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Serious question, has anyone else's old house taught them to love a level?
My place in Cincinnati is from the 1920s, and nothing is straight. Last month I was trying to hang a simple shelf and my eye was totally off. Using a 4-foot level showed me the floor slants almost an inch over that distance. How do you guys handle projects when your starting point is already crooked?
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emerychen1mo ago
My buddy in his 1910s bungalow tried to mount a TV on what he swore was a flat wall. He used a level and the bubble was way off, so he shimmed the bracket. Now the TV looks perfectly straight, but all his pictures on the adjacent wall look like they're sliding downhill. He just laughs and says the house has its own spirit.
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the_ryan1mo ago
Man, that's the story of every old house I've ever lived in. My last place had floors so slanted you could roll a marble from one side of the room to the other. I hung a shelf level with a spirit level, and it looked totally crooked against the ceiling line. You just have to pick what you want to be straight and live with the rest being weird. I kind of love that your buddy just went with it.
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taylor_flores25d ago
Once you start shimming one thing in an old house, you're basically declaring war on the rest of it. Tell him to just pick one line of sight and ignore everything else, or he'll go crazy trying to make all of it level.
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