• Ioughttamow@fedia.io
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    10 days ago

    When moving into our house years ago I got our couch stuck in the stairs. I had to sawzall it into 3 pieces to get it out and take it to the dump

    • KingJalopy @lemm.ee
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      10 days ago

      Long time ago, first time my wife left me alone for a week since we got together, I decided to go on a Xanax bender. I didn’t remember a fucking thing. But, we had a basement with a spiral type stairway where the washer and dryer were. She came home and went to wash her clothes and yelled, “what the actually FUCK!?” there was an entire sheet of plywood wedged in that stairwell, impossibly stuck. She demanded an explanation that I simply could not provide so I played it off like I was doing a building project down there and it got stuck. I had to sawzall that thing to get it out. When we went down we discovered I had built an entire grow cabinet for weed which was entirely up and running. I was like, “surprise!”

      She was surprised alright, but not as much as I was lol.

  • andrewta@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    I love older homes because they were built to last.

    I hate them because you can’t move anything anywhere without a saw.

    • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      Older homes are not build to last. Older homes are just worth preserving. I live in the Netherlands we have a shit ton of old homes, if these homes weren’t repaired or renovated across the centuries most of them would have collapsed. Before modern build codes, like before the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon for an old home to just collapse with the inhabitants in it.

      In many Dutch cities old homes are literally sinking into the ground, but instead of demolishing them most owners put in a new foundation. If it was an ugly modern glass box it would have been razed to the ground without a second thought.

      • andrewta@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        Interesting. There are a ton of homes here built (starting about 1920) that still stand. And trust me they were built to last. Minor upkeep and they are still good today, but then everything is going to require minor upkeep.

        • Hikermick@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          Survivors bias. You don’t see the old houses that weren’t built well because they’re gone.

          • andrewta@lemmy.world
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            9 days ago

            Look at trainguyrom and read his comment it might give you a different perspective.

            I would also say the ones that didn’t survive were the ones that failed do to not being maintained.

            • Hikermick@lemmy.world
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              8 days ago

              I too owned a house built in the late 19th century with an addition built probably around the same time! The houses in the neighborhood were built to house workers from the steel mills nearby. On the main streets you had the foreman houses. Lots of brick, well made. My house was a worker’s house, a stick frame shotgun shack. What little of a foundation it had was a few rows of bricks set upon railroad ties just below the surface. Most likely the only reason it is still standing is because it is on top of a hill and the soil drains quickly. When the wind would blow real hard the house would lean enough that the front door would open. The latch could get past the jam. Fixed it with shims but you get the idea. Nowadays building code would require a foundation built on footers beneath the frost line. (4 feet here) Another building code that is a big improvement is requiring (I forget the proper name) walls to be built in such a way that the space in-between studs doesn’t act like a chimney in case of a fire. Major safety improvement there. I now own a house at least a hundred years old. Same story, built to house quarry workers. Fortunately someone who owned this house before me poured a concrete foundation all the way around. The additions on both my houses are pretty amateur probably because they were done by the homeowners and there was little enforcement of building codes if there were any.

              Also well built houses also fall into ruin due to disrepair. Here in Cleveland there used to be Millionair’s Row. A street where the titans of industry built their mansions, the Rockefellers, Carnegie, Mellon. Very few still exist due to being expensive to maintain. I have a lot of experience with old buildings not only in my personal life but also at work (I’m a contractor) also most of my friends are in the trades with experience in old homes. Suffice to say just because a house is old is no indication of its quality. I can say plenty of bad stuff about new houses too.

        • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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          9 days ago

          My house was built in the late 19th century with an expansion added on in the 40s. The build quality of the original part of the house compared to the later built section is night and day, with the newest part of the house being the part that has aged so much worse due to trying out this new wood framing thing they started really getting into after the war

              • Hikermick@lemmy.world
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                8 days ago

                Light framing can mean a lot of things. Wood framing has been around a lot longer than that. I too owned a house built in the 19th century, stick frame though. Also an addition sometime after ww2. They dug a rotund basement (round brick room) to accommodate indoor plumbing and built a kitchen on top of it.

