Strangest Thing that Came with Your House

I'm doing some work on a house with orange peel on the walls & heavy spray on the ceilings. This house is about 20 years old so it's just drywall stuff. The reason they spray this junk is because any dummie can do taping if it's sprayed over to cover up the mess underneath.
I finish walls smooth. Much easier to paint & you can also fix or redo easier.
Bernie

Bernie, you are right... these orange peel and popcorn finishes are popular with builders and subs because it's cheaper and easier than doing a proper job on the drywall.

Of course, drywall became the material of choice because it was cheaper than plaster and any dummie could do it, LOL.

I can finish drywall joints pretty good, just not over my head.

I grew up in Chicago on the north side. Our house was very old and had a walk up attic. There was a secret room - very well disguised - which had a still in it! After living there for over 30 years my parents sold the house to the city for demolition...they removed the built in china cabinet and had sides & a back made for it and took it with them. Behind the china cabinet they found a very old bottle of whiskey wrapped in a black corset!

Eileen

That's very funny, Eileen... a whiskey bottle in a corset!

lol, Eileen - what a great story! Chicago, you say????

This house was built in 1955, but was built by 1900 standards - balloon studding and no insulation. There was a bedroom upstairs that was painted pepto pink and under that had been tomato soup orange - apparently the room needed the pepto after the soup. The kitchen had linoleum that had been placed on the walls like a wainscot while the plaster was still wet. We had to take the walls down and replace the plaster with wall board to get rid of the linoleum. There were two bedrooms on the first floor. The "master" and the hired man's room. The hired man's room was at the far end of the livingroom and was so small that if you put a bed in it and set it up with the door closed, you couldn't open the door. If you set the bed up with the door open, it wouldn't close. We ripped it out and added the space to the master bedroom. the main floor bathroom was so narrow that Stan's shoulders rubbed when he walked in. the toilet and sink were behind the door when you opened it. We completely remodelled that! To get to the cellar stairs, you had to go through the kitchen and the pantry. There were 3 cupboards above the kitchen sink which was a metal cabinet on an inside back wall. We tore out the pantry, put the door to the cellar in the back room and lengthened the kitchen out and opened it to the dining room and living room. When we started, there were 7 doors into the dining room. Now, it is open from the east wall of the house to the west. There wasn't a downstairs wall that we didn't take out, move or add to - We started on Novemeber 18, 1993 and moved in on January 16 1994 with very little left to finish. We were much much much younger then!!!!

My daughters house, which is one of the best in her town, was built by the banker around 1940. It is still mostly original, even the very beautful antique light fixtures are still there. The bathroom was on the second floor, basement + 3 floors. So when these people got older they added a first floor stool. They stuck a little room off the kitchen out into the garage. It is so small my son in law has to back in so as to sit on this stool, then his knees hit the door when it is shut! This room fits right in with a house that has a 14 X 26 living room!
Bernie

Ahh yes Popcorn ceilings! YUCK!! We moved in here and every room in the house had it, and if that wasn't bad enough they all had large flakes of glitter in it! Yep, they mixed big glitter flakes into the mix before blowing it on the ceilings.
The ceiling in the dining room was awful, it had big spots where the roof leaked and the popcorn stuff would just fall right in the middle of the dinner table! After a huge piece fell into my big pot of chili we vowed to get rid of it.
Now we are down to one last room with it still on the ceiling, but its been painted over so you can't see the glitter anymore! Thank goodness!

We have the popcorn ceilings. Out here they are called cottage cheese ceilings. Ours has glitter in it, too. Actually, I think it is some kind of transparent crystals. I don't look at the ceiling much, so it doesn't bother me. I'd prefer a regular smooth ceiling, but redoing the ceiling is not at the top of the priority list. When I do look at ceiling, I try connect the dots in my mind and form constellations. The space shuttle and the bat ray are the two that come to mind right now.

We have a pepto pink bedroom. It was my idea to paint it that color. Actually, two walls are pink, two are white, and the carpet is dark green. I like that color combination.

Other things that came with the house that I want to replace are the beige drapes and the Las Vegas chandelier.

A thing that came with the house that some people might find strange is the grille. It is a wooden screen that goes along the staircase. It was laying up in the rafters when we moved in but I liked it and we put it back in place. It is so '60s, but it matches the vaguely Spanish look we have here and there. This picture shows the grille. The picture was taken accidentally when I almost dropped the camera and that is why it is not straight.





