If we let them get by with this, next they will leave cartons of products in the aisles and expect you to restock the shelves for them too.
Have you ever shopped at Aldi? That's almost what goes on over there. I know you think you are working for the shop if you bag your own groceries, but like the gas stations they are selling a product. How they deliver it isn't part of the contract.
I can't agree with you more regarding self-checkout. It's an insult to the customer. Be that all as it may, the till tarts we know and love today are working on borrowed time. The self-checkout isn't exactly robotic, but it is a precursor to such things. Groceries will likely pattern themselves after those Amazon Go stores where maybe, if times are tough, there will be one person in the shop who dresses the lettuce to look pretty. There are few stores I can think of where checking out and paying can be done no other way than with a store employee.
OK, let's take Kroger as an example:
I have a pocket full of Rain Checks, because Kroger seems incapable of keeping some things in stock.
So when they don't have it, I request a Rain Check if it was on sale.
But besides that. Kroger is big on pricing things in volume. E.g. 4 for 12 dollars, which is obviously 3 dollars each.
However, you have to buy FOUR to get that price, else they charge 5.49 each. But they only had TWO or THREE to sell.
I've argued with them many times over it, because you can't handle this transaction at self-serve, and most checkers do not have authority to override the scanned price. If they have the authority to issue a Rain Check, I tell them I want a dozen cartons at 3 dollars each on the Rain Check and they will write it up that way.
Then I will take another older Rain Check out of my pocket, get my two or three at the sale price, then have them issue me a new Rain Check for the unused portion of the Rain Check I just handed to them.
There is No Way a self-serve counter can do this! Nor usually the attendant working the self-serve section.
I had a standing order with a small mom n pop grocery store for years. They would order a dozen of a certain product for me to pick up on the first Monday of every month and stash it in a certain storage area for me so I didn't have to have someone get it from the back for me. Because I bought in bulk like that, the order was automated with the vendor, and worked like clockwork for years. I also got a 10% discount. Then the store changed managers and vendors also. The new vendor was higher priced which was OK with me, no more discount, but they sold to me at cost plus 5%. I was OK with that too. Then they changed vendors again and the newest vendor was grossly overpriced for the item I was buying.
Plus they were mighty sketchy on having my order there when I went in ever since they changed to the previous vendor.
Their excuse was that vendor does not keep standing orders for anyone and they had to remember to order it for me.
I understood that so didn't complain and would just check the next Monday to see if it was there. Even changed to checking on Wednesdays, since the vendor delivered on Tuesdays.
Their latest vendor was priced two bucks higher than their previous vendor, which made the product higher priced than many other local stores. So I finally told them to stop ordering for me. The new manager told me they can't buy enough to get it for the lower price. I thought yeah right, but it turns out she was telling the truth, but only because they no longer carried that brand of other things. No biggie, I just get that product elsewhere.
Our Aldi stores down here are considerably different than those back in Missouri.
But I know what you mean. We had a store called Bargain Barn where they just stacked up the cases of stuff on pallets, no shelving of anything, hi hi. Even the refrigerated stuff was still in boxes on pallets, but pushed up against the big glass doors so you could reach in and grab something.
Although it was the same company, they moved into a new building with some shelves and changed their name, but still operated pretty much in the same way. The shelves were only used when a pallet got super low and they wanted to move it out and move all the other pallets up a notch. Little by little they added more shelves and had less in boxes.
Another move to a big store that was once a large grocery store and now they are like a discount grocery store.
But that is coming to an end too as they slowly migrate to becoming a normal grocery store with prices to match.
Even so, most of the stores we have here, mom n pop and local chains, and in some cases national chains like Kroger, almost always have lower prices than Walmart on name brand items. Walmart pushes their store brand, and they are usually the same price as local chains house brands.
