That’s the thing. This is the house he built for himself. Lived there 40 years, think my uncle bought it off his estate. Might have been one owner in between. The floor plan wouldn’t really work for that without totally gutting it too.
Plus multiple front doors is a mysterious thing with McMansions, including additional faux entryways. The 2 or 3 houses of this type from the same time that I’ve been to all have at least 2 front doors distributed seemingly at random. I don’t think anyone knows why.
It’s one of several things we just can’t figure out. If it was just another McMansion sure OK those are weird and made of spit and glue.
But the house is this bizarre mix of cut corners you wouldn’t expect a corner cutter to subject themselves to, outdated but at the time high end stuff, and things that are somehow more expensive but also much worse than doing it right.
Like the HVAC thing was apparently the super high end, cutting edge way to do AC for 2 years in the 70’s. Right around when the house was built. And there are sweet 70’s intercoms in every room, even the bathrooms. But then all of the wiring was done in a dangerously sub par fashion.
And the house had a big drainage problem. According to my brother who does that sort of thing for a living, some parts of the drainage system look like common, out dated methods for adding drainage after the fact. But they’re all done in ways that bear no relation to the way they’re actually supposed to work. And there’s this bizarre system of underground dams, pipes and storm drains in the middle of the yard that appear to do nothing.
It would have been more expensive than just accounting for drainage when they dug the foundation. But it was all put in when they dug the foundation? It seems to be set up to deliberately flood one section of the yard, which it does. But since it’s done so wrong it also causes everything to back flow into the foundation.
Personally I suspect it’s a situation where a guy thinks he knows better than everyone else. And he may have been using his own house as a sorta test bed.
