weird sh*t
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NAVIGATION
When renovating a home, you're going to run into some weird shit. I see that drama built into all my favorite home improvement shows. Sometimes the issues are manufactured and eyerolling. Other times the issues are heartbreaking, as in the case of a collapsed sewer pipe, or cringeworthy, as in the case of some animal or insect infestation. Yuck.
Well, snagging a 1960s ranch home in New England, that had been mostly used as a rental over the last 20 years, my husband and I ran into our own set of issues. Some frightening - we’re lucky the house didn’t burn down, some annoying - why didn’t the previous owners fix that properly - and some just weird.
On this blog, I’ll get into more of the details of each of my renovations, things I tackled and can share how to DIY and things I left to the professionals. For starters though, I wanted to share some funny and weird stuff we ran into over the last 4+ years tackling this 1960s girl.
1. Conjunction Junction (Box) What’s Your Function?
A room we called mudroom was off the garage and connected to the kitchen by what looked like at one point was an outer door. We figured at one point, this was part of a larger garage which was later badly converted to interior space. It had vinyl floor directly on concrete slab, so it was cold in the winter and warm in the summer. It had damaged drywall on three walls and MDF panel board on another. The door to the boiler and the washer/dryer looked like it had been through a war. It also only had one really crappy light which lit nothing. You know the ones lovingly known as “boob lights”. Yeah, that kind.
I bought a beautiful milk glass schoolhouse light to bring much needed light to the room, knowing this was all temporary until we could start our kitchen renovation. It matched the style I was going for in the rest of the house which was a rustic industrial. It also matched the style of the oil rubbed bronze barn lights I’d had installed on the front and back porch.
We turned off the power and took down the old light. Low and behold, no junction box. What’s a junction box you ask? Almost all electrical code requires you have an electrical box, also known as a junction box for any electrical wire connection. This is to prevent short circuits and potential fires. This is a good thing, because in our case we had no junction box, leaving seriously old wiring laying right up against the pink insulation hanging down from the attic. A major fire hazard. Keep in mind, this is nothing that an inspection could have picked up on. Usually a town or city electrical inspector would note an issue when checking someone’s work. This of course doesn’t happen when you have some idiot cousin putting in electrical, or whoever the previous owners used.*
To say I was really glad we updated that light is an understatement, though it made me pretty concerned about what else we were going to find in the house as we continued the renovation.
*Always use a licensed and insured electrician for electrical work. You can always check work done on a home prior to buying it by checking with the city for the appropriate building permits.
2. Nuts in the Wall
A room we called mudroom was off the garage and connected to the kitchen by what looked like at one point was an outer door. We figured at one point, this was part of a larger garage which was later badly converted to interior space. It had vinyl floor directly on concrete slab, so it was cold in the winter and warm in the summer. It had damaged drywall on three walls and MDF panel board on another.
It was the MDF panels we were tackling today. Finally ripping down these heinous pieces that seemed to serve no function other than covering the cinder block wall leading to the boiler and washer/dryer.
My little guy helped us with his own tools which was adorable. When it came to finally just tearing it down, it was just my husband and me. It was weirdly satisfying to get the board off. Even the cinder block with the glue was better looking then that board. Good riddance.
Now most of us have run into garage put into the wall by construction workers. We’ve found everything from cigarette butts, to fast food trash. It’s totally gross but mildly funny. This time, we found a massive pile of pistachio shells. My husband is generally an observant guy, but sometimes he misses the obvious usually, says “Wow, the squirrels have been busy”. I audibly laugh and he says, confused “What?”. I say, “It was only squirrels, if their cousins were visiting from California,” Walnuts are native to New England, pistachios, not so much.
3. Slanty Shanty
The thing about old houses - nothing is level or plumb. When installing kitchen cabinets, everything needs to be level and plumb, otherwise you can run into a multitude of issues, from drawers and doors not staying opening or closed, to your countertops cracking.
Though we had no expectations that this house was close to level or plumb, even I was surprised how “off” we were on the wall adjacent to the garage. A cinder block wall built in the 1960s that had been sheetrocked over sometime later, was so far off, I lost count of the shims we used.
