Do It Yourself

I feel your pain. 140 year old house with 3 additions and several remodels over the years. Still had a coal cistern when I moved in!

The middle bedroom has a partial window where the addition was tied in but they couldn’t be bothered to seal up the hole fully.. it’s about 8 inches wide and made of a custom storm window and nothing else (currently sealed up well with insulation until I can re-do siding).

Fireplace hearth (way overbuilt thing for a pellet stove -previous owner was a mason) was installed over a layer of hardwood flooring, which they didn’t realize wasn’t subfloor because there were 2 layers of hardwood flooring, old kind that was thick - the house sighed with relief when I ripped it all out and I gained 4 inches to my ceiling height.

Had to drill through a 4-inch thick cement wall to install my dishwasher. Someone moved the entry from one side to the other at some point, probably when they added the driveway and garage, and the walkway is still under my lawn. And my cabinets are different internal heights for some reason?

Weird stuff. Every project becomes 5-15 projects to do right.

I feel you man. Let's not forget about hacked up electricity, shoddy repairs from the previous owners, lower building standards back then and other surprises that make a somewhat doable project turn full teardown.

Yeah, I also bought an older place recently.

Oh geez, what an adventure!

This is a space that used to be two closets in our dining area. When we redid the bathroom to replace rotting subflooring we decided to enlarge the bathroom footprint from 22sqft (2.04m²) to 36sqft (3.34m²), which gave these closets only 8" of depth. They're too shallow for what we used to store in there, and the swinging doors took up additional floor space with their clearance needs. In a <1200 sqft (111.48m²) home that stuff adds up quickly.

Our plan is to build in shelving to consolidate our book collection, which is currently overflowing from a number of smaller bookshelves and stacks. We picked up some great boards from a local sawyer that I'm excited to get to work on for this project. Once the initial demo and resheathing of joists is done I'll be able to cut the boards for depth and get them installed. If folks are interested I'll try my best to record steps in the build to share with the group.