I know, I know .... it truly worries me that there are so many contenders for this title! Yet, this one - in the crawl space of a rental duplex, place originally built in the 20's - was bad enough for me to document on my way through.

First of all, I was delighted to see that there was a junction box used:





Next, I guess he ran out of Romex, so out came the extension cord:




Then he ran the cord across the floor:



He ran his circuits together, in a neat and orderly (unsupported) manner:



Finally, he was ready to go up into the wall:

In that first pic, Is the romex just 'wrapped through' the plastic box?

Yes, it is ... no splice in the box.

What scares me the most is that this appears to be fairly new construction. In a 50+ year-old building, you never know what to expect, but in newer construction, I am surprised. Mighty fine violations there, I might add!

Erm... may I correct you by quoting the original poster?

Tex, I didn't correct the man, simply because he actually is looking at some 'new' construction. This house has had extensive work done, including the replacing of some floor joists and the floor above.

A bit off point, but, IMO, when a place needs that much work - it's time to knock it down and start over!

Yeah, I just noticed that. I just looked at the pictures and then posted. I thought that those floor joists look pretty new and that the walls were poured concrete, certainly not something you would see in a house that old. Nice catch.

Indeed, I missed the floor joists.

The concrete wall looks like it's already seen a few centuries though, even if it's probably indeed not from the 1920s.

Personally sometimes I think the architectural value of a building justifies much more work than the monetary value of the house would, sometimes simply the fact the house was built 80+ years ago and is still standing.

I say the same of Levittown houses, but sometimes it would be cheaper to rip the thing down to earth, dig a basement and build a house that meets 2007 codes. (In other words, no 2X6 joists for a 25foot span or 12foot double-2X6 load-bearing headers.)

Ian A.

Sure, some things are simply best described using 4-letter words
However, most of the pre-WWII houses built to such a constructionstandard are long gone, so those that remain usually deserve to be saved unless there is serious strucutral damage (even though replacement of load bearing components, especially foundations is much more common in the US than in Europe).
I see far too many beautiful houses go just because someone thought the lot with a new house would be worth more than with the old house (which is unfortunately true in most cases since there seem to be too many people with bad taste) and leave the old ones to rot so they can get a demolition permit.

I wish it was the worst that I've ever seen...

I have you beat.

I need to get the pictures together but the rundown was a 1600Sq ft house that had one 20A circuit for the entire house. It originally had knob and tube wiring and basically a single overflowing junction box was wired into all of the knob and tube with open splices everywhere and to top it off a very thriving Rat colony chewing on the wiring. Pictures to follow.