:rolleyes::smack::dubious: I have some super-fake cheap-ass paneling that’s got to GO. The previous owners paneled the shit out of the kitchen walls nailing and gluing it down, and the former chatelaine used the glue to write Lois :(on the drywall. :eek:
There is cheap AND poorly installed carpet in the smalller bedrooms red and royal blue, it sucks to vacuum BECAUSE it goes up and down like waves on a lake.
Yay them. :rolleyes: I just love it. ::p:dubious:
Aside from all the weird crap the previous owners left for us in the basement (up to and including late 1970’s/early 1980’s porn magazines interspersed with religious paraphernalia - I’m surprised we haven’t yet turned up a body, and that was 11 years ago), we found that they had stucco’d the walls to cover up cracks. Including the walls in the bathroom. Including the shower, so we were fighting falling chunks of stucco when it got steamy.
Wow. Dont tell me the builder was Tom DelForge! Sounds a lot like my “house”.
The “builder” was the previous owner, who gutted and updated a nasty old house himself.
A lot of his choices were great. We bought the place because he turned a cramped narrow hut into a light-filled open-plan wonder. But beyond the big picture, he was terrible at executing all the particulars.
After we bought our 1912 Craftsman Bungalow about 9 years ago, we were delighted to find all the original tongue and groove flooring in really good shape underneath upstairs carpeting. They had added some outdoor outlets at the top corners of the columns at the ceiling of the front porch, which was nice.
When we pulled the carpet out of the room above the front porch, we found that they had cut a hole in the hardwood floor, run an electric wire from those outdoor outlets on top of and across the floor diagonally about 20 feet, then cut another hole on the other inside corner to feed it back inside the inner wall.
I can totally imagine them doing this, then covering it with carpet and high-fiving each other.
People lived in this one-hundred and 20-something year-old, four bedroom house for a nearly a century with no coat closet, no linen closet, and only two bedroom closets. There were still pull switch lights.
They painted over walnut baseboards, window trim and the ornate walnut, three-turns stairway.
The gorgeous wood floors had all been carpeted over and needed refinishing.
It was furnished in dark colors and as gloomy as a tomb.
There were no pantry shelves nor storage shelves in the basement.
It was not insulated. Standing in the living room you could feel the winter breeze blow right through.
The stupid house we just moved out of had all sorts of weird stuff. It started out as a tiny square-ish bungalow 50 years ago, and the people we bought it from gradually expanded it. It was a one-floor maze with gems such as:
-one switch in the bank of switches on the wall between the kitchen and LR area controlled some of the outlets in the LR, one of the 2 outlets in what had been the formal dining room, and the lamppost light out on the front walk.
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They evidently turned the carport into the bedroom, and turned what had been a patio (I think) into another sitting room or large entry (Not sure how they used it, we bought it empty) at any rate, the walls around the master bedroom, well actually almost ALL of the interior walls were cheapie 1970s paneling nailed to 2x4s (or just possibly 1x2s) and painted white.
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There were 2 hot water heaters, which was nice. Unfortunately one of them was housed under the kitchen counter, in a corner, blocked in by the fridge, and with no access panel at all. When it croaked we had to move the fridge and dismantle the corner cabinet.
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the washer and the slop sink in the laundry room had no shut off valves, and the connectors for the water lines for the washer were ordinary outside taps, coming up out of the slab foor, at floor level.
-the main part of the house had acoustic tile ceilings, which started to buckle. When I pulled part of it away to see what was up I found that the visible tile was a second layer glued to the original layer, that was just stapled to the most random assortment of wood supports I’ve ever seen.
At about the ceiling stage I gave up. I tacked a white sheet on the ceiling to cover the hole and catch the dust, and said the hell with it.
The only thing that was professionally done I think was the carpet, and I ripped that out because the bedroom leaked from the slab up, and the mold was killing me. I also had/have indoor pets and an outdoor job, and keeping light cream carpet clean was impossible.
I am SO glad to be out of that house!!
Ceiling fans in two bedrooms were loose and wobbly. I was afraid they’d fall on us if turned on. I took them down, painted the ceilings, and reinstalled correctly.
Dog shit in the crawlspace under the house. :mad: Never let your dog use the crawlspace as his dog house.
Playboy magazines hidden in the attic. Probably the previous owners kids jerk off material. The kid must have painted his own bedroom because there were some long runs on the molding. I Had to strip that and repaint.
Otherwise we got pretty lucky.
We just bought a house. Got a heck of a deal on it since the owners were going through a nasty divorce. The house inspector said a lot of the work around the house looked as if it were done by a “talented amateur”.
One of the bedrooms was painted fuschia. Painting over that was a bitch, and there are still some spots we missed.
Damn near every outlet had been painted over- multiple times. Who does that?!
There’s a small electrical switch in the master closet. It runs from the basement to the attic. I have no idea what it does, but I give it a flick every now and then.