One thing that floored me about Ace Hardware, who I always considered a High Priced hardware store, was they are underselling the chain hardware stores, and even Walmart on a lot of things. And since my frau works there part-time, she keeps watch on what's on sale too. Not counting her employee discount, things like outdoor bird seed and suet cakes they have a sale on quite often, and sometimes a really deep sale. What Walmart sells for 9 bucks, they have for 4 bucks on sale, and during a deep sale only 3 bucks, same brand, same size. Also, a toilet flush valve ring I needed, I checked at Home Depot and Lowe's and both of them hand a peg for them but were out, their price was 9.89 each. I even stopped at Colonial Hardware, they had one for 10.29 but it looked old, so didn't want to trust it. Stopped by Ace and they had four on the peg, for only 7.29 each, I bought two of them, and this was without using the frau's discount, in fact, she wasn't working there yet back when I picked them up.
Now don't get me wrong, Ace is still super high priced on a lot of things, and things they never put on sale. But the thing is, they usually have the kinds of items the big box stores don't even bother to stock anymore too.
So, although it might cost more, they have it and you saved hours of roaming around a big box store looking for something they don't even stock, hi hi.
Your rain checks could easily be handled automatically with the use of QR Codes. But then, you might have to get a clever phone, or even a smart phone, in order to use it. I've not tested it out here in Missouri, but the stores I used to shop in generally had a limit on the quantity of sales items you could buy. If it was 4/$12, that was all you could get for that particular sale. Of course, you might be able to go through the line four or five times to get the quantity you want, but be sure it's a different till tart each time. If they recognize you they will call the Kroger Police and haul you away. LOL
There are people who shop only with coupons and only buy items on sale. I've read an article or two about people who can live on about half the food budget you and i live on simply by shopping at 100 different stores instead of giving one all your business. None of them included the price of gas to get to these stores and of course the extra time had not been factored in either. But, if you have the time to hunt down sales and clip coupons, you can indeed eat cheaply.
I had an Ace Hardware within walking distance of my old house. That alone was reason for me to go there for many of my needs. There was a True Value Hardware just outside my walking limits and the two stores would often compete on sales items. I didn't need that much hardware to take advantage of it, but I did when it came to groceries. One of the local malls had a super WalMart just two doors down from the Kroger store. When WalMart decided to sell groceries at that store, then deliberately would undercut every sale item that Kroger advertised. Sometimes it was a huge discount. Kroger would do the same thing when they could and all us grocery shoppers benefited from the competition. But, WalMart being what it is (the world's reserve of hard cash), drove Kroger into the ground. When I left town WalMart was going strong, and the Kroger store was vacant. So now I don't shop at WalMart for anything. I may order things on line once in a while, but they are predators and I don't like the way they treat their competition.
One of my aunts was a Coupon Queen and often invited to write articles for our local small newspapers and a couple of local magazines. Although coupons were BIG in the mid-west, they were virtually unheard of down here. Instead, stores issued you these keychain cards, and if you used them, you got a discount, and if an item was on sale nationally, you got the sale price the same as if you had a coupon.
Some stores got carried away with this and started posting two prices on the store shelves, one for card holders and one for non-card holders. Most no longer show the discounted price on the shelves now though, mainly because the discount now only applies to a few items and it isn't that much anymore.
Even though Walmart is BIG and can buy cheaper than a single store, most of the companies down here who supply stores with goods, work more like a co-op warehouse. This is why most of our local mom n pop shops can have prices lower than Walmart on many items. Also, many of the product manufacturing companies for various food-stuffs no longer sell to Walmart, or if they do, it is not under their recognized trade name. Then too, their are some companies who kowtow to Walmart to get their account.
We have a large distributor over in Georgia named Flowers Foods Specialty Group.
One of their products is Mrs. Freshley's Pecan Twirls sweet rolls.
They could not make enough to supply Walmart all the time, because they would take care of the smaller stores first.
They do make a 3-per pack, packaged in bulk boxes they sell to Sam's Club, but only after they have filled all the orders to local area distributors to the smaller grocers. They refused to put in more equipment to handle Walmart, due to Walmart's reputation of dropping a product if the company would not give a lower price when Walmart demanded it.
Most of our local mom n pops have the individually wrapped long boxes of these sweet rolls, like they were selling to Walmart for the same price as to the local distributors. This irked Walmart so they discontinued carrying them and went with another company making something similar, but they taste horrible, hi hi.
I have to admit that WalMart has consumer sales down to a science. There is a reason why they are the biggest cash cow on the planet. In order to achieve that status some throat cutting and predation must take place. If the goal of a business is truly to maximize profits, there is no room for sentiment. I've read where businesses who actually follow the "maximize the profits" mantra are sociopaths in nature. Sounds right to me.
I agree!
The frau had to go out to a doctors appointment which is just past Walmart.
I had a sales flyer showing they had IN STOCK twin packages of 1A10B,C 2.5 pound each fire extinguishers on sale for $24.42 for the pair. I asked her to stop on the way home and pick up a pair to replace our existing pair.
Not only did Walmart not have what they advertised, turns out they never carried the two-pack, and the ad gave their exact store address. Instead they had loose ones, same brand, size, and type for like $14.89 each. I told her to pass on them, because ours are not yet expired anyhow.
I checked on-line and even the on-line blurb says they have them in stock at that store for that price.
So, I ordered them on-line to be delivered to THAT STORE, so I didn't have to pay shipping on them.
Got the receipt for the order in my e-mail, with a note that they won't have them for me until Monday April 13th.
If everything goes like the last time I had an on-line order delivered to the store, they won't be able to find them to give to me, even though I have the e-mail delivery notice with the location bin printed right on it to facilitate them finding it easier. They use the excuse they have not yet put away the special orders, come back tomorrow.
I feel your pain in regard to the deliberately false advertising practices used by WalMart. The exact same things happened to me but for different items, of course. The point of the Internet ads is just to get you into the store where they assume you will pay the altered price and buy a few things you did not intend to buy. I no longer go into the WalMart store unless there is no other alternative. That's rarely the case. I will order from them online and pay the shipping if I can't get the item anywhere else, but that too is kind of a rare case. I've also run into the case where certain items cannot be purchased directly from the manufacturer, but they will have a list of places where it can be purchased. A time or two I got back to the company to tell them they lied to me because the store did not stock the item they claimed they stocked. The only answer I get then is that stocking the items was part of the agreement they made with the store. They should have it. Right. I'll call my lawyer and start a law suit pronto.
Stores will tell you they have no control what the vendors put on their leased shelf space.
Vendor will tell you they only stock what the store said they wanted stocked on those shelves.
One or both are lying through their teeth. Usually the Store!
I do order a lot of things on-line, but most of them I have delivered to a store for me to pick-up there.
Unless shipping to my house is free, and it is not such a large size order I may not be able to put it away right away.
Also, I hate trying to get some things delivered on a day when it is not raining cats n dogs which will ruin what I ordered.
But sometimes that can't be helped, so I keep pallets and tarps handy to set boxes on and cover them up.
I also try to get things delivered by Volunteer Express Company, regardless of which trucking company got them as far as Knoxville. If it costs more it is usually just a pittance, often not more than a buck or two per case. But the benefit is well worth it. VEC always comes in a smaller tractor/trailer, they always have a lift-gate, and a pallet jack, and the driver will help pull the pallet up to the top of my driveway where I can unload it later into my storage sheds.
The way my health is now, I can only move one box into the shed and then rest for a half hour. No kids around here to hire for an hour to help either anymore. Even if their were, it is doubtful they could get their nose out of their cell phone long enough to help.
There was this one grade school kid who walked past my house every school day, he always stayed away from the other boys walking the same direction. I cornered him one day and offered him ten bucks an hour to stop by my house every other Thursday for an hour and a half to do some light outdoor chores. I gave him super easy things to do the first two times, then a little more work the next time, still simple though. He never showed up again after that. If he saw me he would say he has homework or his mom told him to come straight home. Some excuse.
No more kids come my way anymore at all.
