Weird features spotted while house hunting

[Hillia]

I have a five year old son who would LOVE to live in a firehouse! That sounds really neat.

I once looked at an old firehouse that had been converted into a residential rental.  Well, sort of converted...the bathroom still had a 3 stall, 2 urinal setup.  Would have been handy for parties, I suppose.

[jedikaiti]

Where do you find listings for old churches and firehouses for sale?

[Shoo]

We looked at a house that was very nice.  Problem was, it was directly underneath some very gigantic and ominous looking powerlines.  We called it the Brain Cancer House.

[Bluenomi]

In addition, most of the houses here had an upstairs toilet (no sink, just the toilet) in a separate room to the bath/shower and sink.

That's a standard arrangement here in West Oz.  Ensuites usually have the toilet in the same room as the shower etc but the family bathroom usually has the toilet in a separate room. You then go into the bathroom to wash your hands.

That's why when Americans say they are going to the bathroom it confuses us.  You won't find a toilet in there.   

I think that is pretty standard in most of Oz. We refused to buy a house that had the loo in the bathroom, it's more convient seperate when you've only got one bathroom, it means you can use it while someone else is in the shower. we didn't see many, mostly they we houses with bad bathroon renos.

We keep thinking about upgrading our loo to one with the sink in the cistern so you don't need to use the bathroom or kitchen sink to wash your hands.

[OSUJillyBean]

1.  When we were looking to buy our first house, I had a habit of checking inside of cabinets, appliances, etc.  I was surprised once to find a whole load of dirty dishes inside the stove where the family had stashed them!  I think it was to make the sink look cleaner and really, who look sin the oven (besides weirdos like me?).  We didn't hold it against them though, although it was pretty funny.

2.  One of the weirdest things I've seen while looking for college housing (off-campus) was a jacuzzi tub in the master bedroom that had FULL SHAG CARPET ON THE FLOORS AND OUTSIDE WALLS OF THE TUB.  That house was the moldiest, nastiest property we looked at and I was so glad we found someplace clean to live!!!


3.  ETA this:  http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/photo/a8LZZr1_460s.jpg

[RebeccainGA]

2.  One of the weirdest things I've seen while looking for college housing (off-campus) was a jacuzzi tub in the master bedroom that had FULL SHAG CARPET ON THE FLOORS AND OUTSIDE WALLS OF THE TUB.  That house was the moldiest, nastiest property we looked at and I was so glad we found someplace clean to live!!!

We found one of those, too. Who does that???

[OSUJillyBean]

2.  One of the weirdest things I've seen while looking for college housing (off-campus) was a jacuzzi tub in the master bedroom that had FULL SHAG CARPET ON THE FLOORS AND OUTSIDE WALLS OF THE TUB.  That house was the moldiest, nastiest property we looked at and I was so glad we found someplace clean to live!!!

We found one of those, too. Who does that???

It looked like a 1970s studio for adult films that had been hastily turned into really icky student apartments.  Carpet in the bathroom is a terrible idea.  Lime-green shag carpet with what appeared to be an active mold colony growing in it made my skin crawl.  The house was huge and very cheap rent.  Now I know why!  Yikes!

[Mel the Redcap]

The house the Good Ethnic Boy and I bought after our wedding was listed as "4-5 bedrooms" - the main bedroom, two small children's bedrooms, a long thin room we've converted into a film/TV/game room, and a teeny-tiny room that used to be a small wardrobe-less bedroom, lost its window and a chunk of space when an addition was built on, and is now a storage space that I'm slowly converting into a library.

The weird features (apart from the odd shape of the long thin room) are the security shutters on the windows of the two children's bedrooms (surprising, given that no other rooms had them, the front security door was long broken, and the back fence was a low wooden picket fence in horrible condition that I was able to kick down when we replaced it), and the wallpaper borders at the top of the walls in the same rooms. Originally we were planning that I would have the slightly smaller one and the Good Ethnic Boy would take the one that had better storage space for his comic collection... then he looked up, and discovered that the smaller room had a dinosaur border, but the larger one had fairies. Pink fairies. His masculinity revolted, and I got the bigger room.

[Mel the Redcap]

Ooh, and how could I forget this one?

When the Good Ethnic Boy and I were house-hunting, we were looking at some that were in an area with a lot of small, fairly steep hills. One in particular was built on the downhill side of the road, and the ground had been dug out to accommodate a two-storey house. The ground floor was sunk into the hill, with about a six-foot gap between the front of the house and the (walled-up) earth, so those rooms got at least some natural light; the rear of the house was clear; and you entered the house via a bridge over the 'moat' that connected to the centre of the top floor. We made jokes about installing a drawbridge and pulling it up to protect you from visiting relatives.

