Were they packrats? Did they tend to use some rooms more than others? Did they have a tendency to delay necessary maintenance? Did the neighbours like them? What sorts of things were important to them? What was their colour and design sense like? Were they consistent in their choices?
It's amazing how these and other questions (even the ones you didn't necessarily want to ask) can be answered by the little traces they leave behind.
As you start to construct the personalities of the previous owners, I think this process becomes significantly easier - despite how hard you may try NOT to learn any more than you have to - if the person who lived in your house before you was the kind of a person to leave a LOT of clues...
In our case, the previous owner left a whole slew of things (even besides the statues) that really make us wonder just what was going through his head. For one thing, the guy was obsessed - OBSESSED - with temperature. There were no fewer than six different thermometers mounted either on the outside of the house, hanging on the walls inside, or, in at least one particular case, hanging on the wall inside with a wire lead drilled through the wall to a sensor on the outside so it could display both temperatures at once. In addition to the many thermometers, almost all of the thermostats are marked up with liquid paper, pencil lines, or even Sharpie annotations.
The amount of time he must have spent fiddling with the thermostats and heaters and comparing them to all of his thermometers and whatnot is remarkable. It's especially noteworthy when you realize that despite all of the analyzing and double-checking, he never actually replaced any of the heaters or thermostats. He seemed to be content to just make his little marks with the liquid paper and pencils and trust in his dollar-store thermometers to let him know whether it was warm enough or not.
I think another facet of the temperature obsession was something of a fixation on energy. With the exception of the three bulbs in the ghastly lamp in the hall (two of which were burnt out when we moved in), every single light in and out of the house had a compact florescent bulb in it - including all TWELVE sockets in the gruesome bathroom fixtures. The ones in the garage are particularly irksome because a) they take a couple seconds to turn on when you flick the switch, and even then they take a couple more minutes to warm up to maximum brightness; and b) we need a ladder to change them out, but there's so much crap in the garage that there's nowhere to put the ladder so we're stuck with them.
Every time we go to Home Despot, we drop off a couple of the CF bulbs in their recycling bin and buy a few more incandescent bulbs - the CFs just don't give off any light!
Frank (I figure I might as well just use his name at this point) also seemed to dislike most colors. That, or he had a violent aversion to painting anything. When we moved in, there wasn't a wall in the house that wasn't white. Well, except for the enormous mural of the mountain valley on the back wall of the garage, but that's different, and the subject of another whole post, I'm sure. Everything that was painted was painted white. The untextured ceilings were white, the walls were white, the trim was white, the doors were...
Actually, the doors aren't white. Not exactly. They're all sort of this yellowy-off-white color that's singularly unattractive. It's like teeth-that-haven't-been-brushed-in-a-week non-white. A painful non-color. As a matter of fact, they all look like they've only ever been primed with builder's primer and have never actually been painted. Which, we realized when we started taking down the closet doors so we could start on the floor, is exactly the case. Every door in the house, with the exception of the front door was installed straight from the factory and never painted.
That picture really shows the difference between the nice white trim paint and whatever botched attempt at an actual color (sun-bleached-buzzard-skeleton-yellow?) builder's primer is supposed to be.
Now it should be mentioned that Frank is by no means solely responsible for all of this - or even any of it for all we can say for certain. After all, he wasn't the original owner of the house - he may not have even been the second for all we know. Then again, we know enough from talking to the neighbours that Frank had lived in the house for at least fifteen years, so we're fairly sure we can lay at least some of the blame on his shoulders.
We also know from talking to the neighbours that Frank had a bit of bad habit in terms of letting people take advantage of him. For instance, he once paid a guy to pressure-wash the driveway and, when the guy offered, to power-wash some of the moss off the roof. One of the neighbours had to run across the street and tell the workman to stop power-washing UP against the grain of the roof and taking the shingles off along with the moss. Frank had no idea.
So it may not have been Frank necessarily - it might have been a friend, or a hired handyman, or somebody else - that spread mayonnaise all over the walls in an attempt to patch the holes left by picture hooks or whatever.
Okay, so it might not be mayonnaise, but I'll be damned if I can say for sure what it REALLY is. I thought at first it was just unsanded drywall patching compound or PolyFilla, but it's not that. Someone else suggested it might be toothpaste, as they had heard somewhere that it was supposed to work for that kind of thing, but the stuff on our walls doesn't have a minty flavor. Then someone else pointed out that it looked a lot like shiny, dried-up mayonnaise and for want of a better suggestion, that's what I'm calling it. It even shares pride-of-place with the world's most forlorn valance on the wall above the bed in the master bedroom:
It's freaking EVERYWHERE in the house. Every wall, every room, every conceivable place you could find a hole, there is one - stuffed with mayonnaise. Hell, Frank (or somebody else) even used it to seal the wire for the doorbell to the inside of the door jamb where it comes in from outside.
