There is an island called “Just Enough Room,” where there’s just enough room for a tree and a house.
100 Mind-Blowing House Facts
Queen Elizabeth II had a personal net worth of 425 million dollars. That includes the $65 million Sandringham House and $140 million Balmoral Castle.
“Tsundoku” is a Japanese word for the habit of buying too many books, letting them pile up in your house, and never reading them.
A woman was elected to the House of Representatives four years before women even won the right to vote.
A French general gave John Quincy Adams a pet alligator. Adams kept it in one of the White House bathtubs and enjoyed showing it off.
Abraham Lincoln loved cats and once let one eat from the table during a formal White House dinner.
When electricity was first installed in the White House in 1891, President Benjamin Harrison and his wife were afraid of electrocution because of the new concept. They refused to touch light switches, so the staff had to turn the lights on and off for them.
Bill Gates’s house was designed using a Macintosh Computer.
When he was President, George H.W. Bush banned broccoli from Air Force One and the White House.
LEGO bricks withstand compression better than concrete. An ordinary plastic LEGO brick can support the weight of 375,000 other bricks before it fails. This, theoretically, would let you build a tower nearing 3.5km in height. Scaling this up to house-size bricks, however, would cost far too much.
In 1871, Potter Palmer, a Chicago businessman, built Palmer House, a Hilton Hotel, for a wedding gift for his wife, Bertha, who in 1893 asked the hotel’s pastry chef to make a chocolate cake-like treat that would be easy to transport for the World’s Columbian Exposition. The result of this request was the Palmer House Brownie, made of thick chocolate and topped with a walnut and apricot glaze and later published in a Sears Roebuck Catalog in 1898.
Most Disney characters wear gloves to keep animation simple. Walt Disney might have been the first to put gloves on his characters, as seen in 1929’s The Opry House, starring Mickey Mouse. In addition to being easier to animate, there’s another reason for the gloves: “We didn’t want him to have mouse hands because he was supposed to be more human,” Disney told his biographer in 1957.
The British royal family is named after Windsor. You’d think Windsor Castle was named after the House of Windsor, but it’s the other way around. The royal family changed its name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 1917 so it would sound less German and chose Windsor because they had ties with the English town.
The Speaker of the House isn’t allowed to speak in England. Okay, not literally. Instead, the Speaker of the House acts as a mediator for debates. They are not allowed to speak their own opinion on an issue.
Millie the White House dog earned more than four times as President Bush in 1991. Once known as the most famous dog in White House history, Millie was one of Bush’s family dogs. One of her amazing feats? The $900,000 in royalties earned from Millie’s Book easily outsold the $2,291 earned in 1991 by the President for his 1988 campaign autobiography, “Looking Forward.”
Human fingers are really sensitive. The nerve endings on fingers are so sensitive that if your fingers were the size of Earth, you could still feel the difference between a house and a car.
Children are more often poisoned by house plants rather than household chemicals. The poisoning could occur from eating or touching the leaves, roots, or berries. Having skin contact with the plant’s sap or juices could also cause poisoning. Some cases also occur when children drink water that comes from the plant tray.
Most of your house dust is your dead skin. The next time you get mad at all the dust in your place, remember that it’s your fault. Humans lose 30,000 to 40,000 dead skin cells each minute. So, aside from the dust from the streets, most of the dust bunnies gunking up your house probably came from you. How’s that for interesting facts that’ll change your perspective?
The oldest surviving pencil was from the 1600s. The world’s oldest pencil was found on the roof of an old German house while it was being renovated. Stationery brand Faber-Castell has since acquired the pencil.
The house from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is now a family restaurant. After shooting the 70’s slasher, the suburban house that once saw the horrors of Leatherface was turned into a restaurant. Initially, it was a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-themed restaurant, complete with a Leatherface dummy. However, it was since rebranded as the Grand Central Cafe, with less of a gimmick on the venue being the Massacre House.
A house fire inspired The Sims. Will Wight was inspired to create The Sims after suffering a house fire in 1991, where he lost everything. When he had a vision of rebuilding his house, he thought of a game concept where one could create a “virtual dollhouse.” From there, The Sims was born. Talk about WTF facts with a plot twist.
Over a dozen skeletons were found in Benjamin Franklin’s basement. In 1998, an organisation called Friends of Benjamin Franklin House decided to restore the four-story Georgian house where Franklin lived in London. However, they discovered a gruesome sight – one of the workers found a human thigh bone. The authorities were brought in, and a total of remains from 15 people were found – 6 of those belonging to children, and all with holes drilled into their skulls. The skeletons date back to 200 years ago then, which was around the time Benjamin Franklin lived in the house. This is one of the most disturbing WTF facts.