For a short time in my teen years I worked in a grocery stocking shelves, among other things. People like you would stop me and ask about items on sale that were not on the shelves. I'd put out what we had, but frequently it wasn't enough. The store manager blamed it on "corporate" -- that's all they sent us. He was pretty good about issuing rain checks, but it still seems as if he was passing the buck. His wife did the ordering. So I'm guessing that she was not good at estimating certain things. I'm pretty sure that is what happens in the larger stores too. The manager has nothing to do with stocking the shelves. There is somebody who keeps track of the inventory and they may or may not be good at what they do.
I've only had things delivered by a transport company twice, and both times the drivers were very helpful. In one instance I ordered a treadmill that weighed in at 250 lbs on the truck bed. The driver pushed it off the truck and down a ramp that went right into my garage. He then helped me drag it closer to the entry door to the house, but it was up to me to get it into the basement. The second instance was here in O'Fallon. I don't know why but Kohler decided to send their medicine cabinet to me on a pallet. It was short of 100 lbs of mirrored glass and I could have possibly handled it on my own if I had a hand truck. But the driver didn't want to keep the pallet so he brought it right to my garage where it sat until I could install it. Then there was the UPS guy who hand carried my 130lb gun safe from his truck parked on the street into my garage. Getting THAT to the basement required me purchasing a hand truck and two other people to help me lift it. I couldn't believe the UPS guy did it on his own. Generally they are only required to carry 60 pounds or so.
I don't know if I could hire any of the kids around here to do chores for me. They have amazed me more than once by volunteering to shovel the snow from my driveway. A time or two they never even asked me. They just did it. But I'm a cynical ol' coot. I don't believe they did it because they wanted to. LOL My guess is they were doing charity work to satisfy some program conducted by their church or school. This community is very big on charity, which is fine and noble. I just get a little suspicious when kids go out of their way to do things I consciously avoided when I was their age.
I bet you can hire a handyman, i.e. a full grown adult. He might want $20 instead of the $10 the kid would take. But the older guy is more reliable and likely does better work.
I bought a Woodstock Soapstone Stove, but rather than have it delivered to my house, I had it delivered to my brothers business, because he had dock-high delivery bays, and I knew it was coming on a tractor trailer. We had a fork lift there so got the cheapest form of delivery. Woodstock loaded it, we unloaded it at our end.
I forget now what that sucker weighed, but it was over 500 pounds, might have even been closer to 700 pounds.
OK, it was on the dock, but how to get it down from the dock into a pick-em up truck.
I already knew I would need to buy some heavy lumber and a way to get it off the pick-up truck when I got to my house.
So I bought a couple of 12 foot long 4x6 wood beams. Those suckers were heavy also.
I also bought some big 2 inch x 2 inch iron angle irons and super long lag bolts to hold them on the back side of the wood beams.
The wood beams would actually sit on the bumper of the truck, with the tailgate off, and the angle irons would keep them from slipping off.
But I still had to get it off the dock and onto the truck, and thought about sliding it down the same way I planned on taking it off, but couldn't figure a way to do that.
There just happen to be some ramps used for oil changes in the warehouse, so I put them up against the dock and backed the back of the truck up on them until the bumper was tight against the dock. This still left about a two foot drop to the bed of the truck. My brother had the bright idea of using the fork lift like an engine puller, so we screwed four chains to the crate, one on each corner, and slipped each one over a hook he put on a fork of the fork lift. We lifted it up and bounced it a couple of times to make sure it wouldn't come loose before pulling out over the truck. Even so, we all had to push against it for it to clear the edge of the dock. That's when all holy hell broke loose, and the crate started coming apart. It tumbled over landing on its side in the pickup truck, but only actually dropped about a foot during this.
I thought for sure it would be damaged. But four of us managed to get it stood back up and slid to the front of the truck bed. It did break the window on the back of the truck when it tumbled also, but didn't turn it into small pieces, just a huge crack, and it was bent inward a tad.
I slowly rolled the truck down off the ramps, and with that much weight in the truck, the spare tire underneath snagged on one of the ramps and drug it along a bit. I though for sure we would tip over sideways, but it came loose and all was OK.
