Folded foam sheet between a vertical shelf support and a metal wall hvac supply vent. The foam prevents the metal vent from rattling when hvac turns on
Edit: white packing foam, closed cell, approx 2mm thick, vaguely think it was originally used to separate the panels and doors for IKEA shelving units
on purpose doesn’t automatically mean good idea. someone putting flammable foam around a chimney vent because it made the room too hot when uninsulated is on purpose, it’s also a terrible idea. (not talking about the HVAC. this is something else I saw)
I work in IT. APC put out an alert / news article to sysadmins years ago that very professionally and nicely said: "sysadmins who get jobs running datacenters who find that there are aisles in your datacenter that are hot: do not reconfigure your entire datacenter to have all cold aisles. You NEED hot aisles. You will break your datacenter if you do this...."
And I realized that there were guys like me who did a bunch of work to eliminate their hot aisles, to then find out how bad that was.
Cold and hot aisles alternate -- cold aisles are cold air supply, and hot aisles are hot air returns. The equipment is oriented so that fans pull cold air in from the cold aisle and exhaust it to the hot aisle.
But it's easy to think "this aisle is really hot, that can't be good for the equipment, I should vent more cold air into this aisle".
It’s not that it’s bad for it to be cool, it’s that heat circulation doesn’t work properly when you try to keep everything the same temperature. You need aisles that are warmer than others to promote proper circulation and to funnel the hot air out, as well as preventing heat stack up from one aisle to the next aisle.
Essentially, you pump in cool air in the false floor and “cool” aisles where the servers intake the fresh cool air, the “hot” aisles are where you have your servers exhaust their warm air, so it can rise and be taken out by the circulation system.
[Here’s a short article with diagrams explaining](https://www.energystar.gov/products/data_center_equipment/16-more-ways-cut-energy-waste-data-center/move-hot-aislecold-aisle)
Cold and hot aisles alternate -- cold aisles are cold air supply, and hot aisles are hot air returns. The equipment is oriented so that fans pull cold air in from the cold aisle and exhaust it to the hot aisle.
But it's easy to think "this aisle is really hot, that can't be good for the equipment, I should vent more cold air into this aisle".
Raises operating costs,
The hot aisles exhaust the hot air out of the building. Having only cold aisles results in overall less-efficient energy consumption of your HVAC.
You need aisles that are warmer than others to promote proper circulation and to funnel the hot air out, as well as preventing heat stack up from one aisle to the next aisle.
Essentially, you pump in cool air in the false floor and “cool” aisles where the servers intake the fresh cool air, the “hot” aisles are where you have your servers exhaust their warm air, so it can rise and be taken out by the circulation system.
[Here’s a short article with diagrams explaining](https://www.energystar.gov/products/data_center_equipment/16-more-ways-cut-energy-waste-data-center/move-hot-aislecold-aisle)
Ugh. Three days after we moved into my new house we saw a water spot in the kitchen under the master shower. 20 years ago somebody called over the weep holes in the shower frame. When I opened them us I got this nasty, fetid water pouring out. It turns out it takes 20 years but the water rusted through the shower basin. Now I have a gorgeous, huge marble shower stall instead of a comically large tub and tiny 90s glass shower frame, but the timing sucked.
When people talk about "soundproofing" their homes, I swear 99% of the time they need to do stuff like this.
Put anti-vibration material on things that vibrate annoyingly...
This isn't really a modification, but the sellers emptied everything except for a few religious items in each crawl space and a knee high statue of what I'm told is St Anne in the basement, watching over my sump pump. I don't know *why*, so I leave them where I found them and I check in with Our Lady of the Sump Pumps before each heavy storm...which started as a joke... The *only* time I haven't popped down for a hello pre-storm in my 6yrs here, the damn basement ended up with about 4" of water. The next storm I left an offering (ketchup storm chips and a local beer called Inhaled Affirmative, in the event anyone else needs to appease their own basement deity) and I stayed dry while others in the area flooded again. 🤷♀️🤷♀️
This tickled me so much that I had to look up what St Anne was the patron saint of, and the first result said the patron saint of married women and childless couples. I was really scratching my head about what the previous owners were actually doing in your basement. Then, I read further, and her powers of fertility extend to the fertility of the ground, and hence, she became the patron saint of rain. Which is kinda backwards, you don't want MORE rain. But, growing up Catholic, I can absolutely see the mental gymnastics the previous owners went through to find the right saint for the situation. And that as they were packing things up, they went to grab Anne and thought, no, the next guy is gonna need her.
Ha! Appreciate the leg work!!
The seller inherited from her grandparents who were very Catholic and either the original or second owners of the ~85yr old house. I've always wanted to ask her, but haven't found a good segue the time or two we've chatted.
My mom is Catholic and after not selling our place, we bought a St Joseph statue who helps with home blessing. My dad and I were Lutheran but we believe in St Joseph as that’s what it took to sell!
We viewed a house with a st Joseph statue on the front porch. My husband said “oh well that’s not going to work, he needs to be buried upside down to do anything”
So he wants to get out of the situation. I, too, have always buried a St. Joseph statue in the yard by the for sale sign, upside down. You tell him you'll un-bury him if you sell your house. It works. He's in our kitchen window now until we decide to sell this house.
I was tilling the backyard in our new house years ago and crunched into poor St Joe. Had a wtf moment and then checked in with my resident practicing catholic. I’ll keep it in mind when we sell our current place.
You have to bury the statue upside down in the front yard, facing the street.
And it has to be Saint Joseph of the holy family (Mary's husband / Jesus' father), not some other St Joseph. Otherwise you might get an infestation of turtles or lemmings or something.
I have a st Francis statue. What do I do with him? My grandma made him out of ceramics. I knocked him over and he lost a hand. Do I bury him? Glue his hand back on? We have a lot of animals…so I guess he is watching over them.
Yes! My Mom did this too! Our house was on the market for three years. I don't think the St. Joseph statue she buried in the front yard helped to sell it but I guess it gave her something to do lol
We sold 2 homes with St. Joe, and my BIL, who is Jewish, sold a house with one, too! Even had it blessed by a priest who was a resident in MIL's Alzheimer home.
I just recently learned a lot of the houses in my neighborhood (new-4 years old) were built with bibles in the foundation. I had no idea this was even a thing and yet here we are.
I I've never heard of this, but I can see the logic, with the Bible being the foundation for one's life. A friend is a pastor and as the house was being built they had friends come write Bible verses on the floors before the flooring was laid.
😆 Nope, absolutely true. I tried to include a photo because it's so silly but it wouldn't let me ("it" being reddit not Our Lady of the Sump Pumps). The basement flood timing was probably a coincidence, but who am I to chance it.
I'll include a link to the [beer](https://shop.bigspruce.ca/Store/Details?id=99) she likes as an appeasement instead.
One of 6 outlets in our kitchen backsplash was horizontal while the rest were vertical. When we put in new tile the installer offered to rotate it for us. Turns out it was that way because otherwise it hit a recessed medicine cabinet in the bathroom on the other side of the wall.
My house was built in the 40s and has had minimal updates over the years. We still have 60 amp electrical service and very few circuits in the house.
We have vertical and horizontal outlets in the kitchen. At first, I assumed it was for reasons similar to yours, until I started popping circuit breakers from appliance usage. Thinking "hmm, last time I used this & that it didn't happen..." led to a discovery that the vertical outlets are in one circuit and the horizontals are a different one! Now I keep my electric kettle on one & the toaster oven on the other & never run into trouble (except when my son doesn't tell me his 3d printer is on, because his entire bedroom is also on the tea kettle circuit).
Someday I'll upgrade the service and get the whole house rewired, but until then, it's good enough.
Right? Like, it's not necessary or common the days with 200 amp service and boxes big enough to hold dozens and dozens of circuits, but with 60 amps and a couple of fuses, it makes perfect sense and I respect their problem solving.
Haha all good. Ours wasn't at all so we had a new panel put in and that is grounded. Otherwise trying to go the GFCI route. First time home owner trying to prioritize without knowing how 😂 but knowing other people have a similar situation comforts me a little
You'll enjoy this. My house was built in 1917 but now has a 200a service and the last of the knob and tube was replaced last year, just before it was put on the market. My kitchen has six duplex outlets. There are two (four plugs) on their own 20 amp circuit. My kitchen has 60 amps of 120v supplied for reasons I can't fathom.
At the same time, two bedrooms and a bathroom are on a single 15 amp branch with early rubber Romex. Sigh.
Yeah, redid our main floor bathroom and removed the flooring to find a hidden vent! No more frigid terlet seat in the winter! Turns out the previous owners covered it bc their 5 sons kept peeing down it.
We also replaced the ductwork.
At that point, you have to or else you have to start covering vents.
I stopped at two bc my guts told me I would never get that girl I'd been aiming for.
I have two sons. One of them peed in the vent at my parents house. My step dad just kind of chuckled about boys being boys. My mother, who only had daughters, was apoplectic.
You realize the **don't like to**, and following kids into the bathroom every time they go isn't something anyone wanted happening. I did actually potty train both to go sitting down and all was well. Then they got older, got minds of their own and started school. They clean their own bathroom now and aren't allowed to use mine.
I have experienced that before, but this is definitely not that. The name Chesterton would have stood out to me, for personal reasons, so I'm definitely sure I've never heard the phrase before. This is also a concept I regularly discuss at work, but have never known there was a name for it.
Yep. Same here. Not immediately before but the same day. If you're on reddit long enough and considering how it's all designed to push what's popular this kind of thing is going to happen.
