Hack jobs you've done around your house...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Over the years we’ve had plenty of threads about stupid things the previous homeowner did that you’ve had to fix (or live with). I know I’ve written about the guy that lived here before me that thought it would be a good idea to wire the garage door opener into the front porch lights. It took me about a week to figure that out and about 15 minutes and 8 inches of wire to fix it.

Anyways, this thread is about those things that YOU did the poor sap that moves in next is going to look at and say ‘what the hell!?’ and put on his To Do list.

I’ll start. When I moved in, one of the things I did was paint my bathroom. As part of that project I put in a new vent fan. I got one that was much bigger (more powerful and way quieter) than what was already there. So, I climb up into the attic, pull the old one out, drop the new one into the old hole (notice it’s bigger than the hole), secure it, wire it up, connect it to the vent and go back down to the the bathroom. The problem wasn’t just that it was bigger than the hole, if that was it, I would have just put the cover on and ignored it. The problem was that since it was smaller, the clips for the cover didn’t reach the case since there was drywall there. What did I do? Did I just cut out the hole like I was supposed to? Nope, I made a notch to the clip? Yup, talk about half assing it. That was probably almost 10 years ago and it’s bugged me ever since. Not just because I knew it was there but because if I ever sell the house, someone is going to see it and think I do shoddy workmanship. Today, I finally fixed it. Between getting my keyhole saw, some drop clothes, cutting it and cleaning up, it probably took 10 minutes.
Every single time I’d think of that I think of Mike Holmes seeing that, rolling his eyes and saying “Do it once, do it right, pull the ceiling I don’t trust anything in here”.

The two others I can think of that really bother me are:
1)When I moved in there was no garbage disposal, however, the dishwasher was connected to a switch right next to the sink. I wired the disposal to that switch and started rewiring the dishwasher. I dropped the wire though the floor and kinda had a 'aww, fuckit, I’m tired" moment, put a plug on the wire and stuck it in an outlet in the basement. I really have to properly wire that. I need to secure it all the way around the perimeter of my basement to the circuit breaker and put it on it’s own breaker. No big deal, just time consuming.
2)I did some wiring in my garage and had an incredible brainfart. The wire was all nice, wired properly, stapled to code, looked nice and proper…then I realize that one length of it wasn’t actually secured to structure but just a random 2x4 that was sitting above the rafters (must’ve been wedged up there pretty tight). I moved it to structure, but it made for some slack in the line. While it’s probably still okay, it draws attention to itself and if I were selling the house and the new people happened to have an electrician walkthough it might trigger them to look at it more closely. Since it leads to some underground wiring, I’d be worried, I’m sure it’s fine, but I’d rather not lose a house sale over it.
I’ve always told myself ir a house sale were to be contingent on something like that, I’d pull the wires out and let them re-wire it. There’s PVC under the patio so it would be easy.
I do, however, have a friend that’s an electrician. If I ever sell my house, I plan to have him evaluate those two things and give me some guidance (or just do them for me). Rewiring the dishwasher is easy, but I’d like him to check out the patio wiring.

That’s it, off the top of my head. For all the projects I’ve done around my house that’s not too bad. I usually do good work, I do good electrical work as well, those two things just sort of fell apart at the end, I’ll clean them up some day.

What did you half ass that someone is going to see and have to fix after you move out?

Did you run the sump pump into a sink?
Hide some junction boxes behind the drywall?
Run the kitchen exhaust into the attic?
Admit it, did you fish speaker wire under the carpet for surround sound because you didn’t know how to get it into the walls?

Oh, that reminds me, I installed surround sound (looks super nice) but I didn’t use “In wall speaker wire”, but that’s hardly something I’m worried about. But every once it a while I’m tempted to rip it out and replace it.

2

The plumbing for my back house is attached to my water main underground about 2 feet. The guy before me used 1" copper flex tube like you would use on a water heater. When it broke and I discovered it I replaced it with the same. They seem to last about 20 years and then burst. My third one will be coming up soon. The only problem is I have since built a deck over it.

3

I’m so tempted to toss advice out, but I’m going to suggest we don’t derail the thread with advice on how to fix things. Let’s just leave this to stupid things we’ve done to our own house.