I got to my house, then went back to the warehouse to get my two boards with angle irons, then back to the house.
Backed up as close as I could get to my front door, which means I was in the front yard, and the boards would have to extend across a narrow patio about a 10 inches above the patio.
Three adults and two kids could not get that thing to slide out of the truck, much less down those wood beams.
The frau got out her rolls of wax paper and we covered the top of the beams with the wax paper.
And I got a come-along I had and ran a rope from a tree in the back yard, through the back door, out the front door and tied the come-along to it. All of us took turns cranking the come-along and resetting it every foot or two. Shortening the rope each time too. The wax paper did nothing except scrunch up and get in the way.
It took over 4 hours to get it from in the truck to through the doorway and off the ends of the wood beams.
Right in our living room, just far enough inside the front door so we could close the door is where it sat for about two weeks as I figured out how on earth to get it to the area of the house we wanted it, which was also two steps down in the family room.
I used the strap iron to hold the crate back together. Took a hammer and knocked some of the ceiling drywall out, just enough to slip a chain up and over a ceiling joist about 2 feet closer to the rec room than the crate sat. This worked great, it slid when I tightened up the come alone, then I could lift it a tad and have every one push against it as I let it down to pick up an extra foot. Another hole in the ceiling got it closer to the steps.
That was enough for one day.
I made a hole in the den ceiling about 3 feet beyond the steps, to make sure the crate would clear the bottom step when I went to set it down. The best made plans of mice and men often go astray. Oh, the crate cleared the last step OK, but the come along only had a 2 foot draw, so it would not lower far enough to reach the floor. No room to get those beams in there either, so I sawed 3 feet off each beam and used that to set the crate on top of, then readjusted the chains and pulled it up and slid the beam ends out and set it on the floor.
That is where it sat for over three months, as my wife's illness took another downturn.
For a long time, we thought she would never get to see a fire in the wood stove.
Eventually, I got the stove set up on the new hearth I built for it, and connected to the outdoor chimney I built for it.
We did have several fires in it for over two heating seasons, before she passed away.
That's an incredible story. LOL If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I am certain that you were one of the main engineers behind the building of the Egyptian pyramids. Each stone of those monuments was at least the size and weight of your stove and those people lifted them up nearly 500 feet. Amazing. Simply amazing.
Of course I wasn't there to witness your Soapstone Stove project, but after reading your narrative I was wondering to myself why you couldn't put the stove crate on a dolly and move it around that way. It would have been much less effort pushing it around. Then again, I wasn't into building pyramids in my previous life. LOL
We did have some flat dolly's but when we set it down on them, they collapsed and snapped the wheels off.
We also tried lining up a row of broom handles to move it a little ways away from the door.
When we had the auction, it took six guys to pick that sucker up and carry it outside to be auctioned off.
And two of them had those back slings used to carry heavy things like refrigerators.
I had their Fireview but with the heavier Keystone loading door, plus it had the Hybrid catalytic package installed.
It was the heaviest of all of their models when completed, they show 550 lbs for the Fireview, but the heavier door probably added another 20 pounds, and the put the iron tools package inside the unit too, another 10 pounds.
If I recall, the shipping weight was probably closer to 600 lbs if not over that.
The Fireview held more of the soapstone slabs than any other unit they made.
Even the back was four large soapstone vertical pieces and one horizontal piece at the top.
A beautiful stove for sure! Wish ash drawer, heat shields to protect the floor, etc.
Had every option they offered. Ha, I had money at the time too, hi hi.
Don'tcha know, Aliens built the pyramids!
I've seen numerous videos on different ways they could have done it, and many of them were quite convincing it was not as hard as it appears, although time consuming and a lot of extra work on some of them.
What kills me is the long distance those stones had to be brought from.
One video showed they just brought in dirt to get the ground level up to the level of the current row of stones they were setting in place. Another showed them using a fulcrum to lift and turn the stones to where they were set down.
You can laugh at me for this or not. One of my construction clients had an arched brick front for his front door.
