiles, not floor tiles and (b) glued the tiles directly to the subfloor. You don't have to be a tile expert to know that is NOT how tile is supposed to be installed.

[circa1978]

Oh, I have another fun one., When we were looking at houses, we saw this beautifully finished basement with full windows but...the house didn't walk out. The guy had it built so that the drywall was like four feet out from the foundation with lights behind, and then windows looking into that. It was cray.

[IrishBelle]

Our house is about 100 years old so it’s been interesting.

*We were told there was no knob and tube wiring. When we did some renovations we found that the wiring going to the panel had been replaced but everything else was knob and tube.
*The pot light wiring in the kitchen was a disaster.
*During renovations we discovered a wall between two bedrooms that was only being held up by the plaster.
*The original hardwood floors were laid BEFORE the walls were built so when we took down some walls, the floors were higher in those spots since the rest of the floors had been sanded many times.
*There was a really weird room upstairs at the end of the hallway that I don’t know the purpose of. It was about 8x8 with a large arched opening and a full length closet along one side with no doors. The only thing I have thought it could have been is a nursery since it is outside the master bedroom.
*At some point, someone decided to refinish the floors in the dining room which is connected to the living room. There are pocket doors there but it’s always open so the colour just changes in the middle of the doorway.

[winecat]

I found exterior siding and a space where a window had been that had been covered up by drywall in my pantry.

[dr.girlfriend]

The basement was BRIGHT orange. The guy was like, "Yeah, that didn't really turn out how we envisioned" and I was like, "WHAT exactly did you envision?" The trim EVERYWHERE was dark blue or dark green. It took like five coats to paint it over to white, and even then there were bits that looked moldy where they had gone outside the lines!

[bcv513]

I can add something else! We had a new dishwasher installed yesterday. Within five minutes I heard the plumber say “hey come here you’ve gotta see this!” 😳

Turns out the dishwasher wasn’t draining into the kitchen sink like normal. It was draining through the bathtub! A ten minute installation turned into a three hour fix

[aprilsails]

Omg dr.girlfriend. That is a wild colour choice.

I had a friend who was pretty much colour blind and was flipping an old house and kept buying $5 returned quarts of paint to paint rooms. He painted his bathroom Pepto-Bismol pink. I kept telling him he was an idiot and that there was a reason those colours were returned. In the end he had a painted come in and do the whole house before it listed.

[wildrice]

Our 2nd bedroom doesn't have closet doors. There is a track where there must have been bi-fold doors in the past, but the doors are gone and instead they stuck a wooden wardrobe/cabinet in the space where the closet should be. It doesn't fit the space properly and looks terrible. They also put in new carpet before we moved in, and left the old closet door track in place so if we took it off, there would be a gap with no carpet. I honestly would guess it would be around the same price to buy new doors as it was to buy the wardrobe, so why do it this way?

[amandakisser]

There is an axe, hammer, shovel, or some other large, handled tool that was left in the poured concrete in our basement. Just the handle is sticking up, about three feet tall, smack dab in the middle of our unfinished basement. We're having it finished over the winter and our contractor can't wait to see what else is under there lol.

Also when we demoed our kitchen several months ago, we found a mural painted on the wall behind some cabinets.

[Deleted]

We live in a ~2k square foot home that was originally a ~500 square foot outbuilding on a ranch. Everything else has been added on, so we have found all kinds of exterior walls and windows under interior walls, the original doorway in the adobe wall between our living room and a closet hallway, crumbling 100 year old adobe walls held up by chicken wire and hidden under paneling.

We have done major renovations, and we never know what we're going to find when we demo something!

[mrsukyankee]

Thought of one that I hadn't before:
Supposedly, one of the rooms is a steam room. But it didn't come with instructions and we can't figure out how to work it or even if it is working. What it does have is a shower and sink in it so my MIL uses it as her shower. It's taking up so much space for what it is and I think we'll eventually make it into a wet room with toilet, shower, sink and bathtub.

[Wallflower]

I thought of another one - The old owners left notes for lots of things (how to switch over to oil heat, how to turn off the gas to the fireplace and stove), but the electrical panel isn't marked up! I have no idea which switch controls what parts of the house.

I think that's sort of funny in general, but in context with how well they documented other things, it really makes me chuckle. Before the pandemic, my friends' 15-year-old was going to help me map the panel, but that's fallen to the wayside.

[heygrey]

We just bought our first house and moved in 2 weeks ago. It's a 2 bed/1.5 bath house, built in '94 so nothing too crazy.