This message was edited Nov 12, 2003 4:39 PM

Pretty, but I sure would hate having to dust each and every one of those holes!

What a great thread....thanks

I rented a place in Bakersfield many years ago that came with a built in Grandma. When the family moved out it seems that Grandma refused to go. They couldn't afford to make payments on both mortages without renting the old place out so they divided it into two units and added a second kitchen for the "new" unit. There was a door between the two units that they put wallboard over But about a week after we moved in Grandma heard my newborn crying and before I could get his bottle fixed she had knocked out the wallboard and was sitting in the babies room rocking him! Scared me half to death when I saw her sitting there holding my baby but time went by and we never did close up that doorway. Grandma wandered in and out at will and the kids loved her...so did I. When Grandma passed away about a year later we moved out. The place was just not right without her. Her son was suprised when he came to clean and found that his Mother had been so bold. Seems we had all failed to mention it to him and he never went into the area where the door was to notice it during his visits.

Inheiriting a Grandma when you are a young mother with 3 kids, one a newborn, is one of those events in life that make you wonder why every household doesn't have one. I highly reccomend it!

Actually, it doesn't take very long to dust the grille.

Great stories, wow Zany what a surprise and shock that musta been!

This house is a 1950's ranch, complete with a pink and turqoise bathroom. There are two things that I think are strange. There are ceiling fans in EVERY room. I always have the airconditioning on ( even in winter ) so I never turn the fans on. All they do is collect dust and cat hair. I hate those fans. They are also the lights in each room. Weird...

The other oddity is outside beside my garage. We have a very long, very wide driveway. It comes up to the front of the house, and then goes around the side beside the garage and the back porch. The previous owners left a flower bed about 30 feet long and 4 feet wide in the midst of the cement. Nothing will grow in it for very long because little tiny tree roots keep coming up in the dirt. Why didn't they cement it too ? Anyone have any suggestions ?

Zany, That is the sweetest story! It is going to be hard to beat that one!

HAH! The mention of bathrooms brings back a memory!

I once rented a house and was surprised to see a rainbow painted across three walls in the bathroom! I thought it was cool! Figgerd a housefull of brethren hippies once lived there!

That rainbow started at the bottom of one wall, arced up nearly to the ceiling then over to the other wall, then began its descent down the third wall.

One day (after living there over a yr), while sitting on the "throne", staring at the beginning of the rainbow before me, noticing the fine artwork then its rise to the top, around the second wall, and how it descended BEHIND me I finally understood!

I was sitting on the "pot at the end of the rainbow"!

True story!

Good one Shoe! Now, wonder how a rainbow would look in my pink and blue bathroom? I kinda like that idea. I once had a friend who never took showers (she prefered tub baths). When you sat on her throne, you found yourself looking directly at a huge picture hanging in the tub area. It was the cutest thing. In the picture there were two young bears climbing a tree. One of the bears was peeking around the tree looking directly at the throne. I loved it but couldn't reproduce it in my bathroom because we are a showering bunch.

This has to be one of the best threads at DG! Joan, you got a good deal with the man of the house thrown in. Darius, your dolphins go swimmingly with your home. And Zany...Oh, boy! There are just so many great stories here!

We bought our house from the daughters of the original owner, who'd died a few years prior. It had been empty since then, but maintained by the family; one daughter, sick with diabetes and too emotionally attached to sell the house, lived a few houses down the street. The other sister, who did the cleaning and lawnwork not only for her mom's vacant house, but for her sick sister, was eager to let it go.

What fun the negotiations were! The sick sister kept going on and on about how expensive and nice the drapes and carpeting were in the house. What we found was sun-bleached and rotted draperies and old, faded carpet, of course. ;) We didn't have the heart to tell her the carpet made a great removeable dropcloth for when we painted the living room!

The house was built in 1954 for the womens' mom, who was a widow. Their uncle (mom's brother) was a contractor in Pennsylvania. He came to Ohio on the weekends with his best crew and built her house for her. It really does have some nice work in it.

It has the original Geneva metal kitchen cabinets, which are really fun. They need to be painted, but we've never tacked the kitchen yet (procrastinating on the hardest room to do, heh).

There are leftover pieces of the original wood floorboards and trim up in the attic, handy for when we're ready to do some repairs. We even found some local newspapers up in the attic, dated from the year the house was built; they were too crumbly to preserve, but it was fun to look at them for a couple of days.

