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Reading my old neighbor's comments on the city housing forum made me think about how things used to be around here
I was scrolling through a thread about lead pipe replacements and this older guy mentioned how back in the 80s nobody even thought about checking for lead before a renovation. That hit different because I just bought my house on West 47th two years ago and spent $3k getting all the old plumbing ripped out. You can tell the houses here have been through a lot just by looking at the foundation cracks and the weird room additions people threw on over the decades. It makes me wonder how many previous owners just patched things up with duct tape and hope instead of actually fixing stuff right. I guess my point is every time I open a wall I find some half baked shortcut from 30 years ago that makes my job harder now. Has anyone else dealt with that kind of nonsense in an older Cleveland home?
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shanelee12d ago
@jamie770 $3k is a steal honestly, you should see what some of these contractors quote for full repipes now. But the real hidden cost nobody talks about is the time you lose chasing ghosts in the walls. Three weekends of my life gone because some guy in 1985 thought flex seal was a permanent solution.
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val_williams21d ago
Stick with it, you're doing the right thing. @jamie770, $3k is actually cheap if you think about what it saves you down the line. I've been in my place on the west side for 12 years and every single wall I've opened has some nightmare from the 70s or 80s. Galvanized pipes rusting from the inside out, knob and tube wiring just left live and buried in insulation, and don't get me started on the "repairs" where they just covered dry rot with new paneling. The worst was finding a floor joist that someone had literally cut halfway through to run a vent pipe. Had to sister a new beam in there and it took me a whole weekend. You get good at spotting the shortcuts after a while though. Look for fresh paint over old caulk, any seams that don't quite line up, and always check the basement ceiling for cut marks in the joists. That's where they hide the real sins.
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