Apparently, mayonnaise paints up pretty nice, too, as you can see from the outside portion of that same wire.
And while we're outside, it's not really clear what we should make of this sign hanging right by the front door:
I'm not going to tell you what Frank's last name is, but I will say that it is NOT Molldara. Which maybe tells us more about Frank than his real last name would... although perhaps not as much as the stuff he left in the drawer in the master bathroom:
No, we didn't inventory that. We dumped it out into a garbage bag and scrubbed the drawer out with bleach. Twice.
This house has two fireplaces: one with a wood stove insert in the family room and the other a normal, wood burning fireplace in the living room. Straightforward enough, except.... well, the wood stove in the family room cost us almost $2000 to have it brought up to code. The guys doing the work said it looked like the only thing ever burned in it was paper. And the one in the living room, well, it sort of had an insert of its own. Behind an over-sized, brass-plated fireplace screen with glass doors was this thing:
Huh, we thought. An electric fireplace. Then we flipped it over:
I... I'm at a loss for words. Really. You just have to look at it and figure it out for yourself. The truly odd thing? Aside from hosting that electric thingy (which is now resting comfortably at the bottom of the Hartland landfill) the fireplace had never been used. For anything.
When we moved in, Frank had helpfully left four remotes for the garage door sitting on the kitchen counter. The weird thing was that each remote had three buttons on it. Obviously, the biggest of the buttons was for the garage door, but we had no idea what the other three buttons were for, or if they even worked. One of the remotes had something written on the buttons (in Sharpie, of course), but aside from "gaRagE", I couldn't really decipher what they said. One looked like "ouslde lanB", and the other was simply labeled "Fp". After thinking about it some more, and wandering around the house clicking the buttons at random, I figured it out.
"Fp" stood for fireplace. The cord from that hideous contraption up there came out from the side of the screen and was plugged into a weird device that was, in turn, plugged into a wall socket. Sure enough, the button on the remote triggered the device, and I could turn the "fireplace" on and off from pretty much anywhere - even out in the driveway.
"ouslde lanB" was a little harder. It wasn't until I noticed this ungodly scar on the wall below the front window that I realized what it was for:
Yes, that is a piece of linoleum and a metric shit ton of mayonnaise used to patch the drywall, but whatever; the important thing is that "ouslde lanB" stood for outside lamp. The third button on the remote turned the carriage lamp at the side of the driveway on and off. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, the wiring for the lamp was run through a piece of irrigation tubing buried in the front yard. No, that's not up to code, or even remotely safe, and yes, there are at least two other places where he's done the same thing for electrical service for the pumps in the fountains. (Our home inspector noticed the switches and whatnot, but Frank assured him that all the wiring had been done by a professional electrician. Shyeah, right.) I'm not even going to go into how wobbly and just plain bad the carriage lamp is (which is too bad, because it's arguably the nicest light fixture on the whole property), but suffice to say we'll be either pulling it out or redoing it.
Speaking of light fixtures, I believe I mentioned in my first post that the ghastly thing in the hall was the second-ugliest light fixture in the house. While there's absolutely no question about which fixture is the ugliest, there's some debate about the third-ugliest. So how about we put it to a vote?
The War Department gives the bronze medal for ugliest to this pair of flying saucer-inspired pieces of shit in the family room:
The only light those bastards give off is straight down; they seem to be utterly incapable of illuminating a closet, let alone a family room.
That's a solid contender, I must admit, but I still say the bronze should go to this abomination from the design-hell that was the mid-eighties:
That thing wouldn't even look good with incandescent bulbs in it; with the CFs, it's enough to make you shut your eyes and wish it would just go away. It never does, though. Oh no, it's always still there.
Judges?
Oh, and while we're talking fixtures, let's discuss plumbing fixtures for a second. I've alluded to this several times, but it really does need to be seen to be believed. Without further ado, I present to you a master bath, inspired by Saddam Hussein himself:
Those accessories had to be put in purposefully and deliberately, by the way: the tiles by the window had to be replaced, and a hole cut into the ceiling of the family room underneath just to install the taps and drain for the tub. (And yes, that's the same master bath that had the carpeted floor.)
So what have we really learned about dear old Frank? I can't say; I'm too busy worrying about what the new owners of OUR old house have figured out about US.
Anyway, I could go on and on here, but this post is already in the running for most excessive ever, so I'll just close with one last thing. I'm not going to offer any comment on this; I'm presenting it merely as it is, a disturbingly existential pondering encapsulated on a clear plastic label, affixed firmly to a drawer in the kitchen:
