Have you ever had to undo someone else's 'jury-rigging'?
Question:geniuses find new ways to do old things... like connecting two water heaters 20 feet apart in series. attaching platforms to walls with guy wires... but when it's time to replace those jury-riggings, the worker must be even MORE inventive. and patient. AND, grudgingly, admiring.
have you ever had to undo someone else's 'custom' installation, of anything? what was your reaction? how did you go about 'fixing' it? could you?
unless you're 'scotty' from star trek or 'macgyver', i expect to hear some failures as well as success stories.
in case you are wondering, here's a version of the origin of the term 'jury-rigging'... http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pp...
Answers:
Having moved into a 1920's house that looked on initial inspection to be in good shape has proven very interesting. I was under the impression the craftsmanship of the updates was of good quality until I tried to put in a ceiling fan in my living room. SIGH.. looks were very deceiving. We took down the original lighting fixture only to fin GAS PIPES!! The house has gas pipes connected but capped off throughout all of the walls because this is how the house was lit and heated. GREAT! KABOOM or KERBLEWEY was all I could thing. What was meant to be a 150 dollar to 250 dollar job just became a huge ordeal.
The previous owner had just drywalled over the issue. This version of 'jury-rigging' is not only scary since leaks and accidental sparks could blow up my friking house. Contractors have informed me that the house will have to be gutted. I can't afford that right now so I have worked around it by having the gas lines taken down from the ceiling of the living room and redoing the drywall. The fan is up and the previous connection system to the gas pipes has been removed. Now there are just gas pipes throughout the house without gas to them until I can gut the house and insulate it will have to do. :-(
I like to call it Job Security. sometimes people do what they have to do, the best the can, that's why this site is so important. It helps people do what is right. Plumbers complain about the electricians painters complain about carpet layers, it seems that everybody has an opinion. Be considerate of others, nobody is perfect and even pros's have their own way of doing things. I have seen some douses, I seen a garage made out of used doors and spot lights made from coffee cans, I do admire raw ingenuity even if it is inferior to what others can do
Sure, I have to fix jury rigged things all the time. Usually something bad happens and I have to fix the jury rig and the problem it caused. I like your water heater example. How did the genius keep the breaker from tripping? Maybe I don't want to know. My favorite: A guy had a bad circuit breaker and it kept tripping. So he made up an extension cord with a male plug on each end. He plugged one end into another circuit and the other end into the tripped circuit. Worked great for him. Until his daughter pulled out the live plug and touched it. Lucky it didn't hurt her bad. Mom called and hired me to fix it. A new breaker and 15 minutes of my time fixed the problem. I charged her $12 so she would yell at hubby for being so cheap and stupid to almost kill the kid for 12 bucks. I could go on for hours with all the jury rigged things I have seen.
all of the time I have seen stuff that would make you pull your hair out
Over the years I have done about 1000 pre-purchase home inspections and I have to say that people are usually pretty good at trying to hide jury -rigged stuff when it comes to selling the family's largest asset.
I was tapping a wall listening for the sound of termite damage one day and I discovered that the owner had wallpapered directly over large holes through drywall... but that is reasonably common.
I found a kids tricycle holding up some bearers in the subfloor... not so unusual... the first handy thing is often used as a prop to try to stop a squeeky floor.
Showers ... the dry one is the one that leaks.. the owner doesn't use it.
Sagging window heads ... What? You have never heard of structural glazing?
fence posts. drive in a few metal star pickets to help support the wrotten timber posts.
Roof space... pales of water under dislodged roof tiles... (it is easier to replace or re-fit the tile.. but oh no.. most home owners will opt for emptying the buckets).
Power cabling. hahaha. Seems everyone is an electrician. There always seems to be a current running through earth wire.. hmmm. Some shocking taps... literally.
A piece of tin over a whole in the rotten floor and a mat over that.
A knife blade wedged in behind the architrave and used as a locking device for the door...
I push the button . ding dong ..
"what do you want"
*I see a man in a dressing gown and slippers yielding a large Kitchen knife*.
"Who me?" I reply.. The guy I work for just loves your house and said he desperately ewants to buy it and he wants me to measure it to price some new carpet ~ can I come in?"
Oh and one final thing..
The manhole in the ceiling that has been used as a repository for soiled condoms.
Got tagged with replacing a latch jamb on a break in.
These jobs are always a little interesting due to the fact that our scheduleing girl never retrieves enough info from the contact, so it`s always a mystery as to what all has been damaged and what jamb dimensions are needed.
The house in question happened to be a habitate house. They , quite suprisingly. had no 4 legged pets. But they did have a 2 legged animal. This kid( as the lady called him) had single handedly busted every door in the house, plus tore up large areas of drywall.
The "jury-rig" in question was the front entry. There were so many nails driven into the jamb to hold it together, all the hammer impacts had literally dissolved the drywall around the opening. There were 47 various sized nails just in the trim on the latch jamb.
The best one we constantly run into is the outswing prehung installed as an inswing. The customer will call us because the door he installed "leaks". (Think about it) This genius has just installed a 3 foot wide funnel in the wall of his house, only because he thought he knew what he was doing. One of the previous posts was correct when he called it job security!!
I always thought it was "Jerry-rigging," lol. I'm not mechanically inclined, so I've never really had to undo someone else's jury-rigging. Glad I learned how to say the word correctly.
the best part was when a guy ran a gas pipe and never installed a shut off valve and never capped it, there was a smell of gas lucky that all the doors and windows were open, i ran and shut off the gas main valve.
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