Except the 1.5 bathrooms. The full bath has a stall shower, two separate sinks (like, a wall divides them), and the toilet. The half bath has a very large vanity with a single sink, and a tub/shower. No toilet. So we have 3 sinks, 2 places to bathe, and only 1 toilet. The bathrooms are connected with a door, and each bathroom has a pocket door to a bedroom. The room with a toilet also has a door to the hallway. So weird. So many doors.

Our house is on a slab so it makes accessing pipes a bit more difficult, but we're hoping to add a second toilet to the half bath eventually. It would be useful for our family and would likely help resale. We're in a super competitive market so this was barely a blip on the things we overlooked to buy a house, but it's still bizarre when you go through the layout of the house.

[definitelyO]

keep in mind we bought our home 15+ years ago as I reference telephones...

there is a phone jack in the middle of a wall in a basement (as in 4' high) that goes nowhere.....

but there is a phone on the exterior of the house on the patio that does not have a dial. It's a red phone that looks like the direct line to the Kremlin but no numbers or dial. when we moved in we used to be able to answer calls on it - but at some point it stopped working. but we still keep it up - conversation piece.

[trissie18]

Our previous house was 100+ years old and was previously owned by DH's great aunt. Over the 13 years we renovated the entire house and found lots of interesting things.

The things that made us really go hmmmm were:
The addition put on the back of the house that included four sets of sliding glass doors...it was so cold in the addition that before we renovated it we could put a pot of chili in there and it would freeze solid. The addition was also built over the top of the outside basement stairs so we had a trap door in what we turned into a mudroom.
The chimney came through the middle of the open doorway between the living room and dining room leaving less than 2 feet to walk through.
The entire upstairs master bedroom sat on 2x2's around the edge and 32" center floor joists above the kitchen. We still joke that had we not gutted to the studs and found the issue we would have woke up in our kitchen. lol

We are now in the process of renovating a house for my brothers to live in and it is even worse than our old house. Similar to aprilsails a DIY contractor owned the house previously and made some really bad decisions. lol The worst was probably the only bathroom in the house required you to go in one door to use the toilet and another door to use the shower even though it was the same room. 


  

[deadwing]

I thought of another one from my old house... There was one corner of the basement where the ceiling was about a foot lower than the rest. We couldn't figure out why, but shrugged it off as an old home quirk. A few months later, we were giving a friend a tour of the house and he managed to squeeze into a tight space to get a look at what was above the lowered ceiling. He found half of the original basement stairs and a landing. The stairs must have been moved when the second bath was added... Probably should also question the safety of that bathroom, now that I think about it...

[tacokick]

Nov 6, 2020 1:09:57 GMT -5 turbo said:

We built our house so there’s nothing about the current house that makes me go “Hmmmm” but apparently the house that was here that we tore down had a bunch of nudie mags from the 1960s in one of the walls. I never saw them but my contractor told me they were there.

What good is a nudie mag sealed into a wall?

Maybe it originally was hidden behind a grate and in duct work of some kind?

[rubytue]

We did not buy this house (*glares at H*), but we just looked at a house that had two windows in the kitchen looking out to the carport. Because, that’s what I want to look at while washing dishes. LOL. Even weirder, they had put garage doors in. So it looked like a garage from the front. I was perplexed bc the listing said carport. When we went to the backyard, and there was no back to the “garage.” So, it had 3 of 4 required walls for a garage. Two sides and a front, with garage doors. So weird.

[lo]

Nov 8, 2020 10:40:20 GMT -5 tacokick said:

Nov 6, 2020 1:09:57 GMT -5 turbo said:

We built our house so there’s nothing about the current house that makes me go “Hmmmm” but apparently the house that was here that we tore down had a bunch of nudie mags from the 1960s in one of the walls. I never saw them but my contractor told me they were there.

What good is a nudie mag sealed into a wall?

Maybe it originally was hidden behind a grate and in duct work of some kind?

We had nudie mags from the 70s or 80s in our walls! And also a note that said something like, “Smoke a lot of weed!”

Our house was built in 1897, but was “updated” in the 70s. And yes, we are in process of fixing all those updates.

[bhnumbers]

the main thing I found weird--or at least inconvenient--about our house when we moved in (and before we renovated) is that in the old master bathroom, there was a light over the toilet with a switch right beside it. But it was kind of a big bathroom, so if you forgot to turn it off, you couldn't just switch it off at the door like the rest of the lights, you had to walk back across the bathroom to do it.

[sandandsea]

Our upstairs is one large bedroom with a full wall of closets and a door to the attached bathroom. The house across from us is the same floor plan so when they sold we went to the open house to check it out. Between the bedroom and bathroom they have another pass through walk in closet! In our attic there is an open space behind that bathroom that is just useless space so I feel like our house was cheated out of that closet. Not that we need another closet in that room but it’s better than wasted attic space.