He wanted one that matched it for the little side door at the end of the house, but still facing the front.
I called my uncle and a few other brick workers to see if they would do it. Their prices were staggering.
I asked my uncle how on earth they get those bricks to stay there without falling down until the top key brick is set in place. We didn't have the Internet back then to look things up. So I spent some time at the library and the way most of them were done required a lot of wood framing work, almost like making a form the bricks would rest on.
My uncle said doing it that way would up the cost considerably, and not allow the proper raking of the mortar joints.
He told me to just buy a bale of 1x2s and he would sketch how to do it the easy way. Which he did for me.
But talk about luck of the Irish. The job he was working on was put on hold for a week for some reason, and he called me and asked if I did that arch yet. When I told him no, he said how close are you to being ready. I said I'm ready now and planned to start tomorrow. He said great, give me the address and I'll be their at 8 am. He worked through lunch and finished the entire thing by 1:30pm and even pulled all the 1x2s he added out and reraked a few of the joints.
He only charged me 120 bucks, when all the bids were well over a grand just for labor. 1979/80 era.
Said he would have charged me only 100 bucks if he didn't have to mix the mortar from scratch, hi hi.
Oh, and all I did was get in the way! hi hi.
Somewhere in my distant past I believe I viewed a television show about how the pyramids possibly were built. The method that stood out in my mind involved spiral ramps that all those enslaved workers used to pull up the blocks. The question of how the material got to the job site was answered by the discovery of a possible canal leading up to the pyramids. The rocks were loaded onto a barge and floated down the canal. However, some of the stone came from quite a distance away and they didn't think a canal was the answer to that. Thus, the only solution left must be aliens.
I've seen some of the grid work used to construct stone doorways. I suppose it could be simple if done the right way. There are any number of houses around here with brickwork arches and I'm guessing there is a standard ready made form for those. Bricks don't weigh as much as stones and would be easier to handle.
We had a spiffy Ben Franklin stove in our old house. It was all cast iron and must have weighed a ton. However, it came in pieces and the workers had to assemble it. That means they didn't have to move the entire stove all at once. They just took the pieces out of the box one by one. The people I sold the house to didn't keep that stove very long. It must have taken at least a few people to carry it away.
When I lived in the big house that was formerly my grandparents home on dad's side. Besides the humongous fireplace in the living room, it had the ugliest wood stove you ever saw in the back of the house he used as his office. It had absolutely no amenities to it. It was basically a tall steel box with a door on the side and a chimney on top. The chimney had steel fins which looked like they were made out of the same thing as the decorative ring used on walls when chimneys go out that way. It had a pipe at the bottom about half the size of the chimney that went to outside as the air intake, and this had a damper built into it that worked on a bimetallic strip to adjust the temperature in the room, or actually the firebox itself.
It had absolutely no ornamentation on it of any kind, not even on the corners, just flat steel panels welded together.
I'm sure at one time it looked great as long as they kept it polished with stove blacking. The only thing interesting about the stove was the inside bottom plate. It sloped from left side to the door on the right side, but had a six inch flat area just before the door, and three or four metal rods from back to front right before the flat area. I assume this was so when you tossed in a log it stayed up high to the left, and the coals and ashes would slide down to the door to help clean it out while still in operation. This also looks like it was added in sometime after the stove was built.
When I first moved up to Creve Coeur, I bought a cheap Grandpa Pigeons wood stove, thing was made of stove pipe not steel, you may have seen these cheap things advertised at one time.
You would have loved my home-brew chimney I placed in concrete outside the house. It was originally the 14 inch diameter steel pipe used to hold up a large advertising sign at the Bettendorf-Rapp food store. I managed to snag that sucker for only like 100 bucks after they had cut it off and I paid them to cut the top part off too, the section I got was 18 feet long.
I moved it up to the florist first dragging it behind the tractor by putting a chain through the electrical access door.
Then using the front loader lifted one end into a tractor trailer, then the other end and slid it inside and brought it to my house. Got it out of the truck by tying a chain to a tree and then pulling the tractor trailer back out of the yard. Broke the step on the trailer, but Probst welded it back for me.
