TL;DR What are some cool old vintage home features that you don't see much anymore that would be good to add to a renovation?One of my grandmothers is moving to Florida and I'm getting the house. The bones of the place is a late 1940s 2/1 bungalow. It was basically gutted and rebuilt on the inside back in the early 80s after a bad kitchen fire. Out went the hardwood floors, plaster, and solid wood built-ins. In came lots of melamine, fake wood veneers, and vinyl flooring. To be fair, based on old photos taken for insurance, the interior was wrecked by smoke and water damage. Well, 45 years hasn't been kind and most of it needs to go. Luckily they insulated and replaced the old plumbing and wiring so all I really have to do the easier stuff.What are some cool features I can add while I am at it? I'm going to be taking the kitchen and bathroom down to the walls and putting hardwood floors/tile back in the place. I don't have the inclination to tear out the drywall and go back to plaster though.Picture from google but is similar vintage. More posts to follow with some ideas I already have.
>>3001400I'm going to wire the place for ethernet to bring it into the 21st century so how about some mid-century tech? A home intercom system with AM/RM radios!
>>3001400My Nana always said she missed the rolling pin drawer the place originally had. Like the photo, it also had a dedicated cookie sheet storage area under it. The cheap cabinets they installed in the 80s didn't have either feature.
>>3001400The original house also had an ironing board cabinet in the pantry that was tossed. It was on an exterior wall and removed when they added insulation.
>>3001400The plan is to use tile for the floors and countertops in the kitchen and bathroom. I plan out ripping out the fiberglass tub/shower combo and putting something like this in.
>>3001406Color are yet to be determined.
>>3001400Picture rails
i just picked up an old sink from the 50s or 60s on marketplace for cheap gonna put it in my laundry room
>>3001431Hey, we actually have one! It is in the dethatched garage next to the washer and dryer. I believe it is called a utility sink. It is massive and the cast iron drainpipe has a foot built into it to help support it. The chrome on the drain parts is bubbling up and about to come off but it is otherwise in good shape.
Bathrooms used to have razor blade slots for discarding used razor blades. They'd fall into a hollow in the wall leaving a nice surprise for future owners renovating the place.
>>3001452I have seen these. I don't really want to add it to the house though. I mean more cool features, like this fold down bathroom scale. Not biohazards.
I once lived in a house with with speakers in the ceilings. They were for entertaining. You could use a single receiver that could handle multiple sets of speakers, a very common feature on high end units, to pump background music throughout the whole house. Also great when you were cleaning. Remember, this was pre-Walkman era technology. Portable music meant transistor radios. The quality wasn't great but it didn't need to be. It was mono sound anyway.
>>3001604this is stil a reasonable thing to do, run cables through attic and drop to ceiling or wallmount speakers remember surround sound?i feel like I never see anyone with systems anymore but it's lovely.sound bars are alright but it's incomparablespeaker lines ran out front and back, can toggle music to wherever with a simple audio reciever and bluetooth reciever
>>3001665I grew up with a decent stereo system in the house. A Pioneer SX-750 with a pair of 28 inch tall speakers. So I knew what a good system could sound like. Three generations have grown up with fucking headphones or earbuds. First with the Walkman, later with the iPod, and now with smart phones. They simply do not know what they are missing.The ceiling speakers did not sound good on that receiver. Poor directionality, no stereo, only a single driver. For background stuff they were fine, but they had no range and you couldn't crank them. Turn up the volume and they just blew static. I have wired newer systems for things like conference and meeting rooms. They aren't any better. They are intended for Zoom calls and promotional videos. You aren't going to cranking the Zep or feeling the rumble of the THX opening on them. I wouldn't put home theater speakers in the walls or ceilings. I never used a soundbar.Surround sound systems that use the little tiny itsy bitsy satellite speakers and a miserable subwoofer are a joke. I've cobbled a few 'surround sound' systems together over the years. My current setups, one for the living room TV and the other for the gaming PC, are very nice. One is a modern Denon 7.1 receiver hooked up to five 40 year old giant speakers (not enough space for seven speakers). Each speaker has a 400mm woofer, so no need for a sub. The other is three vintage receivers each connected to a pair of vintage speakers. One drives two centers, because you can never hear the fucking dialog anymore. The later system needs work. Two of the receivers need professional servicing as their left channels only work intermittently and no amount of DeoxIT in the potentiometers has fixed it. So I run it as a 3.0 system currently.
>>3001400install Med-Cabinets on every possible (vertical) surface in bathrooms. Check code for how low you can go.Knew an old guy who had 4 daughters all about 2yrs apart, and only one bathroom between them, so he put in extra M-Cs. Also great for them modeling clothes with mirrors showing all directions.Do Japanese style under floor between joists storage, but do it right, 'Merican Style.install runner strips full length on joists, then Last In First Out trays. Probably tie FOUR cords to the first one, to pull it with spare cords.Row of hatches could be in center of room, because you wont have holes for pipes and wires in the center of joists.You could also install banks of M-Cs at locations like front entry, next to coat racks, etc. Maybe to be able to check front door from kitchen/TV chair via reflection.
>>3001400Proper stair cases, hardwood floors, chair rail, picture rail, crown, wallpaper is coming back around, plaster is only in older homes and new microcement/tadelak/venitian is so labor heavy it's less than 1%ers. I would say cabinetry is losing most of the trimwork because people are getting poorer. It's depressing to see shakers or slab frameless with no end panels, light rail, top band or crown. It's bare boxes fit for a 7 eleven. Anything victorian went away and probably for good reason. Penny tile, valences, deco air registers, deco molding on casing, tall baseboards, plinth blocks, >>3001413I see them occasionally, but no one uses them. >>3001406add multiple shower heads and pressure boost. Zero entry wet rooms are a huge flex, but I think they're definitely dubious. All the surviving old stuff had cast iron tubs.