A very, very minor one. When I installed my surround sound I needed to go up the back walls, inside the walls. Problem is, I couldn’t gain access in the attic (vaulted ceiling and it got to narrow to get to the outside wall) and the basement (in that area) is almost totally drywalled. There is a closet, however, in one corner that doesn’t have drywall. I dropped the wires through the floor where all my network cables go down behind the entertainment center, ran the wires to that closet* and brought them back up directly below where one of the speakers goes. Perfect. Then I pulled the baseboard off and ran one wire to the other location. So far so good. Mistake one)The trim was such a tight fit and I was lacking a finish nailer that I just popped it back on, it’s tight, it’s not coming off. I’m happy, no ones going to notice, but it bugs me. If I ever buy a finish nailer I’ll fix it. Mistake 2)I kept hanging up on something (turned out to be some overlapping vapor barrier) in the walls when I was fishing the wires up to near the ceiling so I drilled a one inch hole to get my finger in there and see what was going on. Did I fix it, nope, I put a pictures over it.
That’s not really a big deal. If I ever sell the house, the room will get painted and the holes will get patched. Hell, the room needs to be painted anyways** so when that happens I’ll patch the holes then NBD.

*The wires, speaker wires, network cables etc, all come down in one place and have to go to the “computer room” for some reason I wasn’t thinking and drilled the hole near the ceiling. It looks really stupid when you walk in and see 8 or 10 wires coming in in the upper corner and falling down to the floor. That hole should have been at ground level in the only finished room in the basement. But no one goes in there anyways.

**The people before me used really, really crappy paint, anything that touches the walls scratches the paint off. You can see everywhere my recliner has been in this room by the arc shaped scratches on the walls.
Oh, another thing, regarding the surround sound, if the people that walk through the house when I sell it have an issue with them, that’s their problem. My plan is to tell them I plan to leave the wires in the wall for them, it’ll make it super easy for them to set it up OR, I can pull them out, patch the holes and paint over it. But if I was looking at house that had the speaker wires already in the walls in a good location (and they looked nice, and mine do, I’d be happy).

4

Never buy a house within walking distance to a Home Depot.

I think my biggest sin is the hot water heater. The old one sprung a pinhole leak through the tank on a Friday before a long weekend we were hosting a big backyard party.

I ran across the street to HD, bought a new one and a bunch of piping components that looked like they might fit, threw the whole lot onto one of their big flatbed carts, wheeled it all home, unhooked the old one, busted off one of the old steel pipes in the process, cursed, went back to HD and bought more plumbing bits & bobs, and got it so that it was hooked up, running, and most importantly, not leaking.

It’s pretty ugly, but I don’t want to touch it because the steel pipes are so old that they’re either almost rusted through or almost blocked by corrosion. I figured this heater will last longer than the pipes will, and by then it won’t be my problem anymore.

5

Wow, I can’t believe I can’t think of anything! But my house is old and crummy anyway, so everything I’ve had done I had done by someone else. Correctly :slight_smile:

I do keep a bent piece of metal taped to a bamboo stick hanging on the fence next to my gate - so I can pull up the chute on the lawnmower, so I can go through the gate. Instead of getting a bigger gate, I guess.

I also had the basement floor painted and I had the guy add flecks and cover with acrylic. Looks great! Except I was too lazy to move the metal shelves holding my brother’s record and book collections, so I asked the painter to paint around them. We decided that if my brother ever moves his shit and I move the shelves, I can finish the paint job myself.

6

I wanted cable to go to every room in the house because the rooms that didn’t need TV still needed internet. While the wiring is done well, with a signal booster to keep it all happy, all the cables run across the garage ceiling and then they run up through the floor of the bedrooms. To avoid having to cut sheet rock, I just drilled through the ceiling of the garage/floor of the bedrooms and put the cable jack mounting plate flush on the floor.

PS: When drilling through a carpeted floor, cut a patch out of the carpet first. Otherwise, you may find that your carpet unravels like one of those sweaters in the cartoons. :slight_smile:

7

My ex-FIL is (was) a master electrician. When I put the drill against the carpet to drop all those network cables mention above he quickly said 'get a razor blade and cut an X where you want to drill or you’ll pull a big long string out of the carpet".

