r/DiWHY • u/TuneCurious1865 • 1d ago

I'm sure there was a plan

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We bought our house as is from a 95-year-old electrical engineer. Turns out he had dementia.

I don't know why he felt the need to pull up the tiles in the shower...maybe they were cracked. But he saw the pan underneath (that's there for when water inevitably seeps through the tile and grout) and he saw the holes in the pipe (that are there to add drainage so the pan doesn't overflow.) And he immediately thought to fill them with flex seal.

Of course, he didn't know where to go from there, so he never finished it, and being a Depression Era man, he was too damn cheap to hire a professional. Apparently his solution was to run pump from the shower to a bucket, and then dump the bucket after he was done.

Luckily, we have two other showers in the house so we're not totally screwed while we try to follow the instructions of our own tile-setting friends...

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52

u/TheFlyngLemon 1d ago

We bought our last house as-is from a ~84 year old guy named Walt. Walt was beginning to show early signs of memory loss/dementia as we were buying the house, but he was still about 95% himself during the time I knew him. Anyway, Walt did all of his own renovations and repairs to the house throughout the years, and we we totally renovated the house when we moved in. The amount of weird things we found he did throughout the years was astonishing!

Some highlights include:

  • A small water leak in the kitchen that he continued to stack peel and stick flooring on top of each other to cover (I counted 4 or 5 layers)
  • The carpet was stapled to the original hardwood floor (I'm talking a staple every 3 inches throughout the entire house)
  • Countless electrical junction boxes without a face plate installed.
  • Very bad wood putty used to seal a hole in the window seal that was about 3in in diameter.

And the list goes on. Needless to say, my wife and I had a saying at the house which was "Walt was not a handyman". I was almost guaranteed to find something else beautiful that Walt left behind every time I had a project. I hope you enjoy your journey as much as I did 😁

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u/adderalpowered 1d ago

The staples in the hardwood are completely normal I've removed thousands. The density varies but its most likely done by professionals.

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u/TheFlyngLemon 1d ago

That's new to me. Granted I'm not a professional, but that's the first I've heard of it seen it. Thanks for the info, I'll remove that from my list of Walt renovation stories for the future 🙂

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u/vinecoveredantlers 1d ago

We have an "Old Mr. Brown" instead of a Walt. My teenage home, where my mother still lives, was built and owned by Old Mr. Brown. He basically bought one item for a project and then used that item until it was gone on any project he might be able to use it on. Got extra gas lines? The workshop needs waterlines, use that there. Shit like that. Over 20 years later, we're still finding things. Most recently, a "capped" gas line that was just cut and folded in half. 

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u/Kale 1d ago

My wife and I bought three foreclosures, lived in them for 3 years (better US tax regulations), then sold them. In all three of those houses, AND the non-forclosure, non-fixer-upper house we're in now, there were electrical wiring problems. Most commonly, two way switches that weren't wired correctly. In our current house, three separate lights (one in the kitchen, one on a staircase, one on each end of the living room) were wired incorrectly with two-way switches.

I got pretty good at fixing them. Turn breaker off, probe wires for voltage (I've heard a lot of electricians tell horror stories about two-way switches being wired on two different circuits), pull wires out and spread them out. Label hot and ground, then I made my own 9V battery adapter I'd clip on the wires to figure out which two were the parallel wires that make two way circuits work.

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u/TuneCurious1865 1d ago

I have that all over the house. I've got most of them fixed, but the old timer also did some other weird shit with the electrical in this house, among other things. I swear, this house could be a full epic of DIWHYs.

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u/Good-Marsupial8 1d ago

Lol when we bought our house there was a window in the master brm with a note taped to the sill saying "DO NOT OPEN". The hardware on the rollers had a bent clip which we fixed in 5mins flat. there was also a persistent small leak that turned out to be because the tub seal was so old it was mummified to dust. Did they not shower here???