What's a strange feature of your home?

There is a room in my basement that is down a set of stone stairs with only a large metal door with these monstrous metal hinges holding it on with several dead bolts. A car ramming it at 40mph would break down that door. In the room itself there is a single hanging light bulb and a chair. I like to pretend it used to be used as a torture chamber.
— Shinya_Aoki

I inherited my grandparents' house, and it's pretty weird. They had the house built backwards behind another house, so the "front door" (which is nailed shut for some reason) faces an empty field. Since the neighborhood was originally built on the site of a park, the houses are numbered out of order with many randomly placed "1/2" addresses. My 1/2 address doesn't appear on Google Maps, which makes it hard to get mail, food delivery or police service. My grandparents had an intercom installed between the kitchen and the bathroom so they could chat while pooping. There's a tiny door hidden behind a painting that leads to a secret storage room. Lights are controlled by long panels of 6 or 7 switches, and nobody knows what half of the switches do. The hall closet is hobbit-sized. The living room used to have industrial fluorescent tube lights, but I took them down because they were hideous. Until recently there was a pigeon farm in my front yard, but we demolished it when we realized that a homeless guy had been living in the coop.
— shinkouhyou

Great original question! We have a steel spiral staircase leading to the basement. It is housed in a closet with a steel trapdoor and a steel closet door. That closet locks from the outside for safety reasons. I essentially have a holding cell.
— pics-or-didnt-happen

I had a WW2 air raid shelter in the back garden of a previous house. It was like a sunken little hut made of bricks with a solid concrete roof.
— hoffi_coffi

The basement door has a lock, so I can conveniently lock people *in* the basement.
— Digger-of-Tunnels

The house I grew up in had the word WHY carved into the side of the basement stairs. It was exactly my thought.
— doctor-rumack

Well I lived in [this](http://i.imgur.com/tlcyMRC.jpg) for 10 ish years. There are too many weird quirks to list all of them but there are some highlights. The condos were heated by a massive central woodfire furnace. It didn't really work so we tore it down eventually, but one of my earliest childhood memories was throwing huge chunks of wood into a brick furnace that literally took up an entire room. The tower was super sketchy and full of rotten wood. You needed a flashlight, good shoes, and a lack of fear for spiders or heights to get up there. Each condo was unique and full of weird stuff but if you asked nicely the neighbors would let you check it out/explore.
— Twiglet_

In college, I lived in a house built in the late 1950s near the peak of Cold War paranoia. We had a bomb shelter in the back yard. Just a small hatch in the ground with a ladder 10 feet down. It was a shipping container encased in concrete and reinforced with steel. You wouldn't believe how hazy it got when we hot boxed that thing.
— stich48

I could do a whole album of the "architectural genius" instances in the house I'm renting. But I'll just list one: in the bathroom there is a phone jack beside the toilet. My best guess for an explanation is that it was for an emergency phone for when an old person lived there; like if they got stuck on the toilet and couldn't get up. The thing is, to my knowledge, that's the only phone jack in the house.
— mycatiswatchingyou

Not my home now, but my senior year of college, I moved into a house that had sinks in every fucking bedroom of the house. There were a total of 10-12 sinks throughout the house. Turns out that the house used to be a dentists office and they just left the sinks there.
— cumuloedipus_complex

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