8

A lot of the work I do on the house starts as a hack job. Eventually I’ll get everything cleaned up and done right. But if I don’t wake up in the morning I’ll have two sections of plumbing that need to be redone, a bunch of wiring that needs to be covered with raceways, a front door that needs to be re-shimmed before I lock it in with molding, one piece of molding over the bedroom door that I’ve left undone for 15 years now, and a light switch I had to unscrew from the wall to get the attic steps detached which is now sitting at the end of the wire on one of the attic steps which are just leaning against the wall. I expect to get most of this done before the end of the year except for the molding in the bedroom.

9

Not me, but my father. He was an electrician in the Navy during WWII. He re-did all the wiring in our house, which dates to about 1905. I’m sure the place has the wiring system of a battleship. It will have to be re-done if we ever sell it.

10

Years ago, the hinges for the door into our garage was coming loose, and I couldn’t get much good purchase in the door jamb even with 3" screws, so I just said fuck it, and glued the damn hinges to the jamb with Gorilla Glue.

Fast forward about 6 years, and the contractors are trying to get the hinges off so they can replace the door. Apparently that shit is serious glue! They ended up not being able to without having to wreck the entire door jamb. When asked what idiot glued the hinges on, I sold out the people who owned the house before us… of all the crappy things done wrong in the house, this was the ONE thing that they didn’t do, so it was believable, if embarrassing.

11

This house was lost to foreclosure.

They took the ceiling fan/light from the family room.

I wanted light in the room, but didn’t have the money for a decent fan/light.

There is now a ceraminc bulb holder and a R38 flood lamp on the ceiling.

It works.

12

When we remodeled our kitchen, we added a bunch of cabinets in the area that was the “eat-in” part. As it happens, there was a vent in the floor for the heat and air that ended up partly behind the stove, partly under a cabinet. So we covered over the part that was under the stove and cut an opening in the kick panel of the cabinet so the heat and air would blow out. In the winter, the inside of that cabinet is nice and warm… But it works, and we didn’t have to re-route the HVAC.

13

The phone wiring in our house is a mess due to the revisions we’ve made over the years. First, back in the day we ran a BBS so we had a second line for that and a third dial-in only line to make the BBS two-line. After that ended we still had dialup for our internet connections, and we had to switch wires around as our computers got moved from room to room. The end result is that now we have a single land-line which connects to the phone box on one wall of the basement through a 25-foot phone extension cord running the length of the basement.

14

I wanted to run a phone line into the room where my wife has her computer. There was an empty socket in the hall, so I ran a wire from there to a nearby door jamb, jumped to an adjacent jamb, then to the door to the room we wanted it in. I ran the wire through the doorway and then left it dangle in mid-air where a phone can be plugged into it. Later we got a new phone line put in when we changed carriers to our cable company, so this is unplugged, but all those wires are still there.

15

The only thing I can think of is a switch in the basement that isn’t connected to anything. The corresponding light outside the basement door doesn’t work, either. This was by design, when I had a timer put in for the outside back lights. Because it was initially set up as a pair of three-way switches, and because the circuitry was convoluted, it was either pony up a lot more money to run new wiring, or just eliminate that fixture/switch from the circuit. The next person will have to hire an electrician to figure out what the hell was done.

16

We have a cable-across-the-garage-ceiling as well. But that’s not the most egregious. I don’t know what we were thinking, but we bought a new refrigerator that was too tall for its space. Above it are those two small cabinets that are impossible to access without a stepladder. Of course, they’re attached to a whole bank of cabinets. Rather than return the refrigerator for the appropriate, smaller :frowning: size, we decided to hack off those little cabinets from the rest of them. A little sanding, wood filler and Minwax stain, and the refrigerator fit (it was a good deal!). You can’t tell with the refrigerator pushed in, but if we move before replacing the cabinetry, someone will say, “What the ever-loving FUCK??” when they pull it out.

17

I plead the 5th. I don’t have enough bandwidth to post all my fuck-ups.

18

The people who chopped off the cabby above the fridge in this place didn’t bother putting in a new bottom or even stain the cut.
But it was a clean, level cut.
I have a 4’x4’ sheet of furniture-finished 1/2" plywood and have thought of hacking a piece to tack onto the bottom.
I don’t have a cabinet saw, and the trim nail gun is broken, so the next person gets it as is.

19

In my previous home I had a plan to install a run of outdoor lights. Got as far as installing a switch in the drywall. Wonder how many times it’s been flicked.
mmm