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What Insane Quirks in Your Home...

55 replies

Notasinglefuckwasgiven · 03/07/2015 20:52

Drove you mad when you moved in? What madness from its past life did you find? And why do you absolutely love your home even though it has the lurgy...?

OP posts:
NetballHoop · 10/07/2015 16:04

The house before this one only had two radiators and they were both in the hall.

CheeseBadger · 10/07/2015 16:31

Light switches behind the doors in every room except the bathroom, where it's on the other side of the landing from the bathroom door.

Built with soft Victorian brick and repointed with cement based mortar, so have about £20,000 to spend on repointing and blown brick replacement.

Pantry extension held up by a raised flower bed.

CheeseBadger · 10/07/2015 16:32

Oh, for got plumbing for a sink in every bloody room. Must have been bedsits at some point.

Mintyy · 10/07/2015 16:37

Apart from doing horrible things like ripping out the chimney breasts and ceiling cornicing and every conceivable original feature from our Victorian terrace, the previous owners thought it would be nice to lay down dark green carpet in the kitchen.

IAmAPaleontologist · 10/07/2015 16:51

We have random light switches that don't appear to be connected to anything yet are still there. Confuses the hell out of my dad, every time he comes over he spends a good 5 minutes trying to switch on either the kitchen or the dining room light with them. Doesn't help that the only light switch for the dining room is in the living room.

We had a security light in the yard. It came on at dusk and switched off at dawn. No movement sensor or anything, no way of switching it off. Rather annoying. After a couple of years the bulb in it went and funnily enough we've never got round to replacing it.

There is not a straight wall in the house. Nowhere. Nightmare for the poor joiner who fitted a new kitchen for us recently!

I'm sure there are others but I don't think about them. Kind of like my parent's house where you can't fully shit the downstairs loo door else you'll be locked in. It is second nature to me even though I've not lived there for years and years but none of us ever remembers to tell any new guest to the house until we hear the sound of the door shutting at which point we yell, generally a few seconds too late.

CheeseBadger · 11/07/2015 01:32

Kind of like my parent's house where you can't fully shit the downstairs loo door else you'll be locked in.

I feel your pain, but if I took a shit on the toilet door they'd probably have locked me out... Wink

IAmAPaleontologist · 11/07/2015 06:50

oops Grin

i tend to shit in the upstairs loo, it has a functioning lock. my late granny however refused to use the upstairs one as it had a wooden seat and she didn't approve of them so was forever shutting herself in the downstairs loo and we'd have to rescue her.

ValancyJane · 11/07/2015 07:02

Ah, our house quirks:

We can only get hot water for a shower if we turn the central heating on.

All doors have a glass panel in them that is see-through, including the bathroom. We're adding some frosted glass paper so we can have some privacy in the bedrooms and bathroom!

No lock on the bathroom door. Who doesn't put a lock on the bathroom door?!

We found live wiring behind a picture when my Mum was decorating. It was definitely live, BIL is an electrician and was outraged.

Dodgy electrics everywhere, BIL has re-done our plugs and light switches (they were a brassy gold, ick) and has some choice words for the previous owner if he ever meets him!

Plaster so bad that the textured wallpaper was pretty much holding it up alone.

Ponds with a complicated built-in overflow system so that draining just one to create a flowerbed was impossible.

Random switches (I fondly imagine it's like that episode of Friends and a neighbour's telly goes off and on when you press it!)

Also, though we knew about this going in, the house looked like the 90's threw up over it. Pine floors/furniture/skirting boards/windowsills. Gold light switches and plug sockets. And my personal odd favourite, sidelights in EVERY room, the ones in the hall were painted peach and were shaped in almost a greek architectural style.

All this said, I love our house. It feels like a family home, it's huge and in a decent location, and when we're done making it beautiful it will be lovely Smile

vindscreenviper · 11/07/2015 07:06

About a year after we moved in we got around to sorting through alll the stuff the PO had left in the cellars, behind a old bookcase we found a secret passage leading to a set of steps leading up to...

nowhere, very weird.

TheyreMadITellYouMaaaad · 11/07/2015 07:21

One place was semi-derelict and there had been a lot of water-penetration, so the wallpaper was bubbled and we had no choice but to strip it all. Took us a couple of months, and I swear the rooms were bigger when we finished. SIX layers of scrim-backed paper in every room, each layer painted white. Except in the kitchen and bathroom, where each layer was the most lurid 60s/70s psychedelic pattern. Mostly variations of brown/yellow/orange.

Bohemond · 11/07/2015 07:43

Our house is c600 years old but was refurbished in the 80s.
The whole of the downstairs is painted apricot apart from the kitchen which has brown rag rolled walls. The upstairs is mostly purple.
The heating system works but has been added to about three times so you now have to do a complicated process to turn it on or change anything (and the hot pipes run through the larder).
A month ago we had black bits coming out of taps and some taps had stopped working - it turned out that a massive (dead) wasps nest in the roof had collapsed into the water tank. We had been bathing in bits of wasp for a number of weeks.....
The septic tank also overflowed when the route in got choked with plant routes. We live near farms so didn't notice for ages as the whole area smells bad at times!

Bohemond · 11/07/2015 07:44

Plant roots.