4. Six Degrees of Separation
After all this renovation we’d been doing, I wanted to upgrade our thermostat to a smart version. No problem, I thought. We’d been doing great as DIYers. What a fool I was.
The thermostat had been updated by the energy audit folks when we upgraded the boiler and got AC when we moved in. All those ads about lowering your energy costs due to programming your heat and AC use. I was on board. Granted our electricity was free due to the solar panels we installed, but it was important to net meter as much electricity in the summer for use in the winter months when it was gray all the time and we weren’t producing much solar. Basically all that means is that we build a credit with the electricity company in the summer we can use to offset out costs in the winter. Easy.
The thermostat change out was anything but easy. Of course. First we had to shut the heat off in late winter. Not the brightest idea on my part, but I was getting cocky after months of reno projects, so I figured, easy. Ugh. Taking the old one out of the wall was easy. Demo always is. What we didn’t realize is that in this old house, there was nothing behind the wall holding anything together. In other words, the Nest had nothing to hang onto. We also realized that the wall board wasn't really board at all, but plaster over wire that had been first wallpapered, several times, then painted over several times. So there were no studs reachable to screw this thing into. Once we figured out how to jury rig the thing in, the wire hookup guide Nest provided was perfect. Never had an issue since. Though we had to buy a plate to cover the big ass hole from the previous thermostat. Sigh.
5. When Life Gives You Mold, Make Penicillin
When buying an older home, you’re buying every problem the previous owners fixed or didn’t fix properly. When we moved in, we had baseboard heating. We knew eventually, we wanted to take down the wall between the mudroom and kitchen, which had baseboard heating on it. Rather than pay to reroute it, we worked with the state’s energy save plan to install forced hot air vents, which also allowed us to install AC, much to my polar bear husband’s glee.
Slowly we’d been removing the old baseboard heaters around the house, and taking the metal to the scrapyard (you can get real money for the copper inside the baseboards). When we got to my son’s room, we could tell looking at the wall, there may be water damage. The tell-tale bump in the drywall right under the window was a sign. When we ripped out the baseboards, our worst fear was confirmed. Not only was there water damage, there was mold and from the looks, black mold. You could see that the previous owners had replaced the windows, which is something that sold me on the place, but never fixed the damage caused by the previous windows leaking.
I burst into tears knowing my son was sleeping next to this. Luckily, it’d been completely sealed up to this point so the chance any mold escaped was minimal. As my sister reminded me, all houses have mold.
Trying to see the penicillin in the mold, I considered us lucky that our homeowner’s insurance covered mold remediation. Whew. Our son was only 3 ½ and never a great sleeper, so we tried for a night having him in the room with us, but he continually woke and wanted mommy. So we moved him into the office for the few weeks while we had a remediation company tear out the drywall and floors and repair everything. In fact, his room has been the one fully renovated room in the house.
6. Did They Fall off a Truck?
The house had been a rental for decades so not in the best shape. The previous owners made some improvements to the house before putting it on the market, including the kitchen and two bathrooms. That said, they put the bare minimum into the renovations - basic big box bathroom cabinets, end of run beige tile everywhere, contractor’s grade floor tile, etc.
For the most part, I was content to rip out most of the improvements and replace them with something decent. The kitchen however was a massive project and like most kitchen renovations, the costs were spinning out of control. We were hopeful we could save money, time and effort, by keeping the current cabinets, but replacing the doors and painting everything to match. At first our kitchen consultant agreed that was a good idea. He came over for one last measure to get the doors we needed. Bad news: These cabinets were not standard. Not only not standard, but no brand. Clearly the previous owners were cutting corners everywhere they could because these things clearly fell off a truck. I was furious.
The only way to get doors and drawers to match would be ordering them custom. At that point it would be cheaper to rip them out and replace them. At the end of the day, the new cabinets are gorgeous and we were able to change up a useless end door cabinet for drawers. Bonus: I got my dream apron front stainless steel sink, so I got the last laugh I guess.
