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It's worth noting that "middle class" used to be almost synonymous with "bourgeoisie", and referred to a much smaller and relatively more moneyed segment of society than it does today.
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Feb 2, 2020 09:01
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Lead out in cuffs posted:It's worth noting that "middle class" used to be almost synonymous with "bourgeoisie", and referred to a much smaller and relatively more moneyed segment of society than it does today. Yeah, this - middle classes = rich people who aren’t hereditary land owners / aristocrats, rather than being just “people with a white collar job” or however it’d be defined now. There is so much extra work required to run a house in pre-WW2 times. Just in terms of cooking - no fridge freezer (so shopping basically every day), no ready meals or easy versions of anything. Everything made from scratch much more so than now. Wood or coal stoves that need constant tending and need to run pretty much 24/7 to heat and cook. If you’re trying to keep things nice and don’t have a massive family it’s just not practical without help.
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Feb 2, 2020 10:49
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It wasn't quite as medieval as you make it sound, cold rooms and iceboxes were used in wide use. but the modern idea of opening your refrigerator and scanning through several ready to eat meals before just taking a pint of ice cream from the freezer was completely out. Source: Grandma.
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Feb 2, 2020 12:25
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there wolf posted:Those date from an era when the domestic labor of a house was much greater than it is now, and most servants were women, black people, or both who you could pay very low wages. Being a housemaid was also a job for teens who had just moved from home. Like my aunt who was 15 when she moved from the middle of forest to Helsinki to work as a maid. It seems like a good starting job because as an older sibling in a large family she had experience of childcare and other household work and she didn't have to look for an apartment right away.
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Feb 2, 2020 12:50
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Nenonen posted:Being a housemaid was also a job for teens who had just moved from home. Like my aunt who was 15 when she moved from the middle of forest to Helsinki to work as a maid. It seems like a good starting job because as an older sibling in a large family she had experience of childcare and other household work and she didn't have to look for an apartment right away. Yeah, I was mostly thinking about the US but that is also true here. I guess what I was saying is it wasn't like Downtown Abby with a massive staff with a whole hierarchy and a reasonable expectation of lifetime employment and a pension after a certain point. A moderately successful lawyer in 1900 could reasonable have a cook, a nurse/governess if kids, maid or two, and maybe some kind of handy man. Mostly women, mostly young women, and in certain areas a subclass excluded from better paying labor like black people were in the US. If 4/5 people working in your house seems like a lot now, wages were poo poo and the work was substantial. Like wooger said wooger posted:Just in terms of cooking - no fridge freezer (so shopping basically every day), no ready meals or easy versions of anything. Everything made from scratch much more so than now. Wood or coal stoves that need constant tending and need to run pretty much 24/7 to heat and cook. Also no laundry machines, no vacuums, no electric tools, no reliable birth control to manage number of children and thus the amount of childcare to be done. And, yeah were talking about a pretty broad period so details can be picked over in a bunch of ways. The point is servants weren't the outstanding luxury that they seem now. They're the equivalent of appliances we replaced them with.
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Feb 2, 2020 20:35
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On the other hand, feminists and labor historians have argued that the advent of "labor-saving" technologies did little to save labor at all, but allowed the burden of housework to pass from the underpaid maids and cooks to the unpaid mothers, and as the absolute amount of labor per task was reduced the expectations of the mother were further expanded upon. Marxist feminists in the 1970s started the Wages For Housework campaign to try to push back against this, which was folded into the greater social wage/Guaranteed Minimum Income movement. Here, have an old-rear end book about it (this is from the website of a college course so I don't think it counts as  but I'll take the link down if it is).Ruth Schwartz Cowan posted:One sophisticated statistical analysis of time-use data collected from a large national sample of households in 1965 found that the average American woman spent about four hours a day doing housework (or twenty-eight hours a week) and about three and one-half hours a day (or twenty-six and a half hours per week) caring for children (a fifty-four-hour week). These figures were startling in two respects. First, they were not strikingly different from what Leeds had found for affluent housewives in 1912 or from what other researchers had reported for rural and urban housewives in 1935. Second, these averages were not markedly affected either by the income level of the household or by the educational attainment of the housewife: women who managed on less than four thousand dollars a year in household income spent 245 minutes per day at housework and 207 at child care; while, at the other end of the income scale, housewives who could dispose of over fifteen thousand dollars put in 260 and 196 minutes at housework and child care, respectively. Housewives with college educations were logging in 474 minutes a day of housework and child care (a little under eight hours); and housewives who had not completed grade school put in almost equally tiring days of 453 minutes (or seven and one half hours).