The bathroom has the original maroon and grey tiles...Coupled with goldenrod fixtures! We went ahead and had new sink and commode put in when we while we were having the basement remodeled into an apartment for my MIL. When they put in our shower upstairs, we learned that the floor tile was laid in 1-2" of poured cement; it took them a lot of time to remove just the 4" section needed for installing the shower, so theremoving all that tile is more of a job than we're ready to tackle for a long, long time!

The wiring was good, but all the outlets upstairs are the old 2-prong ones with no ground. I'm always scrambling to find one of those 3-prong to 2-prong adapters when I need to use the vacuum or some other appliance using a ground! It's not hard to change them out, but we've just not gotten around to putting in new ones - guess I don't have much room to complain. ;)

The better half and I were looking for an apartment in South Florida some years ago. We got to one that seemed nice. Small, but cozy. Clean, and furnished. We didn't ask any questions as we had just arrived and needed something quick. Well we got something quick alright. What I thought was the door to the bedroom, was a closet. The bed was actually a pull out sofa. What I thought was the bathroom door was for the sweeper and such. The bathroom (I am using this term very freely) was behind a partition. You know, one of those Japanese things. We laughed for hours, about how much of a hurry we were in. Can't remember how long we stayed. I don't think more than a week.

honeygirl, I have heard of people leaving an opening in the cement driveway because of oil dripping out from the undercarriage of cars........?????????????

We bought a small house to live in and fix up. (the first of many such projects). It had a cement block foundation, aluminum siding and a roof that didn't leak, how bad could it be? Wellllll, when we started using the shower we smelled something that wouldn't go away. Since the bathroom floor felt spongy we suspected dry rot problems. When we removed the floor we found a big shallow pit where all the gray water in the house was going. Thankfully there was a tank in the back yard that somebody had thoughtfully connected to the toilet. We should have investigated the crawl space more carefully, just shining a light in there might have revealed the situation. Another interesting feature of this house was the built in referigerator that was almost invisable in the kitchen but protruded into our bedroom. We used the top for a shelf and found that the back of it was a great place to dry socks.

Ohhhhhh, thank God it wasn't a sewage hole, too! LOL, Mary! Did they have the back of the fridge enclosed, or was it just a hole in the wall?

Sounds like a hole GW if they are using top as shelf and drying socks over the rear exposed elements.
These stories are just too funny.
Perhaps should start another thread of the strangest thing you'll leave behind in you house!

It sounds like something my (bio)father would do. Ha! That would be good, things left behind...

This thread should be renamed Your old house.We bought tis place as a 200 -150 year old farm house. Back house built 1800, Front,1850. Remodeled by quite a few owners since then. We have replaced the kitchen, upstairs bath, sanded floors. I would still like to move to a new double-wide on a real foundation. "But it wouldn't be quaint." Frank

The very first house that we bought was a cottage, one block from Lake Ontario. We converted this small cottage into a permanent home. Well obviously someone had done major renovations on the cottage because with every wall we tore down, written on the old plaster lathe was "Billy Andrews - mind of a genius!"Every room we went to had this remark on at least 1 wall if not the ceiling. It got so it was a game with us guessing where the statement was going to be found.
We've since renovated 2 other homes and every time we start a room DH and I start laughing, asking oursleves "Will will we some strange words or markings on the wall?" Obviously, Billy wasn't as clever as he thought he was because he set fire to the cottage playing with matches just before we bought it. Guess all that paneling was there for a reason! D

He just didn't want to say "mind of a pyromaniacal genius!"

This thread is just too funny!

Cheri'

The oldest house I ever worked on was pre 1867. It was in central MN. Built out of native Red Pine logs. They were about 14" diameter on average. After we removed the old inside covering, we found 1867 dated Norwegian newspaper glue on the logs. It was impossible to get it off to save, too bad, it would have been a good keepsake. The paper was published in Minneapolis MN.
The only bad spot in all of the logs was where someone had cut a hole for a window on the north side. There was a little spongy wood on the bottom of the openning.
Geart Thread!
Bernie