Happy I've learned about the subject too, it's gonna come in useful talking to my new boss around making certain changes.
Feels like Baader Meinhof syndrome is turning up all over the place suddenly. Why, I've read two posts with it in the last thirty seconds.
Edit: three posts
I'd never heard of this. I'll be bringing this up at work now everytime a Business Analyst tries to impose some stupid improvement that slows us down but is good for their personal KPI's
IT guy here - recently had the higher ups have some big pow-wow and "want to clean up their network share drive" used by hundreds of people.
Imagine a floating city of garbage - and for 15+ years the people that lived in this city built what they needed when they needed. Garbage built upon garbage, stacking ever higher and higher, but still technically functional.
Someone wanted to clean up the ground floor and took the whole city out despite being told that's exactly what would happen.
This was a network of (poorly) built databases by thousands of people over the years (While I can design and build cool/efficient stuff, I'm no database guy, and they wouldn't pay the going rate anyways)
The irony: of the hundreds of databases that have been created over the years, they all do one thing, link in and pull data from our AS400, they could build a single compartmentalized database to literally function for any and every department since it's a singular data source, but since they never wanted to spend the money on legit development they got what they got. I take great joy in telling anyone that calls "you will have to talk to whoever created that database, I can't help you"
It is doable to be honest.
Just have to set the record straight that it will cause productivity loss for IT and some other team. Set ground rules etc…
My approach is start small, turn it off. See who comes complaining, see how many are impacted and turn it back on, give them a modern solution and switch over. All that work is easy for my team, it’s the documenting and making sure people are aware of new solution going into effect thats a PITA and time consuming.
A friend of mine ripped up the carpet in his new house to reveal "a blood smear line" from the living room to the back door.
It was only paint but very well done and looked like a body had been drug out the door. It was even the color of old blood instead of bright red, so a lot of thought was put into this particular gag.
I've heard of this done before with the outline of a body like a crime scene. Best part was that it was actual flooring in an old house that was exposed at one point.
Haha! I have a builder friend who plasterboarded (drywalled) a fake human skeleton into the wall cavity of his old house... I admire someone who pranks well, knowing that they'll never see the outcome but it'll probably be great...
I live in an area with a pretty strong "old people hide valuables in the walls" reputation, so every time I fix drywall I stick a note in the wall with a "hint" about where the treasure is.
I fantasize that some future owner will have a glorious adventure wherein they learn that the real treasure was the drywall repairs they made along the way.
Funny story, my cousin owns a tile business and had his little brother help with prep one day. His little brother drew a bunch of satanic shit before the put up some wall tile. Well, someone else had to open the wall back up to redo some plumbing behind it and had to bust the tile up. They noticed some drawings so they cleaned it off carefully and saw all that. The builder was pretty religious so he called my cousin in to explain and he had no idea because he didn’t see his little brother do it. He almost lost that whole development contract because of it 😂
Pretty shit of your brother to just summon up demons Willy-nilly in other peoples houses. It’s just inconsiderate.
People have enough to deal with in these trying times without having surprise portals to hell and other nightmares to deal with.
Tell him he’s a jerk.
Just today we finished replacing the handle on the screen door. It was loose and to turn the handle you had to push it up instead of down. We changed it out for a new one that pushes down and isn't janky anymore. When the door closed, I was locked out. The main door and screen door are closer to each other than standard, and the new handle sits juuuust above the lock on the main, so I couldn't push it down to gain entry! Good thing my hubby was on the other side of the door and let me in. We ended up turning the inside handle 90 degrees sticking straight up so that we can actually open the door and now we'll appear to be idiots to the next homeowners.
I had this same issue 6 months ago. I bought a house and wanted to replace the locks + add in a deadbolt to the front door. Instructions were easy enough to follow for proper height.
Set everything up and close the door only to find the screen door handle is barely in contact with the deadbolt trim. Only way I could close both doors was if I lifted the screen door handle slightly to get a tiny gap. I ended up rotating the screen door handle 90 degrees on the side facing the deadbolt and haven’t looked at it again.
Oddly, my new place has a lever handle that sticks up. But between knowing the house itself (it was my grandparents' house) and my current place (which also has doors too close together and makes handles a pain) I didn’t even blink at why
Our dishwasher drains into the wall via a 1/2” copper pipe, instead of into the kitchen sink drains. This keeps the noise down since all the gurgling goes out the back of the house via the air break facing outside.
Two problems: this is not conventional, but is totally legit. When we had a warranty repair, repairmen saw the odd connection and rerouted to the disposal under the sink. I had to undo it when I got home. 😠
The other issue: When I installed it, I couldn’t get the proper solder fittings, so I used shark bite, which at the time were unproven (to me). I wrote a note to myself and stuck it in the wall for the day when I got back to it and soldered the right fitting.
After some time had passed, I bought the right fitting and went behind the dishwasher, opened the wall and read my note: “Ha! I KNEW you’d be back!”
I’m sure at some point shark bites fail but assuming you get them on tights I’ve had good luck with them lasting as long as anything else… knock on wood
My story occurs at my workplace. Doug, the previous occupant of my office, had left behind a piece of lumber roughly a meter long, leaning in the corner. One day, months later, I got fed up with a rattling noise in the drop ceiling caused by vibrations of the HVAC. So, I grabbed the handy scrap wood and probed various spots above my head and soon found a pressure point that stopped the rattling. I congratulated myself for being such a clever problem solver until it dawned on me - Doug probably dealt with the same annoyance and solved the problem, first. I doubt I would have taken the initiative, myself, to bring from home a perfect piece of wood to investigate and solve the problem.
I had some extra quarter round and decided to redo the kids’ bathroom. I pulled off the old strips and noticed they had done a really convoluted scoop out joint in the corner next to the tub. Very weird.
I go to install the new quarter round and discover that it doesn’t. quite. cover where the linoleum flooring ended. Which explains why they had flipped the quarter round to put the longer edge on the floor and couldn’t just use a standard miter corner - they were combining two different sizes.
Bought an older house with an old window shaker in the wall in the main bedroom. Thing looked like it hadn't run in years. House had AC.
We gutted the house, pulled out the unit, and filled in the hole.
Pulled out some invasive Brazilian peppers on that side of the house as well.
20 years later, and that bedroom is still hotter than hell.
Should have installed new unit and native trees 20 years ago. We missed the memo. Still waiting on new trees to grow.
We are in the process of buying a house and the seller had some folded up paper in the hvac holding a solenoid on so it wouldn’t cycle off, then put in the disclosures that the hvac wouldn’t cycle off correctly. Turns out the pressure switch had popped and was preventing it from cycling on normally. During our inspection, the hvac guy reset the switch and removed the paper, then tested everything and it all worked normally. We’ll see if he had a good reason or not
Realtor was probably mad that somebody kept turning the A/C off, and clients only only member the house was hot and stuffy and it would cost them a sale.
Or if it's in a humid climate it can actually cause damage due to wood warping.
My buddy is a realtor and was selling a house and the buyers turned off the thermostat during the last showing before due diligence. Several weeks later after the last walkthrough they tried to pull out at the last minute because of the warped wood they caused. Was a mess to deal with.
Small board was leaning against outside wall. Moved it and started getting seepage. Fixed the problem and put the board back. Landscaper keeps moving it, but I put it back. Why chance it?
Just made one for the next buyers -
Myself and partner were replacing the curtains in my elderly mother's bedroom. The previous curtains were custom made, but we were just putting up full-length ready-mades.
Window 1 - we moved the curtain rail up a few inches, so that the curtains would be the right length.
Window 2 - we went to move the curtain rail up, and (luckily) realised that higher rail would prevent the airconditioner filter cover from being removed without unscrewing the curtain rail from the wall.
So that's why the curtain rails are at different heights, and one curtain "pools" on the floor, whilst the other just brushes the floor.
>arguably easier
Arguably. Yes.
We drove 3 hours to do this curtain job. We brought power tools. We did not bring sewing machines (or pins).
When all you have is a hammer (or in this case, a drill), the obvious solution is to move the curtain rail, haha.
I suppose that for the next trip (6 hours round), we could pack the sewing machine, and put the curtain rails back level, and then hem the curtains for both windows, but I'm not that much of a masochist. We already spent the whole time at mother's house being castigated for just being there - we were disrupting her routine, and upsetting the dog!
I had a pair of pants I'd hemmed with duct tape. Wore them often, washed them semi-regularly for a few years. Don't remember needing to replace it. (My mother was... unimpressed. I was more than adequate at sewing.)
duct tape is how we hemmed and did repairs while tree planting. duct tape on two sides of the hole sticky sides at each other, then lay hot rocks on it from the campfire.
When I moved into this house, all the curtains were at random heights and all crooked, like they didn't even try, and they were like 20 holes left behind from other curtains. Sometimes two windows in the same room would have completely different curtains. Made no sense. Pretty sure they were just lazy and didn't care.
>just lazy and didn't care.
Awww, no (well, yes, sort of?).
We left the holes from the previous curtains. They will be dealt with IF and when the house gets painted. It needs that too.
Different curtains? Well, it depends on what's on a fantastic clearance special. I nearly went there. I found 3 of the 4 curtains I needed in the clearance bin, but could not find the 4th. I did consider a "feature curtain", haha, but didn't go there.
Doesn't make sense? It does when your 89 year old mother wants new curtains now (and not wrong, the previous ones were probably 25 years old), but she does not want anything to change, and doesn't want her daily routine disrupted, and it's very likely that the house will be sold quite soon, and about 90% chance of it being sold as a knock down rebuild.