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Feb 3, 2020 00:18
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 Are they just tossing hot tarmac on top of snow? I guess that's one way to melt the snow away.
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Feb 3, 2020 10:07
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Usually the roads take a few years to start cracking up, think of the time savings!
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Feb 3, 2020 10:13
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PurpleXVI posted:
Not even tarmac, cement. You know, that famously flexible material.
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Feb 3, 2020 10:43
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Youth Decay posted:On the other hand, feminists and labor historians have argued that the advent of "labor-saving" technologies did little to save labor at all, but allowed the burden of housework to pass from the underpaid maids and cooks to the unpaid mothers, and as the absolute amount of labor per task was reduced the expectations of the mother were further expanded upon. Marxist feminists in the 1970s started the Wages For Housework campaign to try to push back against this, which was folded into the greater social wage/Guaranteed Minimum Income movement. Def agree. It's more appliances took labor away from a task, but the expectation to do as much work just shifted to other jobs, eventually including stuff outside the house.
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Feb 3, 2020 17:21
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StormDrain posted:What I loved in that video about stairs was them describing "middle class" houses and how they had servants quarters. My old apartment was in a 1915 quadplex and each unit contained a tiny shoebox-sized bedroom at the end of the hall with a tiny en suite bathroom. Even apartment dwellers had live-in help. My bourgeoise middle manager Victorian has three nice-sized bedrooms on the third floor, enabling you to have a maid, a cook, and a nanny. Or I guess if you were Catholic these could be overflow bunk rooms for your brood. Senor Tron posted:There's a lot of false romanticism thrown around about it, but I have also heard it said that in those times if you had the resources to hire people as domestic help it was basicly considered an obligation to do so. I could see this. By hiring domestic help you’re providing folks with employment, income, and if live-in, housing. Seems like a much better gig than working in some lovely dangerous Victorian factory while paying to live in a shithole tenement. Re: butler stairs: I love butler stairs! Here are my butler stairs:  They are narrow and have no railings, but they actually aren’t particularly steep. I haven’t taken measurements to compare all the many stairs in my house, but walking up and down them feels pretty close to normal. The things that need fixing are to add railings and lighting (there is no lighting other than that little window and light from the upstairs hallway and kitchen). Also if you’re taller than 5’9”, you have to limbo ever so slightly when you’re going down around that turn. Going to put some padding there for tall people. Here’s a side by side pic of both the butler stairs and the front stairs:  Butler stairs are steeper, but not by all that much - the front stairs start farther out (as they take advantage of a bump-out) and have the landing. I guess this house, being detached single family with a foursquare layout, had a big enough footprint that they could afford the space to not make the butler stairs (or any of the stairs) completely treacherous like in that video.
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Feb 3, 2020 18:33
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Those look more or less like mine, although we have a railing added in there at some point. I might take a picture but the butler stairs are the most shameful part of the house, as they were badly painted with toothpaste green at some point and it's all coming off in a mess 
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Feb 3, 2020 18:45
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plx
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Feb 3, 2020 23:20
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My friend lived here when we were in elementary school. The butler stairs were fine but the huge dirt floor basement with no electric lighting was noooope. https://mht.maryland.gov/secure/medusa/PDF/Montgomery/M;%2028-17.pdf Found these DC area mansions lmao https://mht.maryland.gov/404.shtml https://www.dmvauroragroup.com/area/washington-dc-metro-area/
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Feb 3, 2020 23:40
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Queen Victorian posted:Re: butler stairs: I used to live in a terrible "little" house in Bemidji. We had servants stairs that were so narrow that you couldn't walk up them straight. You had to crab your way up. It was technically a 5 bedroom house though only 3 were legit. Strangest place I've ever lived. Not sure how a person living off of Irvine Ave ever could afford a servant, but they did. The funny thing was, there was never a door installed on the stair side of the servants quarters. No provision for it either. There was a door on the upstairs side, but none on the stair side. We put a curtain there for one of our housemates. She didn't mind. It gave her quick access to the only bathroom in the house downstairs. I'm sure I've told the story before but I'll tell it anyway: At the bottom of those stairs was a trapdoor that went down to an old cistern which had been drained and they'd put the water-heater down there. It was all brick. About chest high, there was a bunch of brick that was bashed out that led to a curving tunnel. You could not see where it came out as it was curved to about 90 degrees I knew at the end of the tunnel was the furnace. I refused to go through it because I get claustrophobic. One day, we thought we smelled gas so we called the gas company. I showed him where the furnace was and he hucked himself up and squirmed into the tunnel. I climbed back up out of the cistern and sat down in the living room. About 20 minutes later he came back up and said everything was fine. I asked him "What's back there? I've always wanted to know." He said, "You don't want to know." I said, "Seriously, what's back there?" He said, "You don't want to know and I'm never coming back." True story. I imagine many a kobold was slain that day.
