101 crazy building/ DIY discoveries

[Annpan]

Talking about weird walls in Reds kitchen on another post and I wanted to share some of our craziest moments in renovating.

1. In a tenament house we renovated - A cupboard that had been filled with bricks from a knocked down wall, then boarded up. We needed to replace damaged plasterboard and uncovered the cupboard, emptying it was akin to playing a giant game of jenga. Turned out to be a lovely cupboard though and shelved to fit cookery books and our boiler went under them... the bricks are still sitting in the back court (we never got round to clearing them up ) - it's my brother's house now

2. stripping wallpaper in our current house, to find out why the wall sounded very hollow. Found MDF had been used to box something in, took down MDF and found plastic backed hardboard (a kind of fake wood panneling) had be used to box something in... so took off the hardboard and found a waterfall running down the inside wall everytime it rained. It would have been cheaper and simpler to mend the guttering, what a bunch of dafties

[red]

our current house is up to 400 years old but not listed as it has beenchanged so much - and it has! - and its driving us mad not to know why some things are as they are - we find the shapes of old doorways, parts of locks where there are not doors etc. unfortunately most of it has been bodged...

anyway

3 we took of the fiberboard ceiling panels tacked up between the old beams in a downstairs room to move a light socket,and a bare electric cable fell down infront of OH's face...luckily not connected.. the light that he moved was a metal fitting and not earthed... and when i looked up at ceiling i found myself looking right up the internal wall upstairs.. and i mean you could see right up between the lath and plaster layers all the way to the attic. no wonder there was a draft.

4. we found a boxed off chimney (too small to be an actual chimney) running from the sitting room alcove up, boxed in through the room above and straight to the attic... again.. no wonder there was a draft

5. previous owner replaced the front windows to tart the house up before the sale - so only a couple of years old now.. and put in single glazing,,,, sigh... so no wonder there is a draft...

6. himself cut a section of a shellf out to fit in our own tall freezer.. and sawed through an electric cable that was polyfilled in under the shelf... luckily not connected anymore...

7 our house has damp, and every wall has plastic wallpaper or gloss paint... mostly in dark pink...

7 we had to replace a floor/ceiling within weeks of moving in - death watch beetle had had the best of the beams (we did know about the DWB before we bought the house) and although some of the beams looked like wood, they were only wood shaped but were actually just dust, and I vaccumed some up![/i]

[wulf]

I think that last 7 should have been an 8, so here's:

9. Bricked up window behind the shower. Inside the bricks someone had added a big sheet of hardboard, which was fantastic for wicking up all the water it could collect to keep the wall damp!

Wulf

[pskipper]

10. Sash windows, the surveyor missed the fact that they are 20% polyfilla The front garden of our flats had also been raised to the point that it blocks the building ventilation bricks and completely blocked one of the drain pipes for the guttering.

[Milims]

11 We recently discovered that the boiler we just had taken out was wired to the upstairs lights!!!

12 We suspect that the wiring for the shower runs diagonally, in the cavity, across the pantry wall!!

[lizzymahoney]

13 My last two houses had concrete buried under a hands breadth of humus and leaf litter.

14 A free standing mirror was walled up inside the bedroom walls.

[Annpan]

Completely forgot to put our most recent biggy

15. A lintel over a door way has been removed (presumably because it had rotted away) and been replace with tonge and groove panneling, holding up a line of loose bricks

[Eigon]

16. When my mum moved into her new house she noticed a lump in the bedroom carpet. When she looked, she found that the side of a cabinet had been used to cover up a hole in the floor.

17. In the bedroom next door, there was room across the width of the room for a narrow double bed (Queen sized?) and a gap to walk round it on one side. When my cousins went to stay, the little girl kept rolling out of the bed, and no-one could understand why until they looked at the floor - and found that, across that narrow room, the floor dropped four inches!

[Stonehead]

We've had good finds and bad ones.

The 1830s model cottage we restored in London had some corkers:

1. The original gas light fittings were stashed under a false floor in a cupboard, while the orginal pipes were still under the floor.

2. All the original ironmongery for the doors and windows had been thrown under the stairs, where there was no floor.

3. The fusebox was dated April 1919 and the wiring was the same age!

4. When removing layers of paint and wallpaper, we got down to a dark scarlet and cream patterned one that turned out be dateable to 1834-36.

5. What we thought were fairly recent cupboards to either side of the chimney were in fact original sleeping chambers! The idea was that you slept semi-upright with your back to the chimney for warmth.

6. While repairing the top of a party wall from within the attack, I found a cavity in the wall and a leather jewellery box stashed in. Sadly, it was empty.

7. While working in the attic, I discovered the neighbour's attic (which had no direct access) was equipped as a civil defence post, with first aid kit hung on the wall, WW2 era helmets, police rattles, binoculars and other stuff. The shop at the end of our row of four cottages was bomb damaged by a V1 and still held up by the same accro jacks as in 1944 (the old couple living there were more than a little bonkers and their house was a tip).