In fact, Probst is who moved the pipe, stood it up in my pre-prepared hole and balanced it for me to poor the rest of the concrete to keep it there. He also cut the hole in the side where the pipe would come from the house to it to make it into a chimney.
I guess I should say, I dug a hole and put about 8 inches of concrete in the hole, so that when the pole was stood up, it wouldn't sink into the dirt, and keep the electrical access door about 8 to 10 inches above grade. He did set the darn thing about 6 inches further away from my gutter on the eave than I wanted, but that's OK, it worked out well.
I then filled the hole with concrete, about 18 bags on the outside of the pipe, and for good measure 2 bags dumped down inside the pipe through the electrical access door. Probst also welded 8 rebars around the top and welded a garbage can lid down over that to keep rain out of the pipe, since it had no drain into the ground at the bottom. It didn't look like a garbage can lid up there though which was good. We painted the whole thing with Forest Green Rust-O-Leum heat proof paint, but it sure didn't look heat proof after the first year.
Those cheap wood stoves only last about two years, so long before I got the Woodstock stove I bought a used Franklin stove from a place in Kirkwood for like 50 bucks. It was cute, small and no window per se. It had three glass 2" circles so you could see it was lit, but that was about it.
I had a lot of scrap wood from my renovation projects, and although it burned up fast, I really didn't need the stove for heat. I even sawed up old doors, including hollow core doors to burn. Mainly just for the sake of burning something, hi hi. Using a steel chimney I didn't have to worry much about the occasional chimney fire from burning the types of woods I was burning. But you should have heard the noise when it did burn all the gunk out, hi hi.
Hmm, perhaps that is why the paint burned off so fast at the top, hi hi.
OH, one neat thing. After I got the Woodstock stove, we redid the chimney using Ceramic Glaze instead of paint. After a couple of fires that stuff turned into like glass above the chimney port, stayed dull under that area though.
The very first house I purchased was already around 50 years old. The unusual thing about the house was that it was moved from it's original location on a nearby farm and plopped down on the foundation in the new location. That foundation was not all poured concrete for some reason. Three or four courses of cinder block was placed on top of the poured concrete and that is what the house sat on. It all passed code so while I thought it was unusual, it was safe to inhabit.
The people who owned it did a lot of renovation, but the guy was not a carpenter. For example it was lath and plaster but there was no insulation in the outer walls, which I suppose was typical for old farm houses. He finished off the basement with real ash paneling and a bar. Plus he added a fireplace to the basement. It looked fantastic. After I bought it and lived there a few years, I noticed that the chimney, which was made of bricks, was separating from the house. It was about an inch or less at the roof line. I had no idea how this guy build the chimney but apparently it was sinking. I lived there twenty years and when I left that separation at the top was about four inches. I did what I could to fill it in with mortar. Now it's been over thirty years since I left that house. I often wonder if the chimney is still upright.
The only really old house I lived in was the one my grandfather on my dad's side built prior to 1900.
This house was not going anywhere. In fact, they broke two bulldozers trying to tear it down to build the shopping center.
Grandpa was so afraid of fire, that when he built this house, it was divided into four sections. All the outer walls were 18 inch thick, and the inner walls between the individual sections were 14 inch thick poured concrete, all the way up to the roofs peak. He had like a split level basement too. A basement under a basement under part of it. The lower basement was a large flower cooler, and his garage for the cars was above that part. At the other end of the house, under the front porch was another basement room used as a bulb cellar. Then at the west side of the house was another lower basement where the coal boiler was located, and above it, level with the normal basement was the coal bin, and above that was the sun room. Not counting the basements, this was an 18 room house.