Waffle House is used to measure storms. Because the restaurant stays open in extreme weather, the “Waffle House Index” is informally used by FEMA to measure storm severity.
The U.S. flag was designed by a 17-year-old for school. In junior high school, Bob Heft designed the U.S. flag. He made a 50-star flag for the class project. However, the U.S. only had 48 states at the time, so Heft got a B minus for his work. However, his prediction that two more states would be added ended up being true. Heft wrote 21 letters and called the White House 18 times. Eventually, President Eisenhower called to tell him his design would be used. The design for the current U.S. flag was made official on July 4, 1960.
The average American looks at eight houses before buying one. Now that’s a lot of choices. So much for the American dream house.
After the murders, List turned off the lights, turned on the radio to a religious station, and left the house.
Jeannette Rankin was elected to the House of Representatives four years before women had won the right to vote.
The length of the circulatory system is almost 60,000 miles According to the Franklin Institute, if all the veins, arteries, and capillaries in a child’s body were stretched out flat, they would span more than 60,000 miles. Our bodies house around 100,000 miles of blood vessels by the time we reach maturity. That is only one of the astounding facts that seem fabricated but it’s true.
Walt Disney has won the most Academy Awards. The House of Mouse has won 26 Oscars and was nominated 59 times.
John Quincy Adams had a pet alligator. After receiving the gift from a French general, the alligator was kept in one of the White House bathtubs.
John Quincy Adams once had a pet alligator. The alligator was gifted to him by a French general, and it lived in one of the bathrooms at the White House.
In your house, dead skin cells are the main factor in dust. According to research at Imperial College London, humans shed roughly 200 million skin cells per hour.
The bone-house wasp stuffs the walls of its nest with dead ants.
The White House has its movie theatre. It seats 42 people.
The White House in Washington, DC, has 132 rooms, including 35 bathrooms.
It takes 570 gallons to paint the exterior of the White House.
Mexico’s presidential palace is 14 times larger than the White House and started allowing visitors for the first time in 2018. From 1935 to 2018, the Los Pinos presidential palace was the official place of residence for Mexico’s presidents and was closed off to any who weren’t expressly invited. This changed in 2018 when Andres Manuel López Obrador was elected the Mexican President, winning his campaign on the back of promises to fight corruption. As a gesture of goodwill, he chose not to move into the palace, instead simply living in a small apartment in Mexico City’s central district. To give you an idea of what the Mexican president gave up, the presidential palace covers 603,000 square feet (56,000 square meters).
Sheep at the White House. American President Woodrow Wilson and his wife Edith kept sheep at the White House during World War One to keep the lawn neat and reduce gardening costs. The sheep’s wool was also auctioned off to raise money for the Red Cross.
To the last man. Pavlov’s House held out for two months at Stalingrad. The Germans lost more men attacking it than taking Paris.
The Churchill myth. Of Winston Churchill’s most famous 1940 speeches: ‘Blood, toil, tears and Sweat,’ ‘Fight Them on the beaches’, ‘Finest Hour,’ and ‘The Few,’ only one, ‘Finest Hour’ was broadcast on the radio at the time. All of them were delivered to the House of Commons, but only after his ‘Finest Hour’ speech did Churchill record a version later for the BBC. The other speeches he only recorded in 1949.
The White House has been using Linux since 2001.
Since 1642, when Charles I stormed out of the House of Commons, an event which eventually led to the Civil War, no reigning Monarch had been allowed to enter the House of Commons till now.
George Washington was not the first President to reside in the White House, instead, it was John Adams and his wife Abigail.
Structure: The Parliament is divided into two houses: the House of Commons and the House of Lords, both of which have unique roles and memberships.
Seating Distinction: The House of Commons and the House of Lords are distinguished by the colour of their seats: green for the Commons and red for the Lords.
Parliamentary Prohibition: No British royal has entered the House of Commons since Charles the First barged in with guards to prosecute MPs, which eventually caused civil war.
The Longest-Running Show in the World Is in London: The longest-running performance in the world is being performed at St. Martins Theatre in London’s West End. Considering that Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap debuted in 1952, the show has been airing for over 70 years to this day. The plot of the show, which began as a radio play named Three Blind Mice, centres on seven strangers who become stuck at a rural house due to snowfall.
The Queen May Not Enter the House of Commons: Despite her majesty and glory, the Queen of England, who formerly held great power and influence over nearly the whole world, is not permitted to visit the House of Commons since she is not a member of it.
The White House has its own YouTube channel.