PrincessOfChina · 11/07/2015 07:46

I've just read this thread to DH. He's convinced that our 1900's terrace is the only one with wonky walls, slightly odd electrics and damp. Utterly convinced.

Not our current house, but the house we rented before this had a full sized window with curtains into the spare bedroom from the landing. We used it as an office and occasional room for guests but the previous occupants were a house-share so one of them must have lived with it as an actual bedroom.

echt · 11/07/2015 07:53

ValancyJane that no lock business is weird, and something I only encountered when I moved to Australia. I can't think of any house I've been in where there is one.

Could it possibly be one of those odd locks which is a little trigger under the handle?

ButtonClown · 11/07/2015 07:54

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

SomethingAboutNothing · 11/07/2015 08:11

Previous owners of our house tiled over the bathroom tiles instead of removing them, and just painted the floor tiles white as they didn't like the colour. We eventually got round to replacing the floor tiles but there are a LOT of tiles in the bathroom so haven't got round to removing both layers yet.

The house also has a curved wall in the entrance vestibule and upstairs in DS's room, makes it a bugger to fit furniture on the wall as the curve is so bad you can actually see it from outside.

TeddyBee · 11/07/2015 08:27

Loft conversion had no RSJs - manky garage had three. All lights and power in loft conversion coming from one spur run out of a first floor socket. Asbestos pipe inside the walls in the remains of the old side stack, along with a copper boiler. Daily Mail pages from 1996 under the carpets, offering a low low mortgage rate of 12.6% (I fainted). All floors are wonky, including the new extension which we made wonky to match.

4EverScottish · 11/07/2015 08:43

Our house has no central light in the lounge, there are just two wall lights which are both on the same side of the room and are useless.

WizardOfToss · 11/07/2015 08:51

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

ArtyBat · 11/07/2015 11:17

I just love all of this quirkyness - but not of course, the bad electric wiring!

My place? Well, it's centuries old and is held together by cobwebs and is as dusty as hell. I share it with masses of spiders that just hang around in the corners, except for Saturday nights when they all gather together in the massive chimney, bungee jump down to the floor, then hold races/ hoe downs along the passageway.
There is a beautiful Green Man carved into the mantlepiece . Iron loops running along the join of the walls/ceiling - these were for the bell ropes attached to a bell on the roof that the school teacher used to call the village pupils to school on a morning.
The doors are 9ft arched and studded, with 7" keys that I have to drag around everywhere.
And the place is so draughty as nothing fits! When the wind is in the right direction the screaming banshee type whistling that comes through the keyholes has to be heard to be believed!

Oh and yes, when I moved in I found an old photo of the house taken from further along the road, with villagers all standing around. Clothing suggests Victorian era. It's amazing to think that the only thing that has changed is that the tree in the churchyard next to the house has grown.

I do love it though! Smile

WizardOfToss · 11/07/2015 11:44

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

karron · 11/07/2015 11:44

We have a full sized door leading to the cellar but when you go through it you need to duck down to avoid knocking the top of your head off on the underside of our stone stairs. When we had our central heating put in the gas fitter put pipe lagging on it to save himself from being knocked unconscious.
Also our house was originally built as an L shape and in 1870ish it was made square by building 2 bits of wall that were connected at the roof but not keyed into the original building - about 5 cm gap between original wall and new wall on one side. The house was then rendered. When we stripped back the render we found that one of these new walls was built of red brick. The house is stone so we have 3 1/2 walls build of stone and 1/2 wall built of red brick. No idea why.
We also have sockets that only work if other sockets are turn on.

Petitgrain · 11/07/2015 12:02

We found out a few months after moving in that our house was owned by the Kray Twins. Lovely.

YokoUhOh · 11/07/2015 12:06

These completely insane lights, which we are trying to get replaced hurry up Sparky

What Insane Quirks in Your Home...
What Insane Quirks in Your Home...
CointreauVersial · 11/07/2015 12:27

Blimey, where do I start?

Our house is a 1930s bungalow which was massively extended in the 1980s by the previous owner, who apparently was a builder. I pity anyone who ever paid for his services. We started out with:

Insane wiring, upstairs shower on downstairs lighting circuit, outside light cable just drilled through a hole in the living room wall and plugged into a regular socket. Fountain 50 feet up the garden powered by cable nailed to fence and similarly drilled through dining room wall.

All sockets randomly in the middle of every wall. I mean four feet from the skirting.

Nothing boxed/chased in, so pipes running everywhere.

Massive picture windows but no lintels above them, so roof/upper storey supported by a couple of rows of dangerously sagging brickwork.

No floor joists in loft conversion; floorboards just laid on ceiling joists, so massively sloping.

Soffit and fascias made of cheap particleboard, gloss painted.

Tiles on tiles on tiles in both kitchen and bathroom. Rather than remove random unused switches and sockets they just tiled around them. Never bothered to grout the tiles in the kitchen, but filled massive gaps around the edges with massive swirls of dark brown sealant.

Swirly Artex on every ceiling in a failed attempt to disguise the edges of the poorly installed plasterboards. The living room ceiling was gloss-painted for good measure, like a giant upside down meringue.

We have pretty much spent the last six years working though all this.... nearly there!

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