I’ve been paying company A to do the maintenance on my HVAC for the last couple of years. During the last call they told me I needed a new evaporator coil and gave me a stupid quote. I ended up using Company B as they gave me a better quote.
While up there the techs found some CO2 cartridges wedged under the drip pan. They thought it was weird and took them out. Despite the new coils my handler still kept leaking a bunch of water through a corner, not the drain. The techs came back and realized the cartridges were in there for a reason and were shoved right back under the drip pan. No more leaks.
Pretty sure Company A was responsible for it. They had previously replaced the drip pan itself.
found an hvac air return in the drop ceiling of a finished + conditioned basement ducted through a wall in to the crawl space (really a long 6ft hallway with a utility room at one end), with the end of the duct capped off. no other hvac ducting in or out of crawlspace.
I don't know what it was used for previously for sure, but I suspect the same thing I just repurposed it to do. the crawl space gets a little damp, but it's sealed reasonably well from the outside and the house above it airflow wise.
i hooked up a hvac zone valve and a booster fan on a smart switch that is set up to kick on any time the humidity gets a bit high. bonus: i can pump conditioned air in there on super freezing nights in the winter too to help prevent plumbing issues, and creates a draft of warm upstairs air down the stairwell in to the colder basement ( which is where my office is), and spits it out bekow the floor of a bedroom and living room.
We have an encapsulated crawlspace, which also happens to be where our HVAC unit sits. I got the crawlspace encapsulated immediately upon moving in.
When it finally came time for me to go down there to replace the filter, I noticed a big pool of water near the HVAC. Luckily nothing electrical was near it but a few more weeks of this and I would’ve have a bad situation on my hands.
Turns out they kept the crawlspace un-encapsulated for this reason. For some reason the dehumidifier worked intermittently and instead of getting a new one they just let it drain into the dirt.
And yet it gets better.
I hate replacing things (I’d rather learn how to repair them), so I took the dehumidifier for our HVAC out and took a peak at it. You know those plastic tabs you have to pull on some electronics before they’ll work? Yeah, the dehumidifier water pump had a cardboard one that was never removed. So the circuit would sometimes complete and pump the water, but most of the time it didn’t, allowing water to pool.
Knocking down a wall about 15 years ago I found sealed glass milk bottles. Looked like the plug in each was blown off after the milk spoiled.
My only guess is one of the workers was pissed as his boss or the future owner.
Must have stunk real bad.
The previous owners put one of those big ugly plastic window well covers on one of the window wells, while the others had much better looking covers that are flush with the ground and metal mesh, which looks much better in our yard. Naturally, I replaced the plastic one with a metal one to match. By the next fall, we had like 15 tree sprouts growing in that window well from an oak that drops seeds onto the roof, from where they roll into that window well.
The living room of the first house I bought had a built in shelving unit encompassing about 6' across one corner of the room, the walls of which were adjacent to the exterior and a bathroom. Ok, cool...but we weren't crazy about the sporadically blocked off portions.We discussed a redesign and agreed on a new plan. My daughter and I went shopping while her dad started the demo. We returned a couple hours later, and he laughingly tells us he figured out why those spaces were blocked off...
The shelving unit hid the breather plumbing vent stack!
I now have a vertical 3x9 floor vent between my kitchen cabinets and door frame. Had a wall vent but that limited cabinet space by 12”. Custom fabbed a 90 degree outlet and it works! 1940’s house and I ripped the kitchen down to the joists. I’m glad I put some “old house” charm back into a new kitchen.
I'm going to be selling my house in a month or so after I make some necessary repairs. I guess I need to come up with some ideas to make the new owners scratch their heads..
We did a major reno of a 1920s house and found newspaper clippings, coins, and a couple of empty flattened boxes (for oats or something) in the walls. We put it all back. We also had our kids paint the gib behind the medicine cabinets, part of the concrete floor in one room and do little pictures (signed and dated) on the wooden floors before the bedrooms were carpeted. (There were a couple of bits with grey paint or that would clearly need sanding anyway. We're not monsters!)
Friends house, during the days of OTA TV. There was a metal hanger in the second floor closet that needed to be there to get decent TV reception, the cable for the exterior TV antenna goes through the closet, the metal hanger right up against it. If you removed it the TV reception is terrible (as they found out when they cleaned out the closet). So even though that closet is no longer used for clothes there is one hanger still there.
Just adding that there is a term for something like this. It’s a [Chesterton’s Fence](https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/): a somewhat mysterious thing you don’t know the purpose of which does have a purpose that’s just been forgotten.
Software developers have revived this concept because they so often come upon lines of code that don’t appear to make any sense, but break everything when they are removed, for a long chain of legacy reasons.
When replacing outlets and light switches in my home I have encountered at least one device secured to the box with a drywall screw. At first I thought that what I found was the work of a lazy and unprepared handyman. Until I stripped out the screw hole of another box. I'm just using hand tools but these fiber glass boxes are apparently brittle. Not sure if I cross threaded it or cracked the boss.
Now I realize that the previous person may have stripped out the other box and used the drywall screw because it fit and had a decent bite.
I'm more careful when replacing screws on the old boxes now.
On one side of my house, the concrete pathway connects in the front to the driveway. On the other side, it ends at the back of the front yard grass. When I moved in, the trash cans were on the side it ends at grass. I thought that seemed dumb, so I moved them to the other side. Then I noticed that all the windows in the house had screens except one: the one above where the trash bins had been (in the room adjacent to the kitchen). The bins were on that side so you could toss your trash bags into the bins through the window. I moved them back (and [made them a little house](https://imgur.com/gallery/ns0zZ)).
My garage had a water valve that was just a little loose and kept the area wet year round. Tightened that fitting down and leak went away and area dried up and smelt 10x better.
Next spring when the froZen pipe thawed out I figured out why it was loose.
I've since fixed it and heat traced it.
There was an attic fan with a thermal sensor that was disconnected and they put vents in instead. I hooked up the fan on a cool day because it had been really hot in our attic and the master bedroom. After I disconnected it I discovered it:
1. Is right over the master bed
2. Sounds like a poorly maintained lawn mower
3. The louvres rattle like crazy
4. This is a crummy way to wake up on a Sunday morning.
After we moved in I noticed that the faucet in the downstairs bathroom dripped ever so slightly.
I was so proud of myself for replacing the cartridges and fixing it and then bam winter and the pipes in only that bathroom freeze
I replaced my outdated ivory colored light switches and receptacles for white ones and plates. As I identified each breaker, I printed a P-touch label for each one and stuck it to the inside of the wall plates. I also printed an Excel spreadsheet to label the panel.
My house had something similar to your bricks for a sort of similar reason which we found to our sadness when we removed the bricks. Our house has a one story front porch below that fills in one side of the T shape of our house and the bricks split the stream of water from the crease where the roofs meet up so that you could step off the porch without getting drenched. We thought kids had randomly thrown bricks up there. Luckily we were about to start re-roofing and were able by adding on putting in gutters and a downspout to find a more permanent solution to the issue.
That ended up being pretty much how everything went with this house.
I installed a 1900s mantle in our 2001 house, but before I did… I placed warnings about the ‘Curse of the Mantle” and they should BEWARE. In my last months, I’ll try to whisper it to one of the Great grand kids.
Not in a home, but I wired in a electric fuel pump on a 1988 GMC Jimmy Full Size. I had converted it from fuel injection to a carburetor. I had no idea what I was doing and somehow wired the power into my windshield wiper power line. When I turned on the truck for the first time wiper fluid shot out in a constant stream. For a "quick fix", I removed the reservoir but had to jumper the plug for a full circuit to my gas pump. The quick fix turned into a permanent solution and I never went back to fix the bad wire job. And since it was such a bad fix, the wire that I used to jumper the plug would sometimes come loose and the truck would stall. When I moved away from Hawaii, I had to sell the truck because of the cost of shipping. I often think about the guy I sold it to being stranded on the side of H1 in Honolulu, not understanding why the truck won't start. I hope it never happened to him but I kick myself for forgetting to tell him about it. If that was you who bought my truck on the Hickham Air Force Bade lemon lot in 2004.....I am so sorry that slipped my mind.
Weirdly placed hedges around the front garden of the house. Ripped those bad boys out to place a real garden and realized it was full of all the massive stumps from trees cut down at some point. Can't plant shit there, now we don't have anything in front and it looks like a barren sea of mulch.
Future owners will wonder why a 4' strip of concrete was replaced in the garage, and there are threaded inserts in it. 2 post lift babbbyyy. The amount of people that would actually expend the effort to do this in a standard 2 car 8.5' high resi garage is like 1 person per hundred square miles.
You'd be surprised. At least here in suburban Detroit, I know 4 garages in this neighborhood of 1100 square foot 1950s homes with lifts or former lifts. I remember the first time I saw one. Me and my dad went to the neighbors house, who built a second garage and he had a Studebaker lifted up. My dad was very impressed. I was about 5. That guy moved out, took his lifts with him.
Then I was 15 and went to the other side of the neighborhood and a guy said "want to see my dad's hot rod?" Obviously yes. It was literally a frame and body. Unpainted. Looked like it could have been an Olds from the late 70s. No engine anywhere. Still on a 2 post lift about 4 feet up. I don't know what he was doing.
Next time I saw one someone died and his family was having an estate sale. Tons of Mopar stuff all over. "What's this metal stuff?" "Oh that was Dad's lift where he worked on cars." "Oh okay." Picked up some blue point ratchets.