He replaced almost all of the copper plumbing with PVC. He didn’t remove the copper, though.
The faucets in the master bath and the kitchen have their hot and cold reversed. That was a bit of a shock the first time.
Little weirdnesses. Nothing too bad, though- we love the house.
Are you sure they weren’t trying to burn the place down?
Traditional Queensland houses are built on wooden piles known as “stumps”. These tend to get termite ridden or rotten after a century or so and replacing them with wooden or more commonly steel or concrete stumps is a common renovation step. Our last house was largely renovated and had been re-stumped with modern concrete stumps.
After we moved in we noticed that an external wooden staircase was slumping slightly and it wasn’t hard to see why: one of its four stumps was an original and very rotten wooden stump.
We had it replaced: it took a couple of pro re-stumpers about fifteen minutes flat.
Many of the above stories involve people who have clearly taken shortcuts to avoid awkward or difficult problems. But in this case it seems the previous owners had the entire house re-stumped at significant cost involving the replacement of probably a hundred or so stumps, but left one single easy to access rotten stump. After years of thinking I have never come up with any explanation as to why anyone would do this.
None of this really tops the house I grew up in - built in 1947-48 from adobe and what scraps of building material were available in the post-war years. Not one corner in it was 90 degrees and no wall was free of at least a few degrees of tilt. He must have gotten a bargain on cove-edge knotty pine since EVERYTHING else was built of it - ceilings, add-on walls, eaves, cupboards, doors.
The kitchen ceiling was a patchwork of drywall, plywood and packing crate boards, as we found some years later. The boards were still stenciled with wartime depot marks. (There were two huge airbases in town that sold mountains of surplus well into the 1960s).
Wiring - some was knob and tube. I could go on, but that house taught me a lot about the realities of construction and remodeling that ten “ordinary” houses couldn’t have.
I could fill pages with this kind of stuff. But the biggest and best (or worst) isn’t my house, or what I found, but my parent’s house and what they did.
Ca. 1996 or 1997 my parents bought a small, one bedroom ranch house and used it as a rental. The house was designed and built in the 60’s when a recently retired couple wanted a new place to retire to. The bedroom was very long and narrow – it was designed for two single beds to be positioned head to head. It had a massive laundry and workroom; the wife was an artist and used this big room to do whatever creating she had a mind to. It also had a two-car garage. It had no dining room, just a small breakfast nook off the kitchen.
My parents decided to downsize and in 2007 decided to move into the rental. The weird layout meant that they would have to make some changes. At first it was nothing huge. The workroom would become a bedroom, the narrow bedroom would be used as an office, the laundry moved to the garage. A couple days work, a couple-three hundred bucks in plumbing and electrical changes, maybe a couple rooms of carpet.
But it didn’t stop. They kept changing plans. The garage became a bedroom with a new bathroom. The kitchen was gutted and moved to where the original bathroom was. A dining room was carved out of the living room. A bathroom was put in an old mudroom. And on, and on, and on. Basically 80% or so of the house was gutted to the studs, and rebuilt.
But… my parents are cheap. Look up parsimony in the OED and there’s their pic. So they cut every conceivable corner possible to save a few bucks. Some examples:
– All the new wiring was run up the walls and across the insulation in the attic to wherever it was going. I know of at least two spots where the romex wasn’t long enough, so my dad simply spliced on another chunk to make it reach. These splices are in junction boxes, but A) the junction boxes don’t have coverplates, and B) are just sitting on top of the insulation bats. Totally inaccessible.
– He installed new windows. Several of the windows are installed backwards, with the weep holes inside the house. Every window is installed like this: he rough framed the opening, nailed in the window, and then used silicon caulking to fill in all the (really big) gaps. No housewrap or flashing. Just caulk. He never squared them so there’s no shims. Just big empty spaces filled with caulk. Tubes and tubes of caulk per window.
– He wanted interior wall sconces. Instead of mounting a junction box and running the wiring while the walls were still open, he waited untill all was finished, and then used speaker wire (like for a home audio system) to power the lights. Later he added two backdoor porch lights, and also used speaker wire to connect them to an existing junction box.
– The floors were never leveled, in the sense that each room is an inch or so higher or lower than the one adjacent to it. Every room in the house is like this.
– During the reno he went around to every lightswitch and power outlet and wrote on the coverplate with a sharpie what circuit breaker controlled each one. Not a bad idea, but he didn’t replace the cover plates. So now they all have these huge numbers scrawled on them. More than once someone asked if a child had played some sort of game long ago.
– None of the previous water or electrical hookups were removed. So the library has a hot and cold faucet as well as a 220v outlet just sticking out of the wall, evidence of when the room was used a laundry / art studio. The kitchen, formally a bathroom, still has the heatlamp / exhaust fan in the ceiling, etc.