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Feb 5, 2020 04:29
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mostlygray posted:About 20 minutes later he came back up and said everything was fine. So the best case scenario here is a whole heap of rats right?
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Feb 5, 2020 06:32
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Senor Tron posted:So the best case scenario here is a whole heap of rats right? Worst is a Shoggoth being held in place by a star-stone of Mnar that's just about crumbled to dust.
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Feb 5, 2020 06:43
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mostlygray posted:I used to live in a terrible "little" house in Bemidji. We had servants stairs that were so narrow that you couldn't walk up them straight. You had to crab your way up. It was technically a 5 bedroom house though only 3 were legit. Strangest place I've ever lived. Not sure how a person living off of Irvine Ave ever could afford a servant, but they did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZeEC70Hw38 (To be honest I didn't remember the slur at the end, and I'm a little disappointed.)
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Feb 5, 2020 07:55
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Feb 5, 2020 08:47
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Just as likely electrocute yourself as to complete a circuit! E: just noticed the metal bed frame.
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Feb 5, 2020 11:33
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By popular demand posted:E: just noticed the metal bed frame. The new Abtronic exercises your muscles even as you sleep!
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Feb 5, 2020 12:38
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Can I post lovely contractor work in here? I don't have pics, but when our water heater went up a few months ago and started leaking, the plumbers the landlords hired hosed up our dryer. Sort of. They didn't want to extend the pipes another 6 inches, so the new water heater pushed the dryer exhaust off the pipe to the outside, so it keeps falling off and venting into the garage, making for nice hot humidity on heavy laundry days! And we haven't been able to get the plumber back to fix it.  EDIT: Oh! And after Hurricane Matthew, we lost a few shingles off our roof. Maybe a dozen laying in our yard; I picked up what I could and called the landlord, who called the GC of the company we both work for, who in turn called his nephew who does roofing. Said nephew came out and did the fix, but couldn't find QUITE the right color. So, he took some shingles off the back of the house and used them to patch the front, then put the non-matching shingles in the back. For some reason, I now have a water spot about the size of a large banana on my ceiling, right under where he took them from. Can't help but think it's related. D34THROW fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Feb 7, 2020 |
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Feb 5, 2020 16:16
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D34THROW posted:Can I post lovely contractor work in here? yep
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Feb 6, 2020 20:20
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I just noticed what definitely appears to be water damage on the ceiling in my kitchen. Clearly following along a joist edge, with a couple spots at the joists on either side. This is directly below the master bath, the main spot starting at the corner of the shower pan and running along the short wall of the adjacent tub. Secondary spot under the tub near the drain, and another one in the other direction under the shower pan. Accessing the cavity will either requiring opening the ceiling below, or ripping tile and/or flooring up in the bathroom. Assuming I'd rather just throw money at the issue right from the get-go than trying to get in there myself, what sort of consultant should I be calling in here? Plumber? General contractor? Hank from down the road who has a cousin who once redid his own bathroom? Like I'm handy but I just don't have the time and energy to deal with this and I want to know what we need to do and how extensive the repairs are likely to be.
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Feb 7, 2020 19:34
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Bad Munki posted:I just noticed what definitely appears to be water damage on the ceiling in my kitchen. Clearly following along a joist edge, with a couple spots at the joists on either side. This is directly below the master bath, the main spot starting at the corner of the shower pan and running along the short wall of the adjacent tub. Secondary spot under the tub near the drain, and another one in the other direction under the shower pan. Accessing the cavity will either requiring opening the ceiling below, or ripping tile and/or flooring up in the bathroom. The leak will probably be easy to deal with but the drywall ceiling is gonna be the real pain in the rear end for this project. A plumber can cut open the ceiling and fix the leak but might not want to fix the ceiling, or might not do a great job of it.