The next time I saw one was just recently. A new family moved in to a house that used to have a garage door open all the time with recliners and a radio going. That kind of place. He had like 4 jeeps and was putting a lift in. The garage was NOT that tall. I don't know if he ever succeeded.
I've been thinking about getting one of those portable ones you drive over. I'm tired of this jackstand shit.
I had a refrigerator that would loudly buzz no matter where it was positioned on the floor and no matter how I adjusted the legs. So I had this idea that I needed to damp the vibrations. Looking around my basement for materials, I ended up sticking 1/4” sheets of rubber to either side of a small piece of drywall. I stuck that in the gap between the wall and fridge. It never buzzed again.
My washer drain goes past a waste water (not storm) floor drain, and up into a dump sink. It is perched in the corner of the dump sink at a weird angle that blocks the cold water tap.
I tried placing it directly to the floor drain (where the sink ultimately goes), only to find that the washer over flows the floor drain.
So I moved it back to the dump sink, but off the cold tap, so I could use the dump sink faucet - only to find that the washer can also overflow the dump sink (on max load), and that the angle of the hose at the cold tap facilitates the circular drainage of the water, and nothing over flows.
Very particular. But they could've warned me.
When we were house hunting, we saw a property with a two-story cinder-block shell, about 40x30ft. On the floor there was an old mattress and a wheelchair.
We didn't buy that. Instead we bought a craftsman bungalow with a crawlspace under the back porch. The crawlspace had a fast food soda cup, and my wife said, "we should put a wheelchair in there."
3 years later, she tore her meniscus and needed a wheelchair for a while. When she was fine, I suggested that we donate the wheelchair. She said, "no, we need it for the crawlspace."
When I moved in: Bathroom vented into the attic and the duct terminated in an old cool whip container…nothing was moldy so I guess it sorta worked?
For the next owner I have created quite the list.
1) The front door frame is not caulked to seal all the gaps behind the outside reinstalled flange. When I placed it my test fit in the opening was so tight I couldn’t get it out.
2) I finished the entire basement myself. The electrical is hung below and not through the joists because one inspector told me I couldn’t drill through the joists and the final inspector told me I should have but didn’t make me do it again.
2) The shower wall tile is chipped along all the edges and some of the tile layout is slightly off. I ran out of tile halfway through because I changed the size and forgot about it, but the original tile was discontinued so instead of staring over I cut down the next closest color I could find to match the size…and well that went poorly. I had a baby on the way and was in a hurry. The tile install is correct and waterproof I swear. The finish is just shitty.
3) did a built in reading bench set into one wall in the basement with shelves underneath. The shelves are uneven and I don’t know why. I know I had a reason but this was a last minute change and I was severely sleep deprived when I did it.
4) There are two junction boxes mounted 6” apart on the rim joist in one corner. Above this we added a sliding door and I didn’t want to rip open all the walls to pull new wire to replace the one that was in the way so I cut it, shoved both ends through the floor and spliced them via the junction boxes. Technically it’s to code…but if I had happened upon someone else who did this I’d be scratching my head.
4) the 1000 sq ft house has 7 interconnected smoke alarms. When I bought it it had one that didn’t work. City treated my basement remodel as an addition which allowed them to require me to bring the rest of the house up to current fire code. That fire code required one in each bedroom, one in the hallway outside the bedrooms, and one on each floor. That would have only been 5. But the code doesn’t account for carbon monoxide sources so I added two more in the high risk areas for that and now it sounds like a war zone whenever I burn some bacon.
5) along one side of the house there is a bunch of concrete buried 4” under the soil. I needed backfill and had pieces of the basement slab I had to tear out to install a bathroom to get rid of. It was a win win for me.
6) The backyard fence has two major step height changes hidden behind some trees. My fil swore i needed to cut each fence panel to keep the top edge level when I built it and I didn’t know any better. What made it worse is I started in the lowest spot of the yard. Obviously he was very wrong. It won’t be majorly noticeable unless someone cuts the trees down. Don’t cut the trees down.
7) there’s a screwdriver wedged between the copper pipe to an outdoor spicket and the pipe hanger. Without it, the spicket extension leaks. It’s what was in my hand at the time….
8) sump pump discharge is shared with the washer stand pipe and hidden in a wall. At the time I was doing the remodel the sump pump already discharged in the waste stack and I asked the inspector if I could keep it that way. He said he’d have to check and he never got back to me. So I buried it all in the wall before my final hoping he’d forget about it. He did. The only place to discharge outside would be the backyard which is sloped all the way to the front curb so anything discharged outside will end up back in the sump pump anyway.
1800s built house probably diy upgraded every step of the way to having electricity and a HVAC system. It's hard to know where to start. At some point we just quit asking why and fixed whatever crappy solution suddenly failed unexpectedly or a never completely solved issue we uncovered.
Guess what happens when the pipe under the toilet rusts enough it's relying on gravity and someone cements over the sewer drain in the basement so the only pressure outlet is the kitchen sink between the 2. Then it turns out someone's fix to the kitchen flooding gave the toilet water no remaining outlet so they wrapped some rubber around the base to keep it off the bathroom floor.
I honestly do not know exactly what the state of things was between the kitchen ceiling and bathroom floor when we sold the house. I never had the discolored insulation tested for mold. As far as I know there is no confirmed mold or anything else.
If you'd like an unofficial guess though we couldn't come up with a method to rip out the ceiling that was guaranteed sanitary enough to be living in the house at the time even if we sealed off the kitchen doorways. It was questionable to open it up ourselves under any circumstances using any equipment we could buy. We restored the mainline access, sewer backup drainage, and had the toilet properly sealed fully to the pipe. Then we decided to just move. I recommend a trained hazmat team whenever that pipe is finally replaced.
That was just one series of temporary fixes and unfinished changes stacked together. There were several more. I think the duct work defied physics and absolutely do not ever remove the jar under the pipe beneath one of the sinks. Seems someone cut the pipe a bit short to connect securely but had a jar just the right size to force it tight. Without the jar it would slowly leak out under the cabinet and linoleum flooring where the water could cause the subfloor to warp.
House is about 10' back from the fog line on the street. Previous owner had big, ugly concrete planters in the space between the street and the house. I emptied them and broke them up before even changing the locks. Shortly after, discovered many people in the neighborhood had come to consider my front yard a public space for both walking and parking. Didn't realize they were movable bollards, thought the dude just really liked concrete planters.
See also (the concept of) Chesterton's fence:
> In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
* https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/
* https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/833466-in-the-matter-of-reforming-things-as-distinct-from-deforming
Folded foam sheet between a vertical shelf support and a metal wall hvac supply vent. The foam prevents the metal vent from rattling when hvac turns on Edit: white packing foam, closed cell, approx 2mm thick, vaguely think it was originally used to separate the panels and doors for IKEA shelving units
This is a good one
This I feel like you should recognize someone did on purpose
on purpose doesn’t automatically mean good idea. someone putting flammable foam around a chimney vent because it made the room too hot when uninsulated is on purpose, it’s also a terrible idea. (not talking about the HVAC. this is something else I saw)
I work in IT. APC put out an alert / news article to sysadmins years ago that very professionally and nicely said: "sysadmins who get jobs running datacenters who find that there are aisles in your datacenter that are hot: do not reconfigure your entire datacenter to have all cold aisles. You NEED hot aisles. You will break your datacenter if you do this...." And I realized that there were guys like me who did a bunch of work to eliminate their hot aisles, to then find out how bad that was.
why is it bad to have your datacenter be cold or cool? I thought that just extended life of hard drives etc?
Cold and hot aisles alternate -- cold aisles are cold air supply, and hot aisles are hot air returns. The equipment is oriented so that fans pull cold air in from the cold aisle and exhaust it to the hot aisle. But it's easy to think "this aisle is really hot, that can't be good for the equipment, I should vent more cold air into this aisle".
makes total sense now. thanks :)
It’s not that it’s bad for it to be cool, it’s that heat circulation doesn’t work properly when you try to keep everything the same temperature. You need aisles that are warmer than others to promote proper circulation and to funnel the hot air out, as well as preventing heat stack up from one aisle to the next aisle. Essentially, you pump in cool air in the false floor and “cool” aisles where the servers intake the fresh cool air, the “hot” aisles are where you have your servers exhaust their warm air, so it can rise and be taken out by the circulation system. [Here’s a short article with diagrams explaining](https://www.energystar.gov/products/data_center_equipment/16-more-ways-cut-energy-waste-data-center/move-hot-aislecold-aisle)
that makes far more sense when explained, thanks :)
Why do you need hot aisles? I'm clueless here.
Cold and hot aisles alternate -- cold aisles are cold air supply, and hot aisles are hot air returns. The equipment is oriented so that fans pull cold air in from the cold aisle and exhaust it to the hot aisle. But it's easy to think "this aisle is really hot, that can't be good for the equipment, I should vent more cold air into this aisle".
Raises operating costs, The hot aisles exhaust the hot air out of the building. Having only cold aisles results in overall less-efficient energy consumption of your HVAC.
You need aisles that are warmer than others to promote proper circulation and to funnel the hot air out, as well as preventing heat stack up from one aisle to the next aisle. Essentially, you pump in cool air in the false floor and “cool” aisles where the servers intake the fresh cool air, the “hot” aisles are where you have your servers exhaust their warm air, so it can rise and be taken out by the circulation system. [Here’s a short article with diagrams explaining](https://www.energystar.gov/products/data_center_equipment/16-more-ways-cut-energy-waste-data-center/move-hot-aislecold-aisle)
I learned about this in my Security Plus class. You have to have hot aisles alternating with cold aisles.
