America's Pettiest Houses, Two-Tone Cabinet Secrets, and Why Your Deck Coating Is Doing It Wrong

Episode SummaryThis week on Home In Progress, Dan starts off with one of the more entertaining detours the show has taken in a while: spite houses. Real buildings, built by real people, for the sole purpose of making someone else miserable. Then he gets into a deep dive on two-tone kitchen cabinets, answering six questions that almost always come up when people consider taking on that project. And he closes out with deck season, including why most product claims about longevity don't hold up in Michigan, and why RepcoLite's Deck and Dock Wood Protector works differently than most of what's out there.In This Episode[00:00] -- Show Preview[00:54] -- Spite Houses: When Homebuilding Gets Personal[15:26] -- Two-Tone Kitchen Cabinets: Six Common Questions Answered[41:25] -- Deck Season: What You Need to Know Right NowSegment 1: Spite Houses -- When Homebuilding Gets Personal [00:54]Most people who've had a bad run-in with a neighbor or a family member haven't responded by constructing an entire building. But spite houses are real, they show up throughout American history, and they're exactly what they sound like: buildings put up primarily to annoy, block, or inconvenience somebody else.The Tyler Spite House -- Frederick, Maryland [02:27]112 West Church Street, Frederick, MDIn 1814, the city of Frederick decided to extend Record Street straight through a piece of land owned by Dr. John Tyler, a wealthy ophthalmologist who was also credited as the first American-born physician to perform a cataract operation. Tyler fought the decision, lost, went home, and started thinking.He found an old local ordinance that said the city couldn't build a road through a parcel if construction on a substantial building was already underway there. So he hired a crew and overnight, they poured a foundation directly in the path of the road. When the road workers showed up the next morning, they found a hole in the ground, a crew of builders, and Dr. Tyler reportedly sitting in a chair watching the whole thing and looking very pleased with himself. The road was never built.Tyler finished the house. It ended up being a three-story Federal-style mansion with 17 rooms, over 9,000 square feet, 14-foot ceilings, and eight working fireplaces. He never actually lived in it. He already had a house right next door. The whole thing was just a very expensive way to win an argument.The Tyler Spite House still stands at 112 West Church Street in Frederick. It's been a bed and breakfast, been used as offices, and has been on and off the market for well over a million dollars for years. It's also rumored to be haunted, so there's that.The Boston Skinny House [05:57]44 Hull Street, North End, Boston (along the Freedom Trail, across from Copp's Hill Burying Ground)This four-story wooden house is 10 feet wide at its widest point and tapers down to just over nine feet in the back. At the narrowest spot inside, you can stand in the middle and touch both walls without fully extending your arms. There's no front door. You enter from a side alley.The story that's been passed around for generations goes like this. Two brothers inherited a piece of land from their father. One went off to fight in the Civil War. While he was gone, his brother stayed home and built himself a large, comfortable house on basically all of the inherited land. When the soldier brother came home and saw what happened, he had one thin sliver of land left to his name. So he built the narrowest house he could fit on it and positioned it to block his brother's light and kill his view.Whether that's all historically accurate is a little murky. But the house is real, it's still there, and if spite didn't build it, something at least a lot like spite was probably involved.The Plum Island Pink House [09:47]Newbury, Massachusetts, outside Newburyport near Plum IslandA pale pink house with a cupola, sitting completely alone in the middle of a salt marsh. No neighbors, no trees, no context. Just wetlands in every direction.Built around 1925, the story goes that a couple going through a divorce agreed the husband would build his wife an exact replica of the home they had shared in town. The catch was she forgot to specify where it had to be built. So he built it in the middle of an isolated salt marsh, with no fresh water and plumbing hooked up to saltwater. She allegedly took one look and refused to set foot inside.Whether that's true or legend, nobody can say for certain. But the house is still out there if you've ever made it up toward Plum Island.A Note on Exterior Color and Spite [12:43]Dan wraps the segment wondering if some of the truly baffling exterior color schemes you see driving around might have a little spite behind them. If you're going