I thought it was neat to get to live there, until the first winter came. The furnace was a large oil fired boiler at that time, and my heating bill ran over 1,200 bucks a month, and because it was all hot water heat, you couldn't completely turn off all the rooms. I had almost all of the rooms turned down as much as possible and made heavy use of the humongous fireplace. The bad thing about a fireplace is, it draws heat out of the house and up the chimney. This is why I added an outdoor intake to the firebox and a glass front. Made a world of a difference. There were also steel heating tubes that ran inside the walls to the upstairs master bedroom so the fireplace added some heat up there too. Even so, this only cut my oil bill down to around 800 bucks a month. I only stayed there about 4 or 5 years is all. This is where I was living when I moved up to Creve Coeur to a ranch style home with a full basement.
Your grandpa's house sounds like my dream home. Fire protection would be part of the concern, but my paranoia about weather would demand those 18" outer walls. No tornado is likely to bring down something like that. While I could not build my dream, the old house was an all brick exterior ranch. The county assessor loved it because he could tax it at a much higher rate than those crummy wooden houses my neighbors built. The bricks were 6" thick and there were 6" walls behind them filled with insulation. The ceiling had double the batting of fiberglass. This isn't the 18" of stone I preferred, but it was good enough. The ranch house was small, only 1500 sq ft living space. There was a full basement that was left unfinished til the day I moved.
One of the unexpected "benefits" of this construction was the thermal mass of the bricks. After going through an entire summer of Chicago style heat, the bricks stayed warm for several weeks. This had the benefit of requiring less heat to warm the inside. Exactly the opposite was true in the winter. We didn't turn on the air until July sometimes. Of course the surrounding trees helped, but I loved the thermal mass concept of the bricks until they started to crack due to normal issues related to settling.
I did anticipate my dream house to be a nightmare to heat in the winter; the same high cost for fuel that you experienced crossed my mind. However, if I did build myself a castle there would not be one central heating/cooling unit. There would be multiple units so that I could indeed fine tune the environmental temperatures and humidity to conform to my budget.
Well, all that is gone. I now live in a fancy cardboard box that looks exactly like all the other cardboard boxes my neighbors live in. I wear extra clothing in the winter which I didn't need up north because the plastic windows here leak fiercely. At least MO doesn't get as cold as IL, but it's still disappointing.
When grandpa built the first section of his house, gas was still used for lighting. But he knew electric was on the horizon and it would soon be available. He purposely installed much larger gas pipes than normally used, almost all the gas piping to light fixtures was 3/4 inch instead of 3/8 inch. He figured this way he could run wiring through it when needed.
As they poured the concrete walls, he added 4 inch square flue pipe at what would be 1 foot, and 4 foot above the floor. With a large 6 inch flue pipe to the basement on one wall of the house. Sure enough, when electric came, he was ready for it. Wiring to outlets was run from the fusebox in the basement up the 6 inch flue pipe to the 4 inch flue pipes. And the wiring for the new electric light fixtures went through the gas pipes. By the way, this was not natural gas, he had huge tanks similar to what is used today for propane, although I have no idea what type of gas was used. Whatever it was, it was not in enough abundance so he used a coal fired boiler for most of his life. The oil fired hot water boiler was not added until he was into his 50's and shortly before he died. Seems dad mentioned something about coal gas is what ran the lights before electric, but he wasn't sure either.
When I first moved in, I added 1 inch thick foam insulation to the walls and drywall over that, added another track to the windows making them triple-track. This helped keep the bedroom much warmer, but didn't seem to help in the other rooms I did this in.
I couldn't complain about my house in Creve Coeur, it was built as a Gold Medallion home, which meant 6 inch studs for the walls, so it was well insulated. However, even though it was a Gold Medallion home, which at the time it was built meant All Electric home, we had a gas furnace and gas water heater, but everything else was electric. Most of the other homes in the subdivision had baseboard heaters in every room, where ours had the normal furnace ductwork to each room, except for the fact the AC was a separate package from the furnace, designed more like a heat pump is today. It still used the furnace ductwork, but there was a baffle to keep cold air from backing up into the furnace, and the evaporator was outside just like in a heat pump. The house was perfectly balanced as far as heat, cooling and ventilation. Fairly cheap to heat and cool also. I hated having to move from that house!
