The Top 10 Weird Things About This House
As you get to know an older house, you find out about its quirks. When we moved into our house in Sunnyvale, the prior renters had installed a part into the toilet tank that was too long. Their solution? Prop up the tank lid on a block of wood. And, the switch plate collection was quite unique.
So, we figured we'd find some oddities with our new house. That is, the weird things that go beyond what we saw in the inspections. As we discover them, we'll nominate them for this list.
1. Welcome to Hoosierville
On the first Saturday after we moved in, we needed to do a lot of laundry. I looked at the washer and realized that it had undergone some abuse in our Sunnyvale garage (think sawdust). I scrubbed the inside and ran a few cycles through including one with bleach. Finally, I put the first load of clothes in with soap and walked outside for a break. When I walked around the corner, this is what I saw.
For an unknown period of time, the laundry water has been dumping from
the clean-out onto the driveway. Yes, all the soap, bleach and other miscellaneous
unknown substances from the wash have been draining onto the ground instead
of draining to the sewer. After a call to Rotor Rooter, this is now fixed!
-Annette
2. Insulate, schminsulate
We discovered on our first night in the house that there isn't a stitch of insulation in the place. We were laying in bed, about to fall asleep, when we heard voices, voices that seemed to be in our living room. But, no! The voices were coming from some people two houses down who were standing on the sidewalk. No big deal, right? The summer in the house was unbearably hot, and the winter was absolutely freezing. We can't wait to rip off the drywall and take a picture of the inside of the wall, 'cuz we know there can't be any insulation in there.
3. Faucet + Patience = Hot Water
For some wacky reason, it takes several minutes with the faucet on to get any hot water. Now, we don't mean that it comes out lukewarm and it's not hot enough. We mean that it comes out ice cold and takes time to warm up to a tolerable shower temperature. During these plumbing-imposed timeouts, we have theorized as to the cause of this oddity. Is it because the water heater is outside in the cold? Is it due to some weird routing of the hot water through the kitchen? Are the pipes possessed? We simply won't know until we tear open the house, if even then. Meanwhile, we turn the faucet onto a trickle and sit down for a chat or a quick nap.
