Tuesday, December 4, 2012

My House Is A Ticking Time Bomb

We bought this house from an older Italian couple whom we suspect were/are mob-connected.  It was an entertaining series of interactions.  His stated occupation was building contractor, which sounded good upfront, but we've since come to realize that there is no way in hell that could have been true based on the work that was done in this house while they lived here.

Case in point: the hall bathroom that we are currently renovating.  The tile guy had to take the sink and toilet out to redo the floor, and in the process discovered that the base and top of the sink were not a matched set (the bowl was attached to the misfit pedestal with shims and caulk.)  Also, the toilet base was literally glued to the floor.  Can't even begin to imagine why.  The tile guy begged me to go out and buy a new sink and toilet, which I did yesterday.

But the icing on the cake was the light fixture.  Ugliest thing in the world: I had already planned to replace it.  I had the tile guy (who is somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades) take a look at it to see if there was anything I needed to keep in mind while choosing a new one.  He made the discovery that there was no box behind the old fixture, which of course made it a raging fire hazard!  The electrician came yesterday to put in a box and install the new fixture, and he determined that the support for the box had been put in incorrectly, which was why the box wouldn't fit.  Instead of trying to fix the support, the previous owners just left the box out completely and installed the old fixture without it.


I shudder to think where else in my house these bombs lurk...I was unaware of that one for nine-plus years!  Thank God it never caught fire.  Wish I could think of a tactful way to ask the previous owners for a list of everything they did in the house so I can have someone else check it!

P.S.: Oh, and Ms. Moon...I discovered yesterday at the plumbing supply store that some people are actually willing to pay $800-900 for a faucet-and-handles set for their bathroom sink.  Must be the same ones who take baths in leftover champagne!!




2 comments:

  1. Well, the guy COULD have been a building contractor- the cobbler's children always go shoeless and so forth.
    I've paid some good money for faucets but never anything like that. Were they gold-plated?

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  2. No, but they should have been! Most of the sets in the store were in the $400-500 range, which still seemed like a lot to this naive remodeler...

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