surprise!

You can never know what’s in there ..

... when opening up walls. It is more often then not, that when you start to “peel back the onion skin” (a quote from what I hope is a new customer, thanks Dave!) your eyes can start to tear up.

Case in point, a kitchen in a Lindstrom apartment building. What was supposed to be a basic "move a wall", turned out to be ...
something else all together. We found that all the plumbing from the apartment above with the exception of the toilet, drained down and through the lower apartments sink drain…yes including the shower! ...

With a little thought and some approvals from our friendly inspector, the problem is now fixed.

We also found that  the apartment building was wired like a "daisy chain", meaning power went from one unit to the next to the next, etc. causing another "stop to fix it moment". At least we had to re-route the other apartment’s main power lines into a common junction box and re-wire for the remodeled apartment- their own breaker box.

I am not saying these situations were handled wrong, this is a 40 year old building. Codes do change and I’m sure this was all on the up and up back then.

All this to say, you can never know what you will find. You can make some assumptions along the way based on your level of experience, but things can still come up to surprise you. Just be ready. And who knows.. you might find something interesting inside. I will save that for another post!

The Carpenter.