    • Comment105@lemm.ee
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      10 days ago

      The amount of furniture moving we do today is pretty insane. I kind of hate it.

      One more step in this direction and suddenly even kitchen cabinets are separate pieces, carried up and down and in and out and around tight corners. No longer attached to the wall. Just another freestanding cabinet, there in the kitchen, with some dust, two coins, a random piece from a toy and a few dead bugs behind it. So sometimes you’ll feel like you have to pull the whole thing away from the wall and clean behind it. And you’ll have to remove all the dishes first, becouse the MDF panels and their connections are not strong enough to witstand all that weight while being pulled and twisted and turned. And even then you’ll notice a bit more wobble than last time. So maybe you’ll cut a rough match with the baseboard and screw it into the wall when you put it back. Or maybe you won’t, either way it still won’t be good.

      When you end up moving a few years later, depending on your financial situation, you’ll remove the terrible cabinet snd either toss it or bring the poorly built half-mangled half-mess still technically usable thing to the new apartment. An apartment someone else just pulled a kitchen cabinet and everything else out of. And it was hard and annoying for them, too. And just like you, they’re not happy either.

      • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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        10 days ago

        I don’t think it is so much a thing of today unless you mean for the last few decades at least. Kitchens in particular are very weird since people just rip them out out of spite it seems just so the person renting the place next will have to buy a new one.

        • andrewta@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          Not sure where you live but where I live no one takes the kitchen cabinets when they move (us here.)

          • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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            10 days ago

            I am in Germany. Here people are very weird about kitchens when renting (medium to long-term, not with stuff like student apartments) and often do rip out their kitchen even if they don’t plan on keeping it unless the next renter pays them for it, if anything that got a bit better in the last few years as people have been raising awareness how wasteful that is.

          • Comment105@lemm.ee
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            9 days ago

            I don’t know of people bringing kitchen cabinetry during moves either, just the occasional kitchen remodeling.

            What I went on about was the logical extreme of this kind of moving behavior. The kitchen and bathroom are the two places left in a house where things tend to stay put, built in.

            What taladar said about a lot of Germans tearing out kitchens for no reason sounds absolutely ridiculous and I really hope that stops.

      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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        9 days ago

        The amount of furniture moving we do today is pretty insane. I kind of hate it.

        The fact is, the average person owns so much more now than they did at any other point in history. In the 19th century the average American home was about 400-800 sq feet with Victorian mansions pushing 2000 sq feet (also worth noting that the concept of a bedroom is only about 200 years old, and the option of kids not sharing rooms is only about 50 years old)

        I’d also argue that housing becoming a commodity is also a factor. With rapidly increasing rents, rental properties as an investment and non-present landlords one is forced to move in order to maintain their lifestyle far more frequently than they should

        Honestly in this historical context, I feel like there’s some wisdom to the small home and minimalism movements, primarily in that it returns to a more sustainable lifestyle in our urban modern lives

      • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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        9 days ago

        We ultimately had to not use the upstairs for our bedroom because a queen sized bed can’t fit up the stairs. We use the largest main floor room as our bedroom (which inconveniently one has to walk through that room to get to the stairs)

        It’s pretty clear that the stuff people choose to have in their homes today is different from the stuff people chose to have in their homes a century ago

    • Monzcarro@feddit.uk
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      9 days ago

      Per the article posted in the comments, this is a new-build. In the UK, 90% of them are built in the same style that uses a lot of traditional features.

      I do agree with the old homes being awkward though. Our staircase is straight, but narrow and very steep. The house itself was probably well built, but the decades of renovations made to it are not necessarily well done. We’ve found that we’ve had to strip rooms down to the brick and dirt floor to do it properly.