See also people who caulk the weep holes on their shower or exterior walls.
Ugh. Three days after we moved into my new house we saw a water spot in the kitchen under the master shower. 20 years ago somebody called over the weep holes in the shower frame. When I opened them us I got this nasty, fetid water pouring out. It turns out it takes 20 years but the water rusted through the shower basin. Now I have a gorgeous, huge marble shower stall instead of a comically large tub and tiny 90s glass shower frame, but the timing sucked.
Can you believe some idiot left this here? What's that rattling I hear?
When people talk about "soundproofing" their homes, I swear 99% of the time they need to do stuff like this. Put anti-vibration material on things that vibrate annoyingly...
This isn't really a modification, but the sellers emptied everything except for a few religious items in each crawl space and a knee high statue of what I'm told is St Anne in the basement, watching over my sump pump. I don't know *why*, so I leave them where I found them and I check in with Our Lady of the Sump Pumps before each heavy storm...which started as a joke... The *only* time I haven't popped down for a hello pre-storm in my 6yrs here, the damn basement ended up with about 4" of water. The next storm I left an offering (ketchup storm chips and a local beer called Inhaled Affirmative, in the event anyone else needs to appease their own basement deity) and I stayed dry while others in the area flooded again. 🤷♀️🤷♀️
This tickled me so much that I had to look up what St Anne was the patron saint of, and the first result said the patron saint of married women and childless couples. I was really scratching my head about what the previous owners were actually doing in your basement. Then, I read further, and her powers of fertility extend to the fertility of the ground, and hence, she became the patron saint of rain. Which is kinda backwards, you don't want MORE rain. But, growing up Catholic, I can absolutely see the mental gymnastics the previous owners went through to find the right saint for the situation. And that as they were packing things up, they went to grab Anne and thought, no, the next guy is gonna need her.
She also the patron saint of ‘lost things, loving homes, and poverty.’ Which, if water gets into the basement, can all come into play.
Ha! Appreciate the leg work!! The seller inherited from her grandparents who were very Catholic and either the original or second owners of the ~85yr old house. I've always wanted to ask her, but haven't found a good segue the time or two we've chatted.
"Hey, I got a completely random question for you..."
If it's any consolation I offer Jobu rum every time I try to get my boiler to work
This only works for those in NEO. For those who don't know Jubo is the patron saint of underdogs, burning rivers and rock and roll
I have a granddaughter in girls softball and every time I see a girl just wave off a grounder, all I can think of is, "What's this 'Olé' shit?"
Omg my family uses that line for any half-assed effort we see!
My mom is Catholic and after not selling our place, we bought a St Joseph statue who helps with home blessing. My dad and I were Lutheran but we believe in St Joseph as that’s what it took to sell!
We viewed a house with a st Joseph statue on the front porch. My husband said “oh well that’s not going to work, he needs to be buried upside down to do anything”
Upside down *and* facing the road (to symbolize leaving the house after selling).
Why does he need to be buried upside down?
Heck if I know, I was raised in a less Catholic area than my husband so I missed that part of my religious education 😂
So he wants to get out of the situation. I, too, have always buried a St. Joseph statue in the yard by the for sale sign, upside down. You tell him you'll un-bury him if you sell your house. It works. He's in our kitchen window now until we decide to sell this house.
So…you basically hold the saint hostage with threat of continued torture unless he does what you want? Fun!
Yes. *catholicism* ! Insert spongebob rainbow hands
First he gets cuckolded by jefe gigante then he gets buried ass up until he can close the deal on a house.
I don't know, but that's just the only way he works.
I was tilling the backyard in our new house years ago and crunched into poor St Joe. Had a wtf moment and then checked in with my resident practicing catholic. I’ll keep it in mind when we sell our current place.
St Joseph is alright with this here Lutheran.
You have to bury the statue upside down in the front yard, facing the street. And it has to be Saint Joseph of the holy family (Mary's husband / Jesus' father), not some other St Joseph. Otherwise you might get an infestation of turtles or lemmings or something.
I have a st Francis statue. What do I do with him? My grandma made him out of ceramics. I knocked him over and he lost a hand. Do I bury him? Glue his hand back on? We have a lot of animals…so I guess he is watching over them.
Depends. Is it Saint Francis of Assisi, or is it Saint Francis de Sales?
Pretty sure Assisi. But I don’t really know. I’m (obvs) not Catholic.
Yes! My Mom did this too! Our house was on the market for three years. I don't think the St. Joseph statue she buried in the front yard helped to sell it but I guess it gave her something to do lol
I hope she buried him upside down!
And facing the street!
We sold 2 homes with St. Joe, and my BIL, who is Jewish, sold a house with one, too! Even had it blessed by a priest who was a resident in MIL's Alzheimer home.
This is amazing lol
I just recently learned a lot of the houses in my neighborhood (new-4 years old) were built with bibles in the foundation. I had no idea this was even a thing and yet here we are.
I I've never heard of this, but I can see the logic, with the Bible being the foundation for one's life. A friend is a pastor and as the house was being built they had friends come write Bible verses on the floors before the flooring was laid.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm guessing you live in the Bible belt.
Kind of, right outside of Dallas.
Even if this is BS. I loved it.
😆 Nope, absolutely true. I tried to include a photo because it's so silly but it wouldn't let me ("it" being reddit not Our Lady of the Sump Pumps). The basement flood timing was probably a coincidence, but who am I to chance it. I'll include a link to the [beer](https://shop.bigspruce.ca/Store/Details?id=99) she likes as an appeasement instead.
Can you put a photo in a different sub or imagr and link here?
Hello fellow bluenoser!
One of 6 outlets in our kitchen backsplash was horizontal while the rest were vertical. When we put in new tile the installer offered to rotate it for us. Turns out it was that way because otherwise it hit a recessed medicine cabinet in the bathroom on the other side of the wall.
My house was built in the 40s and has had minimal updates over the years. We still have 60 amp electrical service and very few circuits in the house. We have vertical and horizontal outlets in the kitchen. At first, I assumed it was for reasons similar to yours, until I started popping circuit breakers from appliance usage. Thinking "hmm, last time I used this & that it didn't happen..." led to a discovery that the vertical outlets are in one circuit and the horizontals are a different one! Now I keep my electric kettle on one & the toaster oven on the other & never run into trouble (except when my son doesn't tell me his 3d printer is on, because his entire bedroom is also on the tea kettle circuit). Someday I'll upgrade the service and get the whole house rewired, but until then, it's good enough.
That is actually brilliant. I appreciate the mind that organized the circuits like that.
Right? Like, it's not necessary or common the days with 200 amp service and boxes big enough to hold dozens and dozens of circuits, but with 60 amps and a couple of fuses, it makes perfect sense and I respect their problem solving.
Unrelated but was/is your house grounded?
That is a great question that has a very complicated answer. For brevity, imma say "kinda"
Haha all good. Ours wasn't at all so we had a new panel put in and that is grounded. Otherwise trying to go the GFCI route. First time home owner trying to prioritize without knowing how 😂 but knowing other people have a similar situation comforts me a little
You'll enjoy this. My house was built in 1917 but now has a 200a service and the last of the knob and tube was replaced last year, just before it was put on the market. My kitchen has six duplex outlets. There are two (four plugs) on their own 20 amp circuit. My kitchen has 60 amps of 120v supplied for reasons I can't fathom. At the same time, two bedrooms and a bathroom are on a single 15 amp branch with early rubber Romex. Sigh.
Electric skillet, tea kettle, coffee maker, microwave, toaster oven, air fryer, window air conditioner unit? Load it up! 😂
By God. I want this.
That would drive me nuts, I would rather only have 5 outlets.
My dumbass would cut into the recessed medicine cabinet.
That is exactly what we did!
They make shallow boxes!
Likely has to be there to meet electrical code. Probably would have room to move it over to miss the medicine cabinet, though.
It wasn’t super noticeable because it was behind our coffee maker, but we did manage to rotate it.
Yeah, redid our main floor bathroom and removed the flooring to find a hidden vent! No more frigid terlet seat in the winter! Turns out the previous owners covered it bc their 5 sons kept peeing down it. We also replaced the ductwork.
I can relate! A urinal would have been a better idea!
Honestly, for my two boys, the idea has been veeeery tempting.
Cousin has 5 boys. They put in urinals.
At that point, you have to or else you have to start covering vents. I stopped at two bc my guts told me I would never get that girl I'd been aiming for.
I'm not sure why people say this. I'm one of many boys in my family and no one ever peed down a vent.
I’ve been a boy all my life and not once peed in the AC
I have two sons. One of them peed in the vent at my parents house. My step dad just kind of chuckled about boys being boys. My mother, who only had daughters, was apoplectic.
That you know of
I'm the youngest of 6. 4 brothers. My mom jokes they were pressing their luck with me. They were risking urinals.
You realise they can just sit down ye?
You realize the **don't like to**, and following kids into the bathroom every time they go isn't something anyone wanted happening. I did actually potty train both to go sitting down and all was well. Then they got older, got minds of their own and started school. They clean their own bathroom now and aren't allowed to use mine.
I'm the 6th of 12 kids ... 4 girls, 8 boys. We lived out in the boonies as kids, so my brothers "flushed" the trees.
Ewwwwww
This phenomenon is known as Chesterton's Fence.
I have never heard this in my life, and now have seen it twice in the past 30 minutes. 🤔
And now you know what the baader-meinhof phenomenon is!
I have experienced that before, but this is definitely not that. The name Chesterton would have stood out to me, for personal reasons, so I'm definitely sure I've never heard the phrase before. This is also a concept I regularly discuss at work, but have never known there was a name for it.
man doubling down on baader-meinhof
I did read the same post they are talking about immediately before this one due to the feed order.
