This House Sucks

We bought our house almost 6 years ago. It is a 25-year-old, two-story Victorian-style farmhouse with a big wraparound porch, and when we first walked through it, I loved the size of it. There was storage everywhere, the rooms were good-sized, and it even had a secret room upstairs.

As we settled in, we discovered the house had other secrets too.

The basic layout is normal enough. You come through the front door into the entryway, with the staircase going up in front of you. The living room is on the left and there’s a guest room on the right. The family room, dining room, and kitchen are toward the back of the house. Upstairs, there are two bedrooms and a bathroom on one side, and the master bedroom is on the other.

That sounds straightforward until you try to turn on a light.

Downstairs, almost every room has more switches than seems reasonable. I understand 2 switches for one light, especially if you enter the room from more than one direction. That makes sense; that feels civilized. Four switches for one light starts to feel like someone got paid by the switch.

The dining room chandelier can be controlled from 4 different places, including a switch in the front living room. The entryway chandelier has 4 switches too: 3 in the entryway itself and one at the top of the stairs.  

The family room ceiling fan is controlled from 4 different spots around the room. Even the front living room has 2 switches – on the same wall... less than 2 feet apart – that control the same light.

I don’t know what problem they were trying to solve. Apparently walking across a room was considered a design flaw.

There were so many switch plates, I decided to label them. I walked around flipping them on and off, watching for lights, fans, porch lights, mystery glows, or any other sign of activity. I wrote tiny labels and stuck them on each plate so we could function in our own home without treating every evening like a board game.

Some switches did absolutely nothing I could identify; those bothered me. A switch that does nothing feels suspicious, like somewhere in Springfield, a man is standing in his kitchen saying, “There it goes again!”

One evening shortly after we moved in, I was upstairs in our bedroom. It was already dark outside, and David had just come home from work. From downstairs, he called up and asked which switch controlled the exterior lights on the side of the house, outside the dining room door.

I had apparently left that light on during my labeling project. From the bedroom, I hollered, “Middle switch on the wall near the side door.” Seemed reasonable.

He flipped it off.

Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a faint light go off in our bathroom. I stood there for a second, because that seemed unlikely.

I went into the bathroom and looked around. The overhead light was off. The vanity light was off. Nothing obvious had changed. Then I remembered the toe kick light under the bathroom counter that was on once in awhile. I had seen it before, but I had never figured out how to turn it off – I thought it was motion or light-activated but it was dark and that light was now off.

I had an idea. I yelled downstairs, “Flip that switch back on for a second.”

When he did, the toe kick light came on.

I stared at it for a minute, because the bathroom is upstairs, above a completely different part of the house, and the switch he was using was in the dining room, on the opposite end of the house.

“Flip it off again,” I called.

He laughed and did it again.

The bathroom light went off.

So there it was. The middle switch near the dining room side door on the first floor controls the exterior lights outside the dining room (as it should) and the little light under the upstairs master bathroom counter.

Of course they’re connected – why wouldn’t they be? I have no explanation for this. I also have no peace about it; it makes me wonder how the electrical wiring passed any inspections. The connection makes no logical sense.

Our first Christmas in the house brought another electrical adventure. I decided to hang lights on the outside porch. I was very pleased to find an outlet in the porch ceiling, clearly meant for that purpose. I spent a couple of hours getting the lights up, plugged them in, and nothing happened.

I checked the plug. I checked the lights. I checked my attitude. The attitude was declining. I felt a little like Chevy Chase in National Lampoons Christmas Vacation and realized it had to be a switch issue but, for the life of me, I couldn’t find it.

I looked everywhere. I tried the entryway, the porch area, the nearby walls, and any switch that looked remotely plausible. Nothing worked. Given the dining-room-to-bathroom arrangement, I figured there had to be another odd pairing somewhere in the house; I just had to find it.

Frustrated, I finally messaged the previous owner and asked if the porch outlets worked, and if they did, how I was supposed to turn them on.

She responded and said, “Oh, there’s a switch on the back wall of the front entry closet.”

Of course there is.

I went to the front closet, pushed through coats and purses, reached toward the back wall, and found a random switch I had never noticed. I flipped it on.

The Christmas lights came on; that felt about right for this house.

The electrical system was only the beginning. We have also discovered that every seam, crack, trim edge, cabinet line, and baseboard in this house has been caulked. Some caulking makes sense. This house has more commitment than that. Around doors, windows, cabinets, counters, trim, and places where I’m not sure caulk was necessary.

I will say this for the previous owners: bugs have a hard time getting in. The garage gets big spiders once in a while, so the garage was apparently left to fend for itself.

The house was built in the late 90s, when central vacuum systems were all the rage. I’m pretty attached to my Shark stick vacuum, so I don’t use the vacuum ports throughout the house, but there is one that I use daily: a little vacuum port at the bottom of the kitchen counter. When I sweep, I can push the dirt toward it, tap it open, and the dirt disappears. I love that thing.

David, on the other hand, loves being literal, especially when it gives him the chance to say something ridiculous but technically correct. The central vac system gives him exactly that kind of opening.

Every time I use it, he says, “This house sucks.”

Literally.

The other mystery this house has is speakers built into the downstairs ceiling and the master bedroom ceiling. They do not appear to go to anything. We have no system for them, no obvious controls, and no reason to believe they have ever contributed to the surround sound they were designed for. They are decorative squares of silence.

Frustrated that we could find no obvious port and discovering other hidden oddities, I messaged the previous homeowner… again… and asked her where the wiring was that we could connect to the speakers.

“Oh, there isn’t any.” She answered. “We never got around to connecting them to anything.”

For 20 years? Of course not.

Then there was the master bathroom.

When we moved in, the master bedroom and bathroom were one long, open-concept idea, with the bathroom at the far end. No wall - no door – just two pillars. The shower, tub, and sinks were fully visible from the bedroom. The water closet had a door, thankfully, so someone did draw a line somewhere.

I drew mine sooner.

I had a wall built and a proper door installed, because I am a married woman with standards, and I do not need an open-concept shower arrangement.

We have been here almost 6 years now, and I still do not fully understand this house. I know where most of the important switches are. I know the Christmas lights are controlled from inside a closet. I know the dining room has some kind of side arrangement with the master bathroom. I love this house.

Since it already came with one secret room, it would not surprise me at all to find a trap door in the pantry that leads to a secret basement where all the mystery switches control the lighting.

A little grace, a little grit, plenty of laughter,

~Stef