  • Zier@fedia.io
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    10 days ago

    There is a pullout bed in that couch, which makes this even more difficult because it is heavier, pops open when tipped, and will put you in the hospital.

    • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.worldOP
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      9 days ago

      Why anyone pays for a piano is beyond me. If you’ll take it out of someone’s house they’ll gladly hand it to you. The very great musician Neko Case made a piano orchestra out of several free pianos she put in her barn to record with.

    • Monzcarro@feddit.uk
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      9 days ago

      That customer sounds insufferable. Might well be the fault of the company but him going on about how much his house cost (and the sofa) makes him sound like a right tosspot.

      • bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net
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        8 days ago

        It’s not much of a brag, he probably doesn’t have any cash for repairs.

        Also they approached the staircase wrong, you put the top side down so that you can cup around obstacles.

        • VicksVaporBBQrub@sh.itjust.worksM
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          8 days ago

          I would guess, homeowner Luke is ok moneywise. If that couples photo on the website is his home… a brief analysis… correlation of christmas tree and miniskirt suggest an indoor temp of +72’F; an animal skin rug is under the dinning table (expensive choice); and the couple are likely childless (displayed book titled “Creatures With Cocks”).

          That’s on a assumption it is his home. Still, how and why Mr. Luke resorted to get the delivery guy to heave-ho-ing; it comically should’ve never come to that.

  • BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    My grandpa got a pool table in his basement in a very similar stair condition. To this day, I have no idea how beyond the fact that he had a come along tied to a 4x4 across the basement door. We just left it down there when we sold the house.

        • ZeffSyde@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          This actually happens. Had a relative that bought one of a row of townhouses being built back in the 60s. The company building the houses thought it would be a sweet incentive to include a piano with each one, so now everyones house in that row has a busted old stand up piano in the basement that’s impossible to remove without some sort of demolition.

          • Dicska@lemmy.world
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            8 days ago

            WOW. When the app popped up your comment, I saw the first sentence and I tried to guess which of my comments it was a response to. Then I went like “no way”.

            No matter how hard you try to come up with some surrealist bullshit, chances are someone had thought of the same and went like “this is a great idea”.

      • gramie@lemmy.ca
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        9 days ago

        We have that problem with our late parents house. The grand piano was placed into a second-floor room by removing the window casing and using a crane.

        We are hoping that the piano will sell with the house.

      • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        the legs come off a grand, they turn it 90d and wheel it on a cart. seen this done, required tall doors tho.

  • wrekone@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    10 days ago

    Looks to me like they were trying to get it down narrow stairs into a finished basement. I’ve been in the same situation many a time. This is solvable, though still a pain in the ass even when you get it just right.

  • Coskii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    8 days ago

    Reminds me of my own hilarious large furniture movements. Someone bought a love seat for the home I reside in, didn’t bother measuring anything, and asked me to retrieve it from the store. A very kind gentleman was paid to bring it from the store to the outside of the house. I took one look at the love seat, one look at the door, and asked him to kindly leave because he didn’t want to be any part of the process of getting it inside.

    I ultimately took a circular saw to the back of the love seat and later reattached it and stapled the fabric back on.

      • Coskii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        8 days ago

        It had a weird stylistic hump in the center that was the major cause of the problem. I was fully aware upon a handful of measurements that there wasn’t even a chance it was going to fit. My cut was only enough of the back to get it through the door. I realized upon rereading I made it sound like I removed the whole thing.

        Even now, 5 years later you can’t tell it was operated on unless you take a good look at the back of it.

          • Coskii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            8 days ago

            It definitely won’t. Maybe if I somehow push on that weird upper hump while positioning myself to sit I may have an issue, but otherwise it’s very much still solid.

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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    10 days ago

    I bet the owner went back in time and opened a door to help move the sofa and then closed it, the door vanished and now the sofa is stuck in an impossible position.