My house was originally just a summer cabin. It was on locust posts and while the kitchen had countertops, there was only shelving undernearth, no cabinet doors or drawers. My spousal unit had to first put a foundation under the house which is situated on a slope so the back was almost 8 feet tall while it tapered closer to the ground at 2 feet tall in the front. Then he soon added the doors and drawers to the kitchen cabintry. Then he remodeled the bathroom, took a full month. The he had to paint the house and it took all summer about 3 years ago because of all the repairs. Then he and his brother replaced the railing on the deck.
After that he wanted to do some fun projects so that's when he built the papowawa (patio, pond, waterfall, waterfall). Then he built a row of outside tall & deep cabinets on the deck to contain so many things that don't fit inside including a roll-around tool chest, lots of gardening stuff, the charcoal grill and other junk. They look like part of the wall and used an area of the deck that never added any usable space as it was too close to a door.
He just finished the roofwork, installing gutter screens. His final outside project this year will be finishing the terracing he has been working on. The stairs are nearly finished and all the logs are in place with soil in some of them. We are going to get a load of topsoil delivered. Phew!
The weirdest thing to come into the house was a baby possum which I turned over to a wildlife rehabilitator.
In the 200-year old historic house that I helped restore, we found a rope bed-tightner hanging on the wall in the attic. The ropes, that supported the corn shuck or feather mattress, like modern box springs do now, would stretch over time and had to be tightened. Hence the expression "sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite."

A half block from here was a house about to be torn down. It was empty, and in need of everything. The workers found under many layers of plaster and wallpaper, logs.

This house actually dates back to 1800. And the logs are thought to be from Fort McIntosh (said to be the home of the first Continental Army). George Washington looked up from the Ohio River and declared Fort McIntosh be built here.

The log home is now rebuilt, and a museum. Constructed in every detail to replicate 1800. Even the log cabin's perennial, herb, and vegetable gardens are plants of this period. We are proud of this piece of history.

The Master Gardeners have had a lot to do with the landscape, plantings, and maintenance from the beginning.

This thread is so much fun ! I will never sit on the "throne" again without picturing the rainbow !

The oldest historic home around here had many interesting features. It leaked when the historical society bought it and part of the ceiling had to be torn down on the second floor. Between the ceiling and the floor of the attic were rolled up ledger sheets. They were very fragile and had to be taken to the Archives and History Division in Raleigh where they were able to relax them, photograph them and send the originals back. They wanted to keep the originals but I put my foot down. The pages were from 1830-31 and were store ledgers. They had the names, items purchased, dates, and prices. We were so thrilled because it gave us a good idea of the residents in the area at that time. The most popular item was whiskey, then shot and powder, fabric (especially muslin) lamp oil, thread and yarn and other dry goods. We also had some archaeological digs conducted there and found a combination smoke house above and root cellar below, built on the edge of a bank. Root cellars here are often called bank houses. The barn had some old tools and we have expanded the collection and made a tool museum in there. We even had some cows for awhile. One stood on top of the well house and caved in the roof, lol. We also have some Indian artifacts, enough to at least think they camped there regularly.
One terrific find validated the rumor that Davy Crockett had visited there. We found a debit note with the owner's and Davy Crockett's signatures on them. Both Crockett and the owner married Patton family women and I guess that's how they met.
edited for grammar and spelling (geez)!

This message was edited Nov 30, 2003 1:09 PM

I love this thread! Thanks everyone

I forgot to mention a feature no house should be without. The clothes drop. Just open the wooden flap, and presto, the dirty clothes head to the basement. The drop wasn't found for a few months, but is now appreciated.

The house where we now live (another one of our live-in remodel jobs) had one of those clothes drops. There was a trap door in the bathroom floor just behind the end of the bathtub. Raise the lid, drop the clothes and they landed next to the washing machine in the basement. When we remodeled we eliminated it and the bathtub as well. The bathtub had been enclosed with plywood around the base. We had noticed a funny smell whenever we used the tub. When we took the plywood off we discovered packrats had made the space between the tub and the plywood into one big nest. Besides the usual rodent droppings and dry grass and leaves were all sorts of treasures; brushy hair rollers and permanent wave rollers, toilet paper, little pine cones, bark pieces from firewood, lids from tin cans, bits of miscellaneous plastic things, some remnants of Christmas decorations, and a pair of nippers used to trim horses feet. This mess filled 3 large paper grocery bags with some left over. Fortunately the packrat didn't come with the house.

Oh, my! Any loose change in there? :D

Frankay, moving in double-wides means the demise of many historic structures. The older house is often used for storage, then sometimes used for hay and eventually comes down. Much, much better to remodel the interior to modern standards and try to preserve the architectural heritage of the exterior. I am an avid historic preservationist!

No money. That would have been a nice surprise!

I must have lived in that house all of us kids were change magnets