Okay so we are on our third house and luckily with this one we didn’t really have to do any work. There are some strange things though that I noticed and wish I could have asked the seller after settling in!
We have two light switches in our house that we cannot figure out what they are for! (One in the kitchen and one in the bathroom)
There is a heater built into the wall in one of the closet’s in the master bedroom – why would I need to heat my closet?
We have a whirlpool tub in our master bedroom but no access panel – it doesn’t work right now and we can’t find an access panel to check the circuits for it! (It should have its own somewhere right near it)
Our furnace is a little small for the space its in and the way the furnace goes in it continuously gets sucked into the blower (We finally bought one of those plastic washable filters and that seems to be heavy enough to stay in place) There is plenty of room in our basement so I’m not sure why they felt the need to squeeze in the furnace.
We have a dummy vent going to the outside. We discovered that our water heater was filtering through our family room fireplace and not going to the vent to the outside which is actually stuffed with insulation! After smelling a lot of gas in our house, Nicor Gas came out and shut down our water heater until we could get it fixed! Why wouldn’t they vent it to the vent going outside since it was obviously there for it!
we have found tons of issues that the previous owner managed to cover up just well enough for inspection, though our inspector didn't do a decent job either. The owner redid the roof himself and had NO clue how to roof so there were a TON oh nail holes slowly dripping water into the attic until it leaked through the ceiling and wall...still need to get that repaired.
Yeah we have a lot of stuff in our current house that they obviously didn't know what they were doing! Oh another thing is they vented the water heater exhaust (carbon monoxide?) through our chimney in the family room! Luckily Nicor discovered it after I had a gas leak from the stove in the basement that they installed the fitting backwards so its been slowly leaking gas for however many years!
I have ground fault interrupters all over my house, including one that can't be seen...
A whole section of lights went out. (GFIa, usually, only affect power outlets, no built in lights. None of the other GFIs affect anything but outlets. ). We deduced it was a GFI problem. The GFI switch right next to where the lights were didn't help.
First, let me say I live in a log home. The wiring in a log home is placed in channels in the logs, before the logs are placed. You don't mess with it without it costing a GREAT deal of money.
We started to tear apart the wiring, without ripping it out of the walls. Eventually, we traced it back to an outlet that was hidden and couldn't be seen without pretty much knowing where to look for it.
Reset the GFI on this one and the lights worked.
There is another GFI that is by the bathroom sink. It controls the outside outlet where I plug my engine block heater in.
Electrical wiring scares me!
I made the mistake of looking under the house at our support system. We have maybe four "piers" for the entire house, which are only paving stones stacked up until they reach from the ground to the floor of the house.
Oh I don't even want to know about our house - we have ceiling cracks on the one side of a few rooms that I feel like our house may be shifting!
Those are some odd things. About the oddest thing in our house, other than it's really old, is that the "back" door is actually in the front. Makes taking the dog to the backyard a challenge.
That would be silly!
After we moved into our current home, we found that the addition the first owners built onto the house was all wired into the kitchen circuit breaker. The kitchen is on the opposite side of the house, too.
Oh we have some weird rooms wired together too, makes blowing a circuit breaker interesting.
We have two switches we couldn't figure out for the longest time. Turns out they can turn on and off the bottom half of two separate outlets. So if you have an outlet that doesn't work, flip that switch to see of it controlled by the switch.
Oh yeah we have an outlet in each room that is controlled by the lightswitch, which is nice but annoying too.
Gotta keep the tires aired up or we will be leaning to one side and might lose our balance or roll out of bed.
:)
we have a stone room in our basement and it had steel bars on the "windows" (they are cut openings in the stone with bars on them like an old time jail might have had)
Crazy!
What's weird besides my family?! We have a cabinet in the kitchen that is hung in the middle of a large wall and is hung so low and crooked that we can't put a table in the room as people would hit their heads when they sat down!!
Makes you wonder if it is covering something on the wall!
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we have found tons of issues that the previous owner managed to cover up just well enough for inspection, though our inspector didn't do a decent job either. The owner redid the roof himself and had NO clue how to roof so there were a TON oh nail holes slowly dripping water into the attic until it leaked through the ceiling and wall...still need to get that repaired.
Yeah we have a lot of stuff in our current house that they obviously didn't know what they were doing! Oh another thing is they vented the water heater exhaust (carbon monoxide?) through our chimney in the family room! Luckily Nicor discovered it after I had a gas leak from the stove in the basement that they installed the fitting backwards so its been slowly leaking gas for however many years!
I have ground fault interrupters all over my house, including one that can't be seen...
A whole section of lights went out. (GFIa, usually, only affect power outlets, no built in lights. None of the other GFIs affect anything but outlets. ). We deduced it was a GFI problem. The GFI switch right next to where the lights were didn't help.
First, let me say I live in a log home. The wiring in a log home is placed in channels in the logs, before the logs are placed. You don't mess with it without it costing a GREAT deal of money.
We started to tear apart the wiring, without ripping it out of the walls. Eventually, we traced it back to an outlet that was hidden and couldn't be seen without pretty much knowing where to look for it.
Reset the GFI on this one and the lights worked.
There is another GFI that is by the bathroom sink. It controls the outside outlet where I plug my engine block heater in.
Electrical wiring scares me!
I made the mistake of looking under the house at our support system. We have maybe four "piers" for the entire house, which are only paving stones stacked up until they reach from the ground to the floor of the house.
Oh I don't even want to know about our house - we have ceiling cracks on the one side of a few rooms that I feel like our house may be shifting!
Those are some odd things. About the oddest thing in our house, other than it's really old, is that the "back" door is actually in the front. Makes taking the dog to the backyard a challenge.
That would be silly!
After we moved into our current home, we found that the addition the first owners built onto the house was all wired into the kitchen circuit breaker. The kitchen is on the opposite side of the house, too.
Oh we have some weird rooms wired together too, makes blowing a circuit breaker interesting.
We have two switches we couldn't figure out for the longest time. Turns out they can turn on and off the bottom half of two separate outlets. So if you have an outlet that doesn't work, flip that switch to see of it controlled by the switch.
Oh yeah we have an outlet in each room that is controlled by the lightswitch, which is nice but annoying too.
Gotta keep the tires aired up or we will be leaning to one side and might lose our balance or roll out of bed.
:)
we have a stone room in our basement and it had steel bars on the "windows" (they are cut openings in the stone with bars on them like an old time jail might have had)
Crazy!
What's weird besides my family?! We have a cabinet in the kitchen that is hung in the middle of a large wall and is hung so low and crooked that we can't put a table in the room as people would hit their heads when they sat down!!
Makes you wonder if it is covering something on the wall!