Re: Less poor wiring than poor building
For a few years we had a house like that. The insurance or building society insisted in the installation of a firebreak, some sort of mineralised panels which didn't look very substantial.
At about the same time I wasn't very pleased to discover that at work someone from facilities had visited the machine room to do work on the riser and had drilled a few holes in similar panels leaving a good deal of mineral dust about the place, this being back in the days of tape backups.