It's insane, isn't it? Our first surprise occurred when we opened the front door for the first time: the upstairs hallway was a wonderful shower fountain. The roof leaked badly! Later, we wanted better light switches, and discovered the electrical situation: one section two-prong copper, one section two-prong aluminum (!!), one section three-prong copper. We still haven't fixed that. When we went to replace the roof we discovered there were three layers of roof in all, one atop the other. That took ages to clear off.

Our biggest surprise came when we redid the heating system. We learned that the way the attic/roof was reworked (when the second story went on) leaves the old roofline beams just hanging in space. We have no idea how structurally sound this is. Makes it darned awkward to crawl around up there, though. It also manages to block any way to access (and therefore HEAT) the room in which I now sit. We gave up before ripping out any floors, so two years and thousands of dollars later it's still cold in here.

Redoing most of the plumbing was actually the easiest task, surprisingly enough!