8. While digging a pond, I found the foundations for the medieval tithe barn that had been demolished to make way for the cottages. We recorded the stonework, covered it with sand and gave the details to the council conservation officer.


I'll have to describe finds at other places later. I have to go and cook dinner now.

[Cheezy]

Current money pit (victorian end terrace)has all but the two down stairs fire places boarded up, including the bathroom one. Bathroom need some renovation (wood worm and dry rot in a joist under the shower )

So decided to open up the fireplace since I needed to get up all the floor boards. When it came to it they had stud boarded straight across the chimney and around the recessed walls. On removing the recessed walls they had batton'd on roofing felt to stop the damp coming through. Bare in mind this was a shared party wall not the end terrace one!. The wall was wet, covered in slime and had a large silver tail family in resisdence.
All the plaster was destroyed and this is where the wood worm and dry rot came from. It turns out that the lead flashing had gone around the chimney so rather than replace it they felted the wall and studed it over! The bathroom was out of action for 2 years as we tried to pay for the roof repairs, let the walls dry out, complete replaster,new joist and floor.Only then could we get the bloody bathroom back in. Still it's nice now.

[snapdragon]

whatever number are we up to?
1905 mid terrace 'railway' small village version house (town versions are taller rooms to allow more air according to victorian H&S regs)
25. stripping wallpaper in the hallway we found gouges in the plaster (looked like pram wheel level) were covered by newspaper which seemed to be attached to the wall with glosspaint
26. a bump in the wallpaper? - pull off paper>> WHOOMPH all the plaster from the whole section of wall lands in a heap and the house is smothered in dust (I do wish I'd made sure the cupboard doors were closed first )
27 - weeds in the garden? concrete over 'em - in the gap between the concrete path and the house wall !!??! thus wicking damp into the kitchen walls
28 on removal of kitchen/bedroom (now bathroom) chimney breast we found horseshoes and old woodbine paper packet (WW1 vintage) in with the rubble that they had been filled with at some time. plus boxed in with chipboard the remains of the chimney for the 'copper' that had been in the kitchen.
I really want to check whats behind the sealed up living room fireplace - but I think I shall need a large amount of alcohol for dutch courage first

[Annpan]

28. I don't think I have ever stripped wallpaper off and left the plaster intact behind it. Maybe I will by a new build next time

29. An old favourite... finding that wallpaper has been plastered over. Maybe peeling embosed wallpare is too much for some people.

30. Not sure if this counts... recently found an old door handle and lock (for an outside door) in a plastic bag, along with a decapitated doll, crisp wrappers, pieces of metal... I found this bag (and another that I daren't open - double black-bags- I assume animal remains) buried in the back garden... in a flowerbed. Under about 3 inches of soil.

[camillitech]

New years eve 1990 (first one in this house) spring in living room since cured by digging 1m trench at gable end

[Thurston Garden]

Current house:

32. Gas 'living flame' fire inserted into old coal fireplace and sealed in with brown silicone. No flue liner. Nothing.

33. Ceiling light wires from removed ceiling light poked through the light hole into the ceiling void and hole filled with polyfilla. Live wires just sitting there....

34. Several outside bulkhead lights nailed to various trees with internal junction boxes to split wiring wrapped in poly bags and hung on tree branches...bags full of water!

35. All of downstairs clad in pine tongue & groove boarding. Fitting instructions must have been: place grooved edge in corner and use 2" clout nail to fix board to wall. fit next board, groove to tongue and fix with 2" clout nail. Repeat as required. Secret nailing? Don't think so...

36. All of upstairs clad in wood effect hardboard

37. Outside house lights wired back to front - live/neutral wrong way round. Did not stop them working, but cause much head scratching when I replaced the light fittings!

38. Fit all curtain rails upside down because it's easier - don't matter that you can see all the fixings/screw heads!

And that was a local house restoration business owner!

[red]

39 took off wallpaper to find hard board.. took that off to find gaping hole and beetle dust in the shape of a joist - where there should be a cob wall, and supporing timbers holding the upstairs bedroom floors...
the wood you can see at the back is the hard board stuck on the other side... nothing in between.. just plaster and habit holding the wall up!
(new wall is going in right now)

40 in the hall, we lifted the carpet, two layers of lino and some leveling compound that was not level and found lovely old slate slabs.

41 when we took at the really hideous 1950s/60s fake fireplace surround with fake canopy out, we found it had been back filled with rubble.. some of which were the original tiles that had been in an older fireplace.. just broken up and thrown in
42 in the garden we have dug up lots of bits of clay tobacco pipe including a complete bowl, which an enthusiast/expert estimates dates from 1670 ish...