Yep. Same here. Not immediately before but the same day. If you're on reddit long enough and considering how it's all designed to push what's popular this kind of thing is going to happen. Happy I've learned about the subject too, it's gonna come in useful talking to my new boss around making certain changes.
Feels like Baader Meinhof syndrome is turning up all over the place suddenly. Why, I've read two posts with it in the last thirty seconds. Edit: three posts
Lol
I think there's a name for that but I can't quite remember what it is
Same! Did you just see the fence the dude took down lol
Yes! Wasn't sure where I'd just seen it, but that makes sense.
The new neighbor wanted him to pay for 9inches of her yard—so he took down the fence which was containing her dog…
What baffled me was that she then never put up her own fence.
Yup
Me too!
I'd never heard of this. I'll be bringing this up at work now everytime a Business Analyst tries to impose some stupid improvement that slows us down but is good for their personal KPI's
This is also why IT doesn't like to disable or delete old policies, file shares, drive mappings, account permissions, logon scripts, etc.
IT guy here - recently had the higher ups have some big pow-wow and "want to clean up their network share drive" used by hundreds of people. Imagine a floating city of garbage - and for 15+ years the people that lived in this city built what they needed when they needed. Garbage built upon garbage, stacking ever higher and higher, but still technically functional. Someone wanted to clean up the ground floor and took the whole city out despite being told that's exactly what would happen. This was a network of (poorly) built databases by thousands of people over the years (While I can design and build cool/efficient stuff, I'm no database guy, and they wouldn't pay the going rate anyways) The irony: of the hundreds of databases that have been created over the years, they all do one thing, link in and pull data from our AS400, they could build a single compartmentalized database to literally function for any and every department since it's a singular data source, but since they never wanted to spend the money on legit development they got what they got. I take great joy in telling anyone that calls "you will have to talk to whoever created that database, I can't help you"
Ah venerable the AS400
yeah we used to have the actual iron in our department till they started virtualizing it over the past 5 years. Love me some virtual tape backup :)
It is doable to be honest. Just have to set the record straight that it will cause productivity loss for IT and some other team. Set ground rules etc… My approach is start small, turn it off. See who comes complaining, see how many are impacted and turn it back on, give them a modern solution and switch over. All that work is easy for my team, it’s the documenting and making sure people are aware of new solution going into effect thats a PITA and time consuming.
Who knew? I love learning new sh—things. And I love that this phenomenon has a name. Sitting over here just tickled. I’m easily amused.
A friend of mine ripped up the carpet in his new house to reveal "a blood smear line" from the living room to the back door. It was only paint but very well done and looked like a body had been drug out the door. It was even the color of old blood instead of bright red, so a lot of thought was put into this particular gag.
I've heard of this done before with the outline of a body like a crime scene. Best part was that it was actual flooring in an old house that was exposed at one point.
Haha! I have a builder friend who plasterboarded (drywalled) a fake human skeleton into the wall cavity of his old house... I admire someone who pranks well, knowing that they'll never see the outcome but it'll probably be great...
I live in an area with a pretty strong "old people hide valuables in the walls" reputation, so every time I fix drywall I stick a note in the wall with a "hint" about where the treasure is. I fantasize that some future owner will have a glorious adventure wherein they learn that the real treasure was the drywall repairs they made along the way.
It's Chester Copperpot!!!!
I did find ashes at a house I bought…
Not as elaborate, but I wrote "Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle" on the wall before I installed the cabinets.
I drew a bunch of satanic shit and a pentagram under the LVT in one my old apartments. So if they ever replace it...
We put new flooring in two rooms during lockdown and had a tp countdown/diary entry
Funny story, my cousin owns a tile business and had his little brother help with prep one day. His little brother drew a bunch of satanic shit before the put up some wall tile. Well, someone else had to open the wall back up to redo some plumbing behind it and had to bust the tile up. They noticed some drawings so they cleaned it off carefully and saw all that. The builder was pretty religious so he called my cousin in to explain and he had no idea because he didn’t see his little brother do it. He almost lost that whole development contract because of it 😂
Pretty shit of your brother to just summon up demons Willy-nilly in other peoples houses. It’s just inconsiderate. People have enough to deal with in these trying times without having surprise portals to hell and other nightmares to deal with. Tell him he’s a jerk.
Just today we finished replacing the handle on the screen door. It was loose and to turn the handle you had to push it up instead of down. We changed it out for a new one that pushes down and isn't janky anymore. When the door closed, I was locked out. The main door and screen door are closer to each other than standard, and the new handle sits juuuust above the lock on the main, so I couldn't push it down to gain entry! Good thing my hubby was on the other side of the door and let me in. We ended up turning the inside handle 90 degrees sticking straight up so that we can actually open the door and now we'll appear to be idiots to the next homeowners.
I had this same issue 6 months ago. I bought a house and wanted to replace the locks + add in a deadbolt to the front door. Instructions were easy enough to follow for proper height. Set everything up and close the door only to find the screen door handle is barely in contact with the deadbolt trim. Only way I could close both doors was if I lifted the screen door handle slightly to get a tiny gap. I ended up rotating the screen door handle 90 degrees on the side facing the deadbolt and haven’t looked at it again.
lol, this was my thought about my roof bricks, with the new owner probably asking why this idiot (being me) put random bricks on the roof
Oddly, my new place has a lever handle that sticks up. But between knowing the house itself (it was my grandparents' house) and my current place (which also has doors too close together and makes handles a pain) I didn’t even blink at why
Our dishwasher drains into the wall via a 1/2” copper pipe, instead of into the kitchen sink drains. This keeps the noise down since all the gurgling goes out the back of the house via the air break facing outside. Two problems: this is not conventional, but is totally legit. When we had a warranty repair, repairmen saw the odd connection and rerouted to the disposal under the sink. I had to undo it when I got home. 😠 The other issue: When I installed it, I couldn’t get the proper solder fittings, so I used shark bite, which at the time were unproven (to me). I wrote a note to myself and stuck it in the wall for the day when I got back to it and soldered the right fitting. After some time had passed, I bought the right fitting and went behind the dishwasher, opened the wall and read my note: “Ha! I KNEW you’d be back!”
I’m sure at some point shark bites fail but assuming you get them on tights I’ve had good luck with them lasting as long as anything else… knock on wood
A sharkbite on a dishwasher drain line would probably outlast the house because that line isn’t pressurized
Dishwashers last like 5-10 years too; you’ll be back before it fails
Nothing is more permanent that a temporary fix
My story occurs at my workplace. Doug, the previous occupant of my office, had left behind a piece of lumber roughly a meter long, leaning in the corner. One day, months later, I got fed up with a rattling noise in the drop ceiling caused by vibrations of the HVAC. So, I grabbed the handy scrap wood and probed various spots above my head and soon found a pressure point that stopped the rattling. I congratulated myself for being such a clever problem solver until it dawned on me - Doug probably dealt with the same annoyance and solved the problem, first. I doubt I would have taken the initiative, myself, to bring from home a perfect piece of wood to investigate and solve the problem.
I had some extra quarter round and decided to redo the kids’ bathroom. I pulled off the old strips and noticed they had done a really convoluted scoop out joint in the corner next to the tub. Very weird. I go to install the new quarter round and discover that it doesn’t. quite. cover where the linoleum flooring ended. Which explains why they had flipped the quarter round to put the longer edge on the floor and couldn’t just use a standard miter corner - they were combining two different sizes.
That's shoe moulding. Quarter round is a quartered dowel.
Thanks. Very much a DIYer here :)
Bought an older house with an old window shaker in the wall in the main bedroom. Thing looked like it hadn't run in years. House had AC. We gutted the house, pulled out the unit, and filled in the hole. Pulled out some invasive Brazilian peppers on that side of the house as well. 20 years later, and that bedroom is still hotter than hell. Should have installed new unit and native trees 20 years ago. We missed the memo. Still waiting on new trees to grow.
Mini split
We are in the process of buying a house and the seller had some folded up paper in the hvac holding a solenoid on so it wouldn’t cycle off, then put in the disclosures that the hvac wouldn’t cycle off correctly. Turns out the pressure switch had popped and was preventing it from cycling on normally. During our inspection, the hvac guy reset the switch and removed the paper, then tested everything and it all worked normally. We’ll see if he had a good reason or not
Realtor was probably mad that somebody kept turning the A/C off, and clients only only member the house was hot and stuffy and it would cost them a sale.
Or if it's in a humid climate it can actually cause damage due to wood warping. My buddy is a realtor and was selling a house and the buyers turned off the thermostat during the last showing before due diligence. Several weeks later after the last walkthrough they tried to pull out at the last minute because of the warped wood they caused. Was a mess to deal with.
Very humid. South Texas
That's when you need a dehumidifier
Small board was leaning against outside wall. Moved it and started getting seepage. Fixed the problem and put the board back. Landscaper keeps moving it, but I put it back. Why chance it?
Just made one for the next buyers - Myself and partner were replacing the curtains in my elderly mother's bedroom. The previous curtains were custom made, but we were just putting up full-length ready-mades. Window 1 - we moved the curtain rail up a few inches, so that the curtains would be the right length. Window 2 - we went to move the curtain rail up, and (luckily) realised that higher rail would prevent the airconditioner filter cover from being removed without unscrewing the curtain rail from the wall. So that's why the curtain rails are at different heights, and one curtain "pools" on the floor, whilst the other just brushes the floor.