That house was really awesome but unfortunately we couldn't afford the area. Poot.

[menley]

Our house also has a missing window from the inside! We never noticed when we bought it, but I accidentally locked my husband out of the house one day and he was going around peeking in all the windows (so he could figure out which room I was in and knock on the window). I was in the master bathroom and all of a sudden heard loud knocking behind our large rectangular bathroom mirror... and a voice saying "LET ME IN!" 

I just about passed out, because we'd found out shortly before closing on the house that the previous owner had committed suicide.

Then I recognized that it was my husband's voice and tried to figure out where on earth it was coming from... apparently when the master bath had been renovated, they decided they didn't want a window in there. Rather than actually close it off, they just drywalled and hung a mirror over it. So from the outside, we have a window (that still has blinds!) to nowhere.

[Belle]

Our house also has a missing window from the inside!

Oh my goodness - that makes at least three of us with windows to nowhere! (And makes me feel slightly better for not having noticed our windows to nowhere before buying the house.)

The previous owner of our house did many of the renovations himself (which, of course, we had to redo most of because watching a few "Flip This House" type shows does not make you a professional). Rather than remove the windows in rooms where he did major renovations, he walled over them from the inside, but not the outside. We had five - FIVE! - windows that were covered by drywall on the inside but were still visible from the outside of the house. And nobody noticed - not me, my husband, our realtor, our home inspector - until we had been living there for six months.

In our defense, none of the windows were very noticeable from the outside. They were all on the second floor (so you couldn't see that they were covered by a wall unless you got on a ladder), and they were on the sides facing our neighbors. We live in a neighborhood where the homes are very close together, so two sides of our house are rarely seen unless you decide to stand in the gap between the houses to stare at the house. Several windows had to be replaced (damaged, leaking), but we couldn't actually replace them because, you know, wall on the inside, so we had to repair the gaps and reside the entire darn house. (It needed residing anyway, but we weren't planning on doing it for another few years.)

Lesson learned - when you buy a house, count the number of windows on the outside and compare them to the number of windows found inside the house!

[jmarvellous]

I lived in a "guest house" with a DOOR to nowhere. It was a small house with one main room and a bathroom, so I don't know why they would have thought it needed two doors on the same side, but it even had steps leading to it. No sign of a door on the other side.

[VorFemme]

My paternal grandparents retired from farming and bought an OLDER house in Waco, with two front doors.  One went into the front bedroom (it had a closet) and the other into a combined living & dining room with a fireplace at the living room end.

Looking at the rest of the house - I think that it had things set up for before the invention of air conditioning - the back bedroom and front bedroom were on either side of a bathroom - and the hallway let the air from the covered porch blow through the windows screens through the bedroom at the back of the house onto another covered porch/patio.  The original back porch had been enclosed and turned into a tv room/den. 

The garage was a shed with two rooms - the front was for their car and the back.....I seem to remember being where Grandma kept her gardening tools, including a small hand plow with a huge iron wheel.  She was a serious gardener, canning and freezing the produce from her garden for more than 15 years after Grandpa "retired" (arthritis) - she was about ten or twelve years younger than he was.

[Belle]

I lived in a "guest house" with a DOOR to nowhere. It was a small house with one main room and a bathroom, so I don't know why they would have thought it needed two doors on the same side, but it even had steps leading to it. No sign of a door on the other side.

A friend also has a door to nowhere, although in his case it's easy to see why the door is there. A portion of the house was renovated, and the door was walled over on one side. The other side they left as a door - if you open it, you see the back of the drywall. I'm not sure why they didn't wall over both sides.

[amylouky]

I lived in a "guest house" with a DOOR to nowhere. It was a small house with one main room and a bathroom, so I don't know why they would have thought it needed two doors on the same side, but it even had steps leading to it. No sign of a door on the other side.

A friend also has a door to nowhere, although in his case it's easy to see why the door is there. A portion of the house was renovated, and the door was walled over on one side. The other side they left as a door - if you open it, you see the back of the drywall. I'm not sure why they didn't wall over both sides.

We have a door to nowhere, on the outside of our house. The space behind used to be a storage area that opened to the outside, it was converted into a walkin closet for the master bedroom. I'm guessing they didn't want to mess with it, since it is a brick house, matching would be pretty hard.

As an aside, my lovely dog has decided that chewing up that door (including part of the wood frame) would be a great idea, so I now need to replace it. I'm thinking of just putting plywood over the space, with either siding or building some plant shelves there. Would that be weird?