I fitted a new cloakroom washbasin. Glad I checked each fixing hole relative to the top of the basin as one of them was about 3/8" higher than the other. I eas able to make allowances when I drilled the wall.
I suppose the holes are merely poked in when the moulding is soft.
It isn't just soft plastic - I have an aluminium bog-roll holder and when I fitted it the holes were the same spacing as the old one. Unfortunately there was a difference of about 3mm in heightof the holes in the holder and the holes in the wall were level. Then the holes for the sprung cylinder on which the roll goes were out by another couple of mm - in the same direction! I did some filing and bodge drilling but the roll is still noticeably tilted and has been annoying me for about 25 years. Somewhere I have a tuit in the form of a right-angled drill chuck so eventually...
I fitted some metal shelf brackets from IKEA for dad. Every mounting hole was in a different random position. I had to number the brackes to make sure I fitted the same bracket I had use to mark each drill hole, or they would all have been out of line and at random angles.
Some years ago I bought 100 TV aerial chimney brackets. They were all malformed and if the side of the chimney was vertical the mast came out on a slight tilt. I took them back and the man said I was 'a bleeding perfectionist'. He changed them though.
Likewise my son-in-law had a house in which the downstairs lavatory pedestal was faulty in that the base was rotated somewhat relative to the top part. It looked odd. The seat was correct but the base (which was eight-sided; well rectangular with bevelled corners) was at an angle.
Not the same thing at all, and I don't know why it comes to mind, but in the 1970s my uncle had a flat roofed kitchen extension built. The brickwork joined the existing building at each side. Somehow it rose one course on its way round. The whole structure was skew-whiff. The back window was on a distinct slope but the ceiling (I don't know how or why) was perfectly level, so the bit of wall above the window was visibly trapezoid.
Bill
I've had the same problem in the past. Three 1 metre long shelf fixings so I used one as the master for marking and drilling the holes and then found the holes in the other fixing were in somewhat random positions.
There's a jargon word that describes this fault in a building, but I can't remember what it is...
Well, in a crystal it would be a screw dislocation
I wish you could. Anyway, years later he sold the house and no-one noticed the defect.
Bill
Having a "pig" in it, or a "pig course"?
According to this website, regional variations are "quelks" and "gorrets" ...
when I went to buy a corner basin for a tight space in a small loo, the BM said 'go out and pick the nest one, none of them are square, but some are more square than others'.
Clay shrinks as it dries before firing..
My builders kept telling me 'building is not engineering. Nothing is ever true or square, we just work around that'.
My whole house is a parallelogram. Its out by a couple of inches one diagonal to the other.
In message , Bill Wright writes
Did he live in Kimpton?
My semi neighbour built a d-i-y extension which did just that:-)
Around the same time as well!
Must have been built by the same people who built mine. Put 150 years of small movements on that and then try to find anything remotely square, level, flat or straight....
worse. the floors were built level..on green oak frames. They aren't any more :-)
Brickwork had a pig in it
In my BCO days soemone ran into this when extending a house
Pissedbuilder.
When the first extension was being built on this house I saw the brickie outside counting and looking puzzled. One side of the back of the house had one less course than the other. You can't trust builders with helicopters!
In article , snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net scribeth thus
Thats nothing .. there're building a new cinema complex over at St Neots and thats a whole metre out in where its located.
Just how do they c*ck that up?..
Surely there must be surveyors come to check these things .. aren't there?..
Also in the 1970s, we bought a new house on a new estate. One weekend, just round the corner from the show house, they demolished a freshly built detached house, carefully stacking window and door frames, before rebuilding it over a very few days.
It turned out that the plasterers had gone in, checked the rooms for square, and found that the back wall was a brick longer than the front wall!
They should call it M C Escher House, and run a waterfall all the way around it.
On Saturday 20 April 2013 12:34 Andrew Gabriel wrote in uk.d-i-y:
There's a rumour that Senate House at Surrey University was built 180 degrees out, rotated about its centre.
But that might well be a myth.
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