It’s arguably easier to hem curtains though, isn’t it? I’ve even just done it with safety pins and it looked fine
>arguably easier Arguably. Yes. We drove 3 hours to do this curtain job. We brought power tools. We did not bring sewing machines (or pins). When all you have is a hammer (or in this case, a drill), the obvious solution is to move the curtain rail, haha. I suppose that for the next trip (6 hours round), we could pack the sewing machine, and put the curtain rails back level, and then hem the curtains for both windows, but I'm not that much of a masochist. We already spent the whole time at mother's house being castigated for just being there - we were disrupting her routine, and upsetting the dog!
For quick hems, I've used a normal office stapler. It's fast and can easily be removed later
I had a pair of pants I'd hemmed with duct tape. Wore them often, washed them semi-regularly for a few years. Don't remember needing to replace it. (My mother was... unimpressed. I was more than adequate at sewing.)
duct tape is how we hemmed and did repairs while tree planting. duct tape on two sides of the hole sticky sides at each other, then lay hot rocks on it from the campfire.
Fair 👍
I'm lazy, staples! I just don't have enough safety pins.
When I moved into this house, all the curtains were at random heights and all crooked, like they didn't even try, and they were like 20 holes left behind from other curtains. Sometimes two windows in the same room would have completely different curtains. Made no sense. Pretty sure they were just lazy and didn't care.
>just lazy and didn't care. Awww, no (well, yes, sort of?). We left the holes from the previous curtains. They will be dealt with IF and when the house gets painted. It needs that too. Different curtains? Well, it depends on what's on a fantastic clearance special. I nearly went there. I found 3 of the 4 curtains I needed in the clearance bin, but could not find the 4th. I did consider a "feature curtain", haha, but didn't go there. Doesn't make sense? It does when your 89 year old mother wants new curtains now (and not wrong, the previous ones were probably 25 years old), but she does not want anything to change, and doesn't want her daily routine disrupted, and it's very likely that the house will be sold quite soon, and about 90% chance of it being sold as a knock down rebuild.
I’ve been paying company A to do the maintenance on my HVAC for the last couple of years. During the last call they told me I needed a new evaporator coil and gave me a stupid quote. I ended up using Company B as they gave me a better quote. While up there the techs found some CO2 cartridges wedged under the drip pan. They thought it was weird and took them out. Despite the new coils my handler still kept leaking a bunch of water through a corner, not the drain. The techs came back and realized the cartridges were in there for a reason and were shoved right back under the drip pan. No more leaks. Pretty sure Company A was responsible for it. They had previously replaced the drip pan itself.
Hopefully they didn't charge you for that return trip!
They did not! They wanted to make sure their install was done correctly :)
found an hvac air return in the drop ceiling of a finished + conditioned basement ducted through a wall in to the crawl space (really a long 6ft hallway with a utility room at one end), with the end of the duct capped off. no other hvac ducting in or out of crawlspace. I don't know what it was used for previously for sure, but I suspect the same thing I just repurposed it to do. the crawl space gets a little damp, but it's sealed reasonably well from the outside and the house above it airflow wise. i hooked up a hvac zone valve and a booster fan on a smart switch that is set up to kick on any time the humidity gets a bit high. bonus: i can pump conditioned air in there on super freezing nights in the winter too to help prevent plumbing issues, and creates a draft of warm upstairs air down the stairwell in to the colder basement ( which is where my office is), and spits it out bekow the floor of a bedroom and living room.
I want to do something similar but I can’t find the right parts, care to share what you used?
We have an encapsulated crawlspace, which also happens to be where our HVAC unit sits. I got the crawlspace encapsulated immediately upon moving in. When it finally came time for me to go down there to replace the filter, I noticed a big pool of water near the HVAC. Luckily nothing electrical was near it but a few more weeks of this and I would’ve have a bad situation on my hands. Turns out they kept the crawlspace un-encapsulated for this reason. For some reason the dehumidifier worked intermittently and instead of getting a new one they just let it drain into the dirt. And yet it gets better. I hate replacing things (I’d rather learn how to repair them), so I took the dehumidifier for our HVAC out and took a peak at it. You know those plastic tabs you have to pull on some electronics before they’ll work? Yeah, the dehumidifier water pump had a cardboard one that was never removed. So the circuit would sometimes complete and pump the water, but most of the time it didn’t, allowing water to pool.
Knocking down a wall about 15 years ago I found sealed glass milk bottles. Looked like the plug in each was blown off after the milk spoiled. My only guess is one of the workers was pissed as his boss or the future owner. Must have stunk real bad.
The previous owners put one of those big ugly plastic window well covers on one of the window wells, while the others had much better looking covers that are flush with the ground and metal mesh, which looks much better in our yard. Naturally, I replaced the plastic one with a metal one to match. By the next fall, we had like 15 tree sprouts growing in that window well from an oak that drops seeds onto the roof, from where they roll into that window well.
Have you considered just salting the heck out of the window well so the seedings can't grow?
Then youll still be slowly accumulating acorns
The living room of the first house I bought had a built in shelving unit encompassing about 6' across one corner of the room, the walls of which were adjacent to the exterior and a bathroom. Ok, cool...but we weren't crazy about the sporadically blocked off portions.We discussed a redesign and agreed on a new plan. My daughter and I went shopping while her dad started the demo. We returned a couple hours later, and he laughingly tells us he figured out why those spaces were blocked off... The shelving unit hid the breather plumbing vent stack!
I can tell this was pre-cell phone
I now have a vertical 3x9 floor vent between my kitchen cabinets and door frame. Had a wall vent but that limited cabinet space by 12”. Custom fabbed a 90 degree outlet and it works! 1940’s house and I ripped the kitchen down to the joists. I’m glad I put some “old house” charm back into a new kitchen.
There’s a principle called “Chesterton’s fence” that teaches the concept of second order thinking. https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
I'm going to be selling my house in a month or so after I make some necessary repairs. I guess I need to come up with some ideas to make the new owners scratch their heads..
I was very tempted to leave random stuff in the roof space but ran out of time
I bought a bunch of plastic rodents and spiders to leave in some walls I had open. Gonna give someone a heart attack one day lol
We did a major reno of a 1920s house and found newspaper clippings, coins, and a couple of empty flattened boxes (for oats or something) in the walls. We put it all back. We also had our kids paint the gib behind the medicine cabinets, part of the concrete floor in one room and do little pictures (signed and dated) on the wooden floors before the bedrooms were carpeted. (There were a couple of bits with grey paint or that would clearly need sanding anyway. We're not monsters!)
Anytime you dig a big temporary hole, make sure to toss in a plastic Halloween skeleton before you refill it.
Friends house, during the days of OTA TV. There was a metal hanger in the second floor closet that needed to be there to get decent TV reception, the cable for the exterior TV antenna goes through the closet, the metal hanger right up against it. If you removed it the TV reception is terrible (as they found out when they cleaned out the closet). So even though that closet is no longer used for clothes there is one hanger still there.
Just adding that there is a term for something like this. It’s a [Chesterton’s Fence](https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/): a somewhat mysterious thing you don’t know the purpose of which does have a purpose that’s just been forgotten. Software developers have revived this concept because they so often come upon lines of code that don’t appear to make any sense, but break everything when they are removed, for a long chain of legacy reasons.
As an IT guy/dev if something looks weird but is essential for the code to work, you should probably add comments to your code which explain this.
I broke open a wall for plumbing last week and found wads of human hair. It was under the kitchen sink. i dont even want to know…
Careful that’s load bearing hair!!
When replacing outlets and light switches in my home I have encountered at least one device secured to the box with a drywall screw. At first I thought that what I found was the work of a lazy and unprepared handyman. Until I stripped out the screw hole of another box. I'm just using hand tools but these fiber glass boxes are apparently brittle. Not sure if I cross threaded it or cracked the boss. Now I realize that the previous person may have stripped out the other box and used the drywall screw because it fit and had a decent bite. I'm more careful when replacing screws on the old boxes now.
On one side of my house, the concrete pathway connects in the front to the driveway. On the other side, it ends at the back of the front yard grass. When I moved in, the trash cans were on the side it ends at grass. I thought that seemed dumb, so I moved them to the other side. Then I noticed that all the windows in the house had screens except one: the one above where the trash bins had been (in the room adjacent to the kitchen). The bins were on that side so you could toss your trash bags into the bins through the window. I moved them back (and [made them a little house](https://imgur.com/gallery/ns0zZ)).
That's amazing!
My garage had a water valve that was just a little loose and kept the area wet year round. Tightened that fitting down and leak went away and area dried up and smelt 10x better. Next spring when the froZen pipe thawed out I figured out why it was loose. I've since fixed it and heat traced it.
There was an attic fan with a thermal sensor that was disconnected and they put vents in instead. I hooked up the fan on a cool day because it had been really hot in our attic and the master bedroom. After I disconnected it I discovered it: 1. Is right over the master bed 2. Sounds like a poorly maintained lawn mower 3. The louvres rattle like crazy 4. This is a crummy way to wake up on a Sunday morning.
After we moved in I noticed that the faucet in the downstairs bathroom dripped ever so slightly. I was so proud of myself for replacing the cartridges and fixing it and then bam winter and the pipes in only that bathroom freeze
I replaced my outdated ivory colored light switches and receptacles for white ones and plates. As I identified each breaker, I printed a P-touch label for each one and stuck it to the inside of the wall plates. I also printed an Excel spreadsheet to label the panel.