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Feb 7, 2020 19:47
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Bad Munki posted:I just noticed what definitely appears to be water damage on the ceiling in my kitchen. Clearly following along a joist edge, with a couple spots at the joists on either side. This is directly below the master bath, the main spot starting at the corner of the shower pan and running along the short wall of the adjacent tub. Secondary spot under the tub near the drain, and another one in the other direction under the shower pan. Accessing the cavity will either requiring opening the ceiling below, or ripping tile and/or flooring up in the bathroom. Yeah, got similar stuff happening, but we're renters. The tenants in the suite above us moved out in December because they got sick of having to patch-repair leaks themselves because the landlord never got around to it. In preparation for the new tenants, the landlord (who insists on doing all plumbing himself), came down and frantically did a bunch of work on the suite on new years day. A couple of weeks later, we noticed water dripping from the ceiling in the lobby of the building, directly below that suite's bathroom. I don't use that entrance, so hadn't really paid attention, but some other tenants had put down a bucket to catch the water (and emailed the landlord). This had been going on for at least a week, and by this time there was yellow crap seeping through the ceiling and drywall of about half the room. This included around the always-on light fitting. At this point I texted him, saying it was an electrical hazard and he needed to get it fixed right now. Fortunately he responded, although the response was a little laughable. He got his maintenance person to turn off the mains and prepare the space, then got a guy who's the boyfriend of another tenant and who was once a plumber's assistant to come in and fix the leak. (It was some valve that wasn't seated properly or something). The dripping stopped, and so far, so good. Except the whole room still has yellow crap all over the outside of the drywall, and there's almost certainly a ton of water behind that. I asked what the plan was now, and got this response: quote:[maintenance guy] places a heater in the lobby. It will remain there for next ten days or more. Once the plaster dries I will evaluate the damage. It's been two weeks now. Also I just noticed that the plaster is bulging out in the ceiling of the entranceway inside our suite, which is right next to the lobby. I have a horrible feeling he's just going to patch up the plaster around the main leak, and paint over the rest. But I'm curious, and by no means an expert here, about the structural integrity of the soaked floor joists and studs, and the likelihood of mould growing behind the plaster. (If I get time, I'll also post photos.)
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Feb 7, 2020 22:00
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Stop calling your landlord and call the city code enforcement instead.
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Feb 7, 2020 22:51
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Poke it with a broom handle (wear goggles and keep your mouth shut.)
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Feb 7, 2020 23:26
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https://twitter.com/legaladvice_txt/status/1225751088856551425?s=20 The video, proving the temperature: https://m.imgur.com/a/3ct0VRh
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Feb 8, 2020 00:33
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Jesus, 100C hot ceiling? I'd be worried about something breaking and literally boiling me alive; that's "sleep in a store room at work" bad.
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Feb 8, 2020 00:56
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Computer viking posted:Jesus, 100C hot ceiling? I'd be worried about something breaking and literally boiling me alive; that's "sleep in a store room at work" bad. 
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Feb 8, 2020 01:01
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peanut posted:Poke it with a broom handle (wear goggles and keep your mouth shut.) The bulge in our suite is pretty small (maybe 10" diameter). I did poke it with my finger, and it went right through with very little pressure.
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Feb 8, 2020 01:23
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Freudian posted:https://twitter.com/legaladvice_txt/status/1225751088856551425?s=20 That's bad and something needs to be done. But it seems like a big concern is comfort sleeping, in which case you know just drag your mattress into the livingroom for the night?
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Feb 8, 2020 01:28
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Is there a way to access that machine space? You could cook a roast up there given enough time.
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Feb 8, 2020 01:31
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Facebook Aunt posted:That's bad and something needs to be done. But it seems like a big concern is comfort sleeping, in which case you know just drag your mattress into the livingroom for the night? Going by the comments, the big concern is the boiler catastrophically leaking or exploding, thereby showering them with superheated water and either killing them or putting them in a state where they wish they'd died. The Reddit thread advice seems to have settled on the consensus of "call 911 right now".
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Feb 8, 2020 01:34
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In that situation I'd contact the fire department on a non emergency number. It's a potshot, but definitely one I'd make.
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Feb 8, 2020 01:44
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Or if the building has slab perimeter heat, the zone valve for that slab is stuck wide open, and they need someone who can properly troubleshoot it (lol not the maintenance guy). gently caress that poo poo though, I'd be calling the FD already.
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Feb 8, 2020 01:51
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MRC48B posted:Or if the building has slab perimeter heat, the zone valve for that slab is stuck wide open, and they need someone who can properly troubleshoot it (lol not the maintenance guy). "Hey, I'm not sure if you're the right guys to call, but my walls are literally hot enough to boil water, that's bad, right?"
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Feb 8, 2020 02:09
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Don’t call the FD. I work for a large FD and we have no control over these situations, only businesses. All we could do is cut power to whatever is causing the heat, then advise you to call a certified plumber/electrician/HVAC specialist or whatever, or have you contact your landlord.
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Feb 8, 2020 03:08
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The idea is to make a big enough scene that the management company is obliged to cough up and fix it. The OP's problem is the complex management is too loving cheap to pay for a service call.
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Feb 8, 2020 03:15
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