Home Improvement Party Conversations
So, I was at a work-related party last week. As is always the case, conversation eventually drifted to our fixer-upper (people always ask "Still doing that website?") and then to home improvement in general (my attempt to shift the focus from what can always be a very long story).
Often I can trump others with at least one of the wacky stories from our own place, but this time I was pleasantly surprised that the most outrageous story of the group came from someone else!
So, I figured I should share it here on their behalf...
A couple was remodeling their fixer-upper and had water damage in a first floor ceiling near an outer wall. Accessing the offending area required removing a wall upstairs to get into the kneewall above where the leak had occured.
The surprise came when they got the wall open and found this:
A bucket of water IN THE WALL that was full and overflowing from a leak in the roof!
The former owner had placed the bucket there to catch leaking rainwater from the roof...then decided to simply seal the bucket inside of the wall and forget about it!
On the drive home, I found myself wondering what type of career the original homeowner had and how they solved problems at work...
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Comments
Every day I work on our house I hear the words, "What @$$%&!# thought this THIS was a good idea?" come from my mouth. This bucket absolutely beats it all. I will from now on use it as the metric to compare all other rehab findings.
Posted by: steve | March 21, 2005 8:18 PM
Boy, adultfeelings really wants us to visit their site.
As for the bucket, that is unbelievable. It does make you wonder what kind of mental capacity these people had.
Posted by: Kristin | March 22, 2005 8:36 AM
WOW. Hearing a story like that makes us all feel a little better, doesn't it?
I think everyone should be required to take a class on responsible home ownership before they're allowed to buy anything. Sorta like drivers ed for houses.
~Mindy
Posted by: mindy | March 22, 2005 9:20 AM
Love your site!
That's a crazy story, but sadly not as unusual as one might hope. When I was a freshman in college, my dorm room ceiling started leaking in Nov. Months went by, but by March they had supposedly repaired the leak (meanwhile we had a bucket on the dresser to catch the drips). In April, when the dorm room sign-up was, there was no sign of the leak. So, since we liked the location of the room, my roommate and I signed up for another year in the same room. Probably not the smartest thing we ever did.
After we had been there about a month the following fall, the leak started up again. The reason: the pan the maintenance people had put in the ceiling overflowed!
Posted by: Alice | March 22, 2005 10:11 AM