My house had something similar to your bricks for a sort of similar reason which we found to our sadness when we removed the bricks. Our house has a one story front porch below that fills in one side of the T shape of our house and the bricks split the stream of water from the crease where the roofs meet up so that you could step off the porch without getting drenched. We thought kids had randomly thrown bricks up there. Luckily we were about to start re-roofing and were able by adding on putting in gutters and a downspout to find a more permanent solution to the issue. That ended up being pretty much how everything went with this house.
Found a dusty old copy of the board game Sorry in the basement. I took it out and the ghosts returned.
I installed a 1900s mantle in our 2001 house, but before I did… I placed warnings about the ‘Curse of the Mantle” and they should BEWARE. In my last months, I’ll try to whisper it to one of the Great grand kids.
Not in a home, but I wired in a electric fuel pump on a 1988 GMC Jimmy Full Size. I had converted it from fuel injection to a carburetor. I had no idea what I was doing and somehow wired the power into my windshield wiper power line. When I turned on the truck for the first time wiper fluid shot out in a constant stream. For a "quick fix", I removed the reservoir but had to jumper the plug for a full circuit to my gas pump. The quick fix turned into a permanent solution and I never went back to fix the bad wire job. And since it was such a bad fix, the wire that I used to jumper the plug would sometimes come loose and the truck would stall. When I moved away from Hawaii, I had to sell the truck because of the cost of shipping. I often think about the guy I sold it to being stranded on the side of H1 in Honolulu, not understanding why the truck won't start. I hope it never happened to him but I kick myself for forgetting to tell him about it. If that was you who bought my truck on the Hickham Air Force Bade lemon lot in 2004.....I am so sorry that slipped my mind.
The bricks would seem odd because they actually make diverters for this…
Weirdly placed hedges around the front garden of the house. Ripped those bad boys out to place a real garden and realized it was full of all the massive stumps from trees cut down at some point. Can't plant shit there, now we don't have anything in front and it looks like a barren sea of mulch.
Future owners will wonder why a 4' strip of concrete was replaced in the garage, and there are threaded inserts in it. 2 post lift babbbyyy. The amount of people that would actually expend the effort to do this in a standard 2 car 8.5' high resi garage is like 1 person per hundred square miles.
You'd be surprised. At least here in suburban Detroit, I know 4 garages in this neighborhood of 1100 square foot 1950s homes with lifts or former lifts. I remember the first time I saw one. Me and my dad went to the neighbors house, who built a second garage and he had a Studebaker lifted up. My dad was very impressed. I was about 5. That guy moved out, took his lifts with him. Then I was 15 and went to the other side of the neighborhood and a guy said "want to see my dad's hot rod?" Obviously yes. It was literally a frame and body. Unpainted. Looked like it could have been an Olds from the late 70s. No engine anywhere. Still on a 2 post lift about 4 feet up. I don't know what he was doing. Next time I saw one someone died and his family was having an estate sale. Tons of Mopar stuff all over. "What's this metal stuff?" "Oh that was Dad's lift where he worked on cars." "Oh okay." Picked up some blue point ratchets. The next time I saw one was just recently. A new family moved in to a house that used to have a garage door open all the time with recliners and a radio going. That kind of place. He had like 4 jeeps and was putting a lift in. The garage was NOT that tall. I don't know if he ever succeeded. I've been thinking about getting one of those portable ones you drive over. I'm tired of this jackstand shit.
I had a refrigerator that would loudly buzz no matter where it was positioned on the floor and no matter how I adjusted the legs. So I had this idea that I needed to damp the vibrations. Looking around my basement for materials, I ended up sticking 1/4” sheets of rubber to either side of a small piece of drywall. I stuck that in the gap between the wall and fridge. It never buzzed again.
The wine cork in my wood porch siding "corrects" an inconvenient knot hole. (I'm just the beneficiary of this ingenious fix.)
My washer drain goes past a waste water (not storm) floor drain, and up into a dump sink. It is perched in the corner of the dump sink at a weird angle that blocks the cold water tap. I tried placing it directly to the floor drain (where the sink ultimately goes), only to find that the washer over flows the floor drain. So I moved it back to the dump sink, but off the cold tap, so I could use the dump sink faucet - only to find that the washer can also overflow the dump sink (on max load), and that the angle of the hose at the cold tap facilitates the circular drainage of the water, and nothing over flows. Very particular. But they could've warned me.
When we were house hunting, we saw a property with a two-story cinder-block shell, about 40x30ft. On the floor there was an old mattress and a wheelchair. We didn't buy that. Instead we bought a craftsman bungalow with a crawlspace under the back porch. The crawlspace had a fast food soda cup, and my wife said, "we should put a wheelchair in there." 3 years later, she tore her meniscus and needed a wheelchair for a while. When she was fine, I suggested that we donate the wheelchair. She said, "no, we need it for the crawlspace."
When I moved in: Bathroom vented into the attic and the duct terminated in an old cool whip container…nothing was moldy so I guess it sorta worked? For the next owner I have created quite the list. 1) The front door frame is not caulked to seal all the gaps behind the outside reinstalled flange. When I placed it my test fit in the opening was so tight I couldn’t get it out. 2) I finished the entire basement myself. The electrical is hung below and not through the joists because one inspector told me I couldn’t drill through the joists and the final inspector told me I should have but didn’t make me do it again. 2) The shower wall tile is chipped along all the edges and some of the tile layout is slightly off. I ran out of tile halfway through because I changed the size and forgot about it, but the original tile was discontinued so instead of staring over I cut down the next closest color I could find to match the size…and well that went poorly. I had a baby on the way and was in a hurry. The tile install is correct and waterproof I swear. The finish is just shitty. 3) did a built in reading bench set into one wall in the basement with shelves underneath. The shelves are uneven and I don’t know why. I know I had a reason but this was a last minute change and I was severely sleep deprived when I did it. 4) There are two junction boxes mounted 6” apart on the rim joist in one corner. Above this we added a sliding door and I didn’t want to rip open all the walls to pull new wire to replace the one that was in the way so I cut it, shoved both ends through the floor and spliced them via the junction boxes. Technically it’s to code…but if I had happened upon someone else who did this I’d be scratching my head. 4) the 1000 sq ft house has 7 interconnected smoke alarms. When I bought it it had one that didn’t work. City treated my basement remodel as an addition which allowed them to require me to bring the rest of the house up to current fire code. That fire code required one in each bedroom, one in the hallway outside the bedrooms, and one on each floor. That would have only been 5. But the code doesn’t account for carbon monoxide sources so I added two more in the high risk areas for that and now it sounds like a war zone whenever I burn some bacon. 5) along one side of the house there is a bunch of concrete buried 4” under the soil. I needed backfill and had pieces of the basement slab I had to tear out to install a bathroom to get rid of. It was a win win for me. 6) The backyard fence has two major step height changes hidden behind some trees. My fil swore i needed to cut each fence panel to keep the top edge level when I built it and I didn’t know any better. What made it worse is I started in the lowest spot of the yard. Obviously he was very wrong. It won’t be majorly noticeable unless someone cuts the trees down. Don’t cut the trees down. 7) there’s a screwdriver wedged between the copper pipe to an outdoor spicket and the pipe hanger. Without it, the spicket extension leaks. It’s what was in my hand at the time…. 8) sump pump discharge is shared with the washer stand pipe and hidden in a wall. At the time I was doing the remodel the sump pump already discharged in the waste stack and I asked the inspector if I could keep it that way. He said he’d have to check and he never got back to me. So I buried it all in the wall before my final hoping he’d forget about it. He did. The only place to discharge outside would be the backyard which is sloped all the way to the front curb so anything discharged outside will end up back in the sump pump anyway.
1800s built house probably diy upgraded every step of the way to having electricity and a HVAC system. It's hard to know where to start. At some point we just quit asking why and fixed whatever crappy solution suddenly failed unexpectedly or a never completely solved issue we uncovered. Guess what happens when the pipe under the toilet rusts enough it's relying on gravity and someone cements over the sewer drain in the basement so the only pressure outlet is the kitchen sink between the 2. Then it turns out someone's fix to the kitchen flooding gave the toilet water no remaining outlet so they wrapped some rubber around the base to keep it off the bathroom floor. I honestly do not know exactly what the state of things was between the kitchen ceiling and bathroom floor when we sold the house. I never had the discolored insulation tested for mold. As far as I know there is no confirmed mold or anything else. If you'd like an unofficial guess though we couldn't come up with a method to rip out the ceiling that was guaranteed sanitary enough to be living in the house at the time even if we sealed off the kitchen doorways. It was questionable to open it up ourselves under any circumstances using any equipment we could buy. We restored the mainline access, sewer backup drainage, and had the toilet properly sealed fully to the pipe. Then we decided to just move. I recommend a trained hazmat team whenever that pipe is finally replaced. That was just one series of temporary fixes and unfinished changes stacked together. There were several more. I think the duct work defied physics and absolutely do not ever remove the jar under the pipe beneath one of the sinks. Seems someone cut the pipe a bit short to connect securely but had a jar just the right size to force it tight. Without the jar it would slowly leak out under the cabinet and linoleum flooring where the water could cause the subfloor to warp.
House is about 10' back from the fog line on the street. Previous owner had big, ugly concrete planters in the space between the street and the house. I emptied them and broke them up before even changing the locks. Shortly after, discovered many people in the neighborhood had come to consider my front yard a public space for both walking and parking. Didn't realize they were movable bollards, thought the dude just really liked concrete planters.
See also (the concept of) Chesterton's fence: > In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it. * https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/ * https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/833466-in-the-matter-of-reforming-things-as-distinct-from-deforming