Working on an Eichler: What Every Peninsula Owner Should Know Before Drilling

Never drill the floor

Eichlers heat the house through hot-water tubing set into the concrete slab. There is no way to know exactly where the tubing runs without a thermal camera, so nothing — not a threshold, not a door stop, not a floor-mounted TV stand — is fastened into the slab. Adhesive or freestanding solutions are used instead.

Walls are thinner than they look

Interior walls are often single-layer tongue-and-groove or paneling over studs, with no drywall. Standard drywall anchors spin out. Mounting goes into studs wherever possible, and where it can't, anchors rated for thin panel are used. Original mahogany paneling is worth preserving, so holes are planned before they're drilled.

There's no attic

Flat or low-pitched roofs mean wiring and plumbing run through the roof deck or along the beams, not through an attic. Fixture and switch swaps are routine, but running new cable — for a TV, for example — takes planning and is often surface-routed along a beam instead.

Smart devices need a little extra

Many Eichler thermostats don't have a C-wire and many doorbells run on old transformers. Both are solved with an adapter kit, but it's checked before the device is bought.