This place is a firetrap. As God as my witness I have no clue what I’m going to do when they pass away. With a bit of luck they’ll sell it themselves before that happens, but that’s not likely.
I’m sure the insurance adjuster would have paid them less than we did. :smack:
My Fuckwit Mr. Know-it-all-Moose ex-BIL ran hot water into his toilet for flushing while re-muddling his house. Gave everyone a nice warm feeling but the gas bill was pretty high.
Fortunately this was in a house that wasn’t bought, but did get to the inspection stage with lots of weirdness. Things like a gas fireplace which the inspector said he was surprised hadn’t killed somebody because it wasn’t vented properly. The most photogenic problem was a brick hung in the crawl space below the shower drain to pull down on the pipe.
A friend wanted to replace the light switch for his porch light with a timer, so we went through the breakers one by one, but didn’t find any that controlled the porch light. Finally we flipped the big breaker for the whole house, but still the porch light worked. Everything else was off, so we have no idea where the power for the porch light was coming from. At the time, the electric meter was covered by a giant juniper bush, so we didn’t feel like crawling through it to see if it was still spinning. Maybe we should try again, since the bush has been removed and the meter is accessible.
My current house is half wired in aluminum and half in copper. As I was going through remediating the aluminum I discovered that it’s not even circuit by circuit. Some are all copper, some are all aluminum, but many switch half way through. I’m sure that’s the builder’s fault, not the previous owner.
I didn’t mention it, but that thing was also full of dog shit. It was the first thing to come out—that’s how we discovered the roofing nails.
I’ve been looking for a new place to live, and this has involved seeing a number of upstairs apartments in houses converted into two-flat apartment buildings. One that I would have loved otherwise had the tour end abruptly after seeing one “feature.” The ceilings were comparatively short (7.5’) and I’d asked about the height; my husband Shoujin is very tall and I was trying to figure out if he could stretch his hands up over his head without hitting the ceiling. The owner mentioned he might have trouble with the bathroom. I went to look.
You know how sometimes, in the upper floor of a house, you might see the inside walls sloping in to match the eaves of the house, to give a little more room over squaring off the wall? And sometimes this means the slope comes pretty far down the wall?
Someone built the shower into one of these wall sections. I’m 5’9", and the wall started sloping into the shower (lengthwise with the tub) somewhere around my waist, which would have made it difficult or impossible to stand fully facing the shower head (aimed firmly at my neck due to the low position on the wall). Of course, to make it even harder to maneuver in the shower, instead of having a curtain, they had sliding glass doors. So you didn’t even have any literal wiggle room there.
I apologized for wasting his time, noting that with Shoujin’s height and broad shoulders, I’d need a crowbar to get him in and out of there.
Through the end of the month, we’re in what’s charitably called a “non-conforming” two-flat. It’s a turn-of-the-last-century two-story farmhouse converted into two apartments. There are two water heaters - but one supplies the east half of the house and the other the west. (And no, the house is not split vertically into apartments.) One furnace. A mishmash of wiring that included some knob and tube, and a mishmash of pipes that had cast iron running right into PVC and somehow resulted in a plumber having to come out at least yearly so that our kitchen sink could have hot water instead of barely lukewarm - a problem no other faucet ever had. Oh, and the front inside wall sockets downstairs are on the upstairs’ circuits.
I once rented for a brief time in an older house. The floors were all sloping at various odd angles.
The explanation could be found in the basement. At one time, some handy guy had done some plumbing work, and had replaced old pipe with nice new copper pipe. He’d done a reasonable job with the seams and all - no leaks.
Trouble was, he’d just run the pipes directly from “a” to “b” in an interesting variety of angles. I guess this saved pipe - instead of running the pipe beside a beam and then making a right angle he just ran the pipes directly.
But the beams were in the way. So whenever the pipe encountered a beam, he had just cut a notch through it. Some of the notches were quite large, leaving (in a 6 by 6 beam) about one inch of wood left holding the house up. The notches in the beams were everywhere.
Evidently, he (or someone else) discovered that this was a bad idea at some point; Every place there was a notched beam, there was also two metal poles holding the two ends up. There must have been 40 metal support poles in the basement, which were basically all that was holding the house up. It looked like a metal forest down there. You had to do a slalom to get to the washing machine.
We live on about an acre lot. The prior homeowners lived in the house for 15 years and planted exactly 3 decent trees. The entire backyard, nearly 3/4 of an acre, had a total of 3 trees, only 1 of which was worth keeping. The other 2 were fruit trees, about 5’ high and bowing over at odd angles. They couldn’t be saved.
I don’t understand why people who buy new homes don’t plant shade trees at their very earliest opportunity. They take 10 to 15 years to grow, for heaven’s sake! You can pick them up on sale in the fall for less than $50, or heck! Grow them from a damn seed if you’re too cheap to pay for a sapling.