In article <5vcM4goH8OkCF...@nojay.fsnet.co.uk>,
Robert Sneddon  <no...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:

        More of an unfortunate synergy between my parent's preferences,
the local landscape, the economy and the architect's habits. The view
was to the north and in 1968, who knew what OPEC was?

        The windows were double-glazed, mind you.

        One oddity was that my father had something of a fireplace
fetish, so the building had three fireplaces and a flue for a fourth,
all in a central brick piller three stories tall, surrounded by a wood
frame building. For years we thought that this was why a crack kept
forming on one wall each year, because the builder claimed that the  
pillar would settle at a different rate from the rest of the house.
It was only when we were touching up the place to sell it that we
learned the truth: one basement wall had one support fewer than it
needed and the weight of the snow in the winter made the wall deform
a bit.

        Of the three fireplaces, one was used all the time, one was
used mostly at Christmas (leading to the famous nylon shirt event)
and one smoked if you lit a fire in it, which greatly reduced its
utility.

        We discovered at one point that the brick wall of the pillar
would hold up a sock pretty well. This led to sorting socks by putting
them on the wall, which in turn led to mosaics built entirely of socks.
Mission drift is a hazard in all pursuits, including doing the laundry.
--
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll