Have you uncovered a prior owner's sloppy do-it-yourself work in your home?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I am pretty handy, and don’t cut corners, and make mental notes when I see corners being cut. My favorites are times where I can say, “If that isn’t bad enough, they also…”

Here are some of my favorite “If that isn’t bad enough” memories…

I saw an entire ‘finished basement’ where the owners glued 4x8 sheets of panelling/beadboard right to the cement walls. If that isn’t bad enough, the ceiling height was 9 feet, and all the moldings they ran were just butted together with no mitres.

I saw somone install a cedar deck, but they decided to make it something like 17 feet by 17 feet, while Cedar comes in 16’ max lengths at the yard. If that isn’t bad enough, the just added a foot to every end with no staggering, at the end of the deck, the entire end was 1 foot pieces, with the seam all lined up. If that isn’t bad enough, after a year they PAINTED it white. If that isn’t bad enough, they never primed it (It lasted about a month).

22

I bought a 1920’s house which had a monstrous-sized and cruddy looking thermostat in the living room. It was situated on a wall near a corner which was the only good place for the TV. If you watched TV for a while, it warmed up the thermostat and it got chilly in the house. On the other side of the wall was the dining room, which was a better (more central) location for the themostat, so I decided to:

Relocate the thermostat to the dining room;
Replace it with a modern programmable one.

To understand how a “normal” thermostat works, I provide the following:
A 110 volt source of power is used to provide power to a transformer. The transformer reduces the voltage from 110v to somewhere between 12v and 24v. The reduced voltage powers the thermostat, which is really only a switch to turn on/off the furnace.

Now, being that a transformer is connected to power and running all the time, whether the furnace is running or not, it uses power. Probably about 10 cents a month.

To circumvent this outrageous waste of electricity, the former owner disconnected the transformer and hooked the power source (110v) directly to the thermostat.

Now I might mention, I do a lot of amateur electrical work, and I’m familiar with the NEC, and safe practices and all, but I have been guilty of working on live circuits. I treat every circuit as live as much as possible, even if I “know” it’s disconnected, so I make sure not to touch or cross bare wires.

So here I go, blithely disconnecting the old and rerunning the wire, thinking I’m only working with 12 volts or so, but being careful not to let the live wire touch anything. I hook up the new thermostat (which is set to “off”), turn it on and pffft - it’s fried. I puzzle a bit, making sure it’s hooked up OK, turn it off, and disconnect it. In the process, my hand grazes one wire, while touching the other, and tingle-tingle. I get out my multimeter and whaddayaknow!

Oh yeah, the guy I bought the house from was a retired electrical engineer.

23

We bought an old Sears bungalow, which is a pretty good house. The previous owner’s son was a fix-it kind of guy, and we have actually been pretty happy with most of what he did. His electrical work checked out OK when I hired an electrician to do some work. All in all, not so bad as far as he goes.

But, somewhere in the murky past of this house the decision was made to move the upstairs toilet over a few feet. Why, you ask? I have no idea why, but it was done, and there you go. Theories abound, but…fuhgetaboutit.

Meanwhile, the kitchen ceiling, just below the toilet, took enough water damage over the intervening years, that they eventually decided to put in an attractive 70’s style dropped ceiling to cover the problem rather than fix it. Ugh.

When we moved in we vowed to get rid of this ceiling, and one day, in a fit of renovation fever, we tore the thing out. The uglyness of the original stained, cracked, peeling and yellowed ceiling, hideous though it was, was still a major improvement over the dropped thing, so we were happy. We lived with it like that for a long time. Finally, I got inspired, and in an attempt to, “do it right,” decided to remove the crumbling lathe and plaster right down to the rafters, and put up a complete new ceiling.

Demolition work!! Yay! Sledgehammers! Crowbars! Manly sweat, spitting and swearing!!

Carted the whole mess of plaster/wood/nails/dust to the landfill. Came back and took a good look at the ceiling for the first time.

Holy shit, what’s that?

When the plumber in the pre-history had moved the toilet, he’d cut a big chunk out of the main, LOAD-BEARING joist of the house, to allow the black pipe from the toilet to take a one foot dogleg to the new location. There it was, staring at me like an accusation: What are you gonna do now smartass?

F#$@ing plumbers!! NEVER give them access to a Sawzall. They aren’t qualified carpenters, no matter what they think.

Well kids, what did we learn today?

Every project contains a hidden surprise.

Be ready.

24

Oh, do-it-yourselfers who really should have called-the-professionals… I’ve seen my fair share of their work.

When adding on to a house and converting it into a duplex, the owners:
[ul]
[li]Kept the outgoing sewer line from the old part of the house exactly as is, and connected the kitchen from the new part of the house to it. So intead of the line handling just 2 (maybe 3) people, it was handling 2 people plus the kitchen for 4 people. We couldn’t use our garbage disposal much, because if we did the line would back up… into our neighbor’s washing machine. :eek:[/li][li]Made a nice big living/dining area, all nice and open with recessed track lighting along the tops of the walls by the ceiling. But they didn’t use sufficent support beams across the ceiling, so it started to sag in the middle.[/li][li]Made a nice big bathroom in the new part of the house… right smack dab in the middle. No windows. No way to have windows, unless you like looking into a hallway, bedroom, or the laundry room. No way to put in a ceiling light. And oh, did I mention a too-small ventilation fan that wasn’t vented quite right? In a humid climate?[/li][/ul]
(To be truthful, I’m not sure exactly how much the previous owners did and how much they paid ‘professionals’ to do. But considering how low on money they were running…)

Then there was the house we rented in the SanFran bay area. Owner worked for Lockheed-Martin, and boy oh boy, was he proud of it…
[ul]
[li]When cable TV was finally available to the area, he was all proud of the fact that he had already wired up his house, so all the cable people had to do was come out and hook him up. When they got there, they had to re-wire the entire house because the stuff he used was extremely obsolete. (This we learned from a neighbor.)[/li][li]Added a second story to the house. The way it was done was kinda… odd… as the room configuration left a small ‘room’ above the kitchen. Said ‘room’ was a leftover space between the kitchen and the new upstairs bedroom, and could only be accessed via a ladder in the utility closet on the first floor, or a (very) small door in the upstairs bedroom closet. (As an aside, when we moved in we found a grow light up there… and a baggie of something that definately wasn’t oregano!)[/li][li]Never did get around to replacing the siding on the house. It was simply sheets of plywood, untreated.[/li][li]Similarly, never did get around to finishing off the one-by-fours he used to frame off the old door frames when he got rid of the doors as part of the addition of the second story. Just nailed 'em up and left 'em that way.[/li][li]Never did get around to finishing the ‘wine cellar’ under the house: when we got there, there was a half-dug hole that was too big to fill, to small to be useful.[/li][li]Didn’t extend the first floor fireplace chimmney properly when the second floor was added, making the fireplace useless for anything but smoking out the house.[/li][/ul]
And, the current house:
[ul]
[li]Previous owners added a carport with a flat roof. Said roof wasn’t sloped properly, and water pools in one corner.[/li][li]They wallpapered over 70’s wooden paneling in one room.[/li][li]They wallpapered over wallpaper over wallpaper in one bedroom, and as far as we can tell, the original layer was just stuck onto the drywall with no prepwork.[/li][li]Wallpapered the three bathrooms (including ceiling!), and didn’t prep the drywall underneath.[/li][li]Put those cheapy stick-on tiles in the kitchen, without moving the appliances. So now they’re sliding all around the place.[/li][li]All of the three-prong outlets are upside down, and none of the outlet boxes are square/level. (Minor nitpick, just annoying to look at.)[/li][/ul]

And, as an added bonus, another house we were in had had the incoming cable line spliced into (badly) so many times, that the guy who came out to install the cable modem was surprised we got any kind of signal at all.

I’m sure there’s more I’ve blocked from memory, but I don’t want to make this an epic (too late!).

<< Blood is thicker than water. Adjust your recipes accordingly. >>

25

My house is way more full of the things the previous owners didn’t bother to fix rather than things they fixed shoddily, but I’d have to go with these:

  • The drain pipe from the kichen sink was rotting out, so instead of doing the super-simple and super-cheap option of replacing the metal pipe with PVC, they decided to just wind a bunch of duct tape around the weak areas. :rolleyes:

  • The former occupants had some alcoholic rage problems (attested to by my neighbors who witnessed their frequent altercations) and appear to have either kicked or punched out almost every panel in the oak kitchen cupboards. One was left with a fist-sized hole in it, the rest were replaced with cheap 1/4" plywood stained a similar (but not quite matching) color. I eventually painted all of the cabinets white.

  • The huge front porch’s floorboards must have been rotting, because when I bought the house, the entire porch floor had been covered in plywood, installed right over the old boards. And it was never painted or otherwise finished. I didn’t have the time/money to tear it out and re-board the porch when I was moving in, so I did the next best thing…painted the plywood with good porch paint. I’ll get to it someday.

I won’t even go into detail on the multitude of “Eh, leave it for the next person to worry about” crap that they did…such as the tree that they let grow into the foundation, causing a huge chunk of the corner to fall off, or the ivy that they let grow wild all along one side of the house that I still haven’t totally defeated almost 3 years later, or the big hole someone kicked in the dining room wall, or etc…I could go on for days. Morons.

26

My house was only 3 years old when I purchased it. A couple of years ago I decided to remodel the kitchen and bathrooms. In stripping out the wallpaper I found four layers of other wallpaper. I believe they changed wallpaper every year in that house.

When finding a leak in the bathroom I ran across a coke bottle in the wall.

27

Found a bong and a roach clip in the wall when we remodeled the upstairs. Turns out, the previous owners had moved out 18 months before we bought the place, leaving their teenaged sons there to watch over it. The sons immediately went into business: for the first six months we lived there, about twice a month I’d answer a knock on the door from one gaunt, long-haired black-tee-shirt dude or another, shakily insisting they "have to talk to Tad, man. . . "

Fortunately, I only had to direct them down the street, where Tad had set up shop in the basement of a friend’s house. Good old Tad eventually ended up a guest of the state for an extended period.

As for the DIY stuff:

  • When we stripped the wallpaper from the kitchen walls, we found a place where electrical repairs had obliged the old owners to cut a hole in the wall. Post-fix, they just wallpapered right over the one-foot by two-foot hole in the wall. There I was, happily scraping away at old wallpaper, when suddenly my putty knife plunges into the wall, followed by my hand, up to the knuckles, which scraped raw against the edge of the hole.

  • Speaking of electrical: while correcting the three-way switch on the stairway, I got a tingle from a circuit I was sure I had turned off. Turns out this particular switch had juice going to it on once circuit, but running from it on another. Lots of electrical detective work went into that one.

  • In remodeling the upstairs portion, we found where the previous owners had attempted to extend the 1920’s-era circuit. With masking tape. The wires were lying behind the walls, on the insulation of the crawlspace, joined together with ancient, yellowed, brittle masking tape. I replace all the circuits after that.

  • And then there was the time during a rainstorm when the lights flickered. I went down to the circuit box to find water was running down the inside of the conduit and into the box.

When we moved out years later, we left that house in a lot better shape than when we bought it. . .

28

We just bought a house, and moved in mid-May. The week before, we decided to plaster, repaint and recarpet the master bedroom before we moved in. We wanted to paint first, so we decided to just rip up the existing carpet and pad so that we wouldn’t have to worry about using drop cloths. Pretty easy going until we came to the closet. It was a pretty recent addition to the room, more recent that that of the carpeting anyways. That’s when we discovered, much to our horror, that the closet walls had been built over top of the carpet. What a pain in the ass!!

There have been other little things we’ve found as well.
Doors and windows painted shut when a quick paintjob was needed to put the house on the market.
Kitchen cabinets painted and then shut before the paint had dried, so when you opened them, chunks of paint came off.
The bathroom had been repainted as well, though behind the mirror above the sink, and behind the toilet were untouched.
All the baseboards in the living room are missing. ‘Odd’ doesn’t begin to cover that one.
Cable and a telephone line had also been added to our bedroom via a ragged hole in the floor, (which thankfully is hidden by the carpet), and then passed though the wall to the computer room via another ragged hole 20 inches up from the baseboards.

I expected a certain amount of this type of stuff, and I’m not too worried about it. I needed a winter project and I think this will do nicely.

Karma is a wonderful thing though. The house they (the previous owners) bought after having sold us ours, has since required a new furnace, a new hotwater heater, and is having some type of sewer problems.

29

My sister’s house had a partially finished basement. The previous owner had installed can lights. Home-made can lights- 2 lb. vegetable tins and sockets salvaged from old lamps (complete with 18g stranded wire), the entire assembly suspended by toggle bolts that had been inserted backwards. My ex-SO did a walkthrough with Sis and BiL.

BiL: I think this can light’s made with a real can.
SO: Nah. It just looks that way because the baffle’s not installed.
BiL: Look at it.
SO: :eek: Holy crap!

30

We live in a log home. We moved in 3 years ago. It was built in 1989.

The previous owner built it himself. He did a decent job for the most part. But he completely neglected to seal the outside walls of the house, which has caused some water damage. So I’ve spent the last three years sealing, caulking, etc. :mad:

31

In the late '90s my SO and I bought a house in the suburbs of Chicago. The house was built in the '50s, and we were the second owners, ever. When the house was built, the area around it was still fields, and when we bought the house that area was still on wells and septics systems, even though it’s in the middle of the suburbs.

  1. Because the septic system left the house at just below ground level, there were no drains below the floor if the basement. In order to put a cloths washer in there, the previous owners had run the water discharge straight into the sump, and just let the sump pump the water out into the back yard. This included both the soapy water and the rinse water.

  2. It seems that the natural gas lines to the water heater, the drier and the kitchen were moved several times. Instead of removing the old pipes on the basement walls, new valves, junctions and pipes were just added. We declared it modern art, but no one would buy it.

  3. The basement occasionally got a little water in it (not a big deal or a surprise). To keep the washer and drier out of the water, the previous owners had built a 6" high platform for them. Rather then get new materials for the top of the platform, any flat piece of wood they could find was used. Table tops (yes, plural) scrap lumber…) When the wood started to decay (wet basement + unpainted wood=rot), they just added another layer of table tops and scrap plywood on top. We had our own inhouse compost pile.

  4. They had installed a 3’ deep above ground pool in the backyard, with a deck (3’ in the air) surrounding half of the pool. Under the deck, they had placed a layer of white landscaping rocks. So far, so good. But instead of a layer of plastic sheeting under that, they used the bags that the white rocks came in. So there were little tufts of plastic bag sticking up all over, and it was almost impossible to remove the bags. After that long, the bags just shredded when you pulled on them.

32

God, too many to think of, I was helping a guy who’s townhouse rental sat vacant during a vicious cold snap, he neglected to turn the water off or leave to heat on,… the second floor bathroom was directly above the front entry way so when the pipes burst it took out the ceiling and walls. I was there to do surface work and he replaced the second floor plumbing. Well it seems he had to take a circular saw to the floor to get at some pipes and to his credit he did run some water in the tub before sealing the floor up and having me put some nice ceramic tile down, and it didn’t leak then. It seems that with the circ saw he slit the top of the main tub drain and unless you ran a significant amount of water through it, like you might when taking a shower or draining a tub, it would never leak. Well very soon after the new tenant moved in the ceiling needed replacing again. (On the up side I was able to fix the pipe from below so we didn’t need to yank the tile)

Some other things I’ve seen, extension cords used as (in wall) wiring, brand new water heaters ruined by bad soldering jobs, hot water lines that tried to glue copper to plastic pipe, gas lines that tried to glue plastic to black pipe, particle board used where one might expect drywall, black tar used to seal white gutters and a personal favorite, wall to wall carpet throughout an entire home held in place with roofing nails, every foot or so long the walls and seems.

33

My house, originally built in about 1960, had a large master bedroom added on sometime in the '70’s. As was the fashion of the time, no overhead light was installed. The wall switch controlled some of the wall outlets, for lamp use. As I was running wiring to install a ceiling fan/light I found that the previous “electrician” had no use for color convention when running wires. Sometimes white was hot, sometimes black, sometimes red. It varied from circuit to circuit, though within each circuit it was consistent. That’ll teach you real quick not to assume anything!

Half the outlets in the addition don’t work at all. They were covered with masking tape when we moved in. The stairway light switch must be on that circuit, too, because it doen’t work either. I haven’t had a chance to trace the wiring yet.

The phone wiring looks like it was run by a manic rat. I’ve got to rip it out and start all over. Same with the cable coax. Thank goodness it’s in the basement and easy to get to.

The list goes on, but I’ve got to get back to work!

34

Wow, I think Ennui’s been to my house.

Extension cords inside the walls? Check.

Detached two-car garage was powered by a snipped extension cord, run thru a proper buried conduit and everything, snaking up behind the siding to the old porch light fixture. Who knew there was a porch light there?

The upstairs dormer was apparently put together with scraps brought home from other jobsites. Alternating bits of 15 amp and 20 amp strung together, no less than 4 types of paneling in one room, behind which some walls had drywall but some only had cardboard looking stuff, different types of outlets in the same room,etc.
One 14X11 bedroom had a single recessed light fixture, an outdoor garage light type fixture that used a triangular bulb. Sure was bright in there!

Apparently they were very concerned about insulation, installing only about half the roof vents one would expect, then covering them from the inside with foam insulation. So there was no way for the humidity to escape, water leaked down inside the walls for years and I wound up rewiring the entire house eventually, the further we chased the more wrong we found. Wire nuts? We don’t need no stinking wire nuts! Don’t like the placement of this outlet, just move it three inches to the left and slide a bookcover into the hole to paint over!

During a kitchen conversion that included changing the adjacent utility room into a dining area, they neatly moved the hot water tank, washer and dryer to one wall and enclosed the area with louvered doors. The furnace, however, was relocated to the single downstairs closet left after the dormer addition wiped out the bedroom closets, and the AC was put on upside down.

In the last three years, I finished the second story with a 26X8 addition, replaced all the wiring, new drywall throughout, added a ginormous bathroom, moved the stairwell, took out a wall separating a too small bedroom and the too small living room, resided and reroofed, went for the complete kitchen update since we had it torn apart anyway…oy. Equity? What’s that?

35

Wow, and I thought that the weird electrical was bad enough.

I’ve got a room in the basement that has 2 different circuits to it. 1 to each light. So, in order to turn on the ceiling lights, you must have the laundry room and hallway lights on as well.

I also have a light switch in the bedroom that controls…nothing. It’s live, and imbedded in the middle of a wall, not near the door. We have no idea what it was supposed to do.

The thing that bugs me is that the previous owner was a chef for an upscale restaurant, and he remodeled the kitchen using cheap, chintzy cupboards and poorly designed flooring.

36
  1. Moved into a rented home when I was in Charlottesville, Virginia, for graduate school. The previous tenant had taken was what a very lovely, multileveled back garden and crisscrossed it with so much barbed wire and chicken wire, I didn’t dare ever plant blubs or seeds without wearing heavy gloves – I lived there over 3 years, and never got all of the barbed wire out. Allegedlly it was to make separated runs for her 6 dogs.

She also decided to increase the number of power points in the livingroom by plugging in an extension cord into a kitchen power point, knocking a hole in the wall, threading the extension cord behind the wall through to the sitting room, knocking another hole in the wall, and allowing the cord to dangle there. In other places, there were live wires sticking out of holes in the walls she had punched out, then filled around with spackle.

In fact, she did so much damage to this house, knocking holes into the walls to the outside and shoddily repairing them, that I found, when I moved, weeds growing inside the house through cracks in the baseboards in the back bedroom!

The landlady tried to blame us for all the damage, but the inspector she brought in said that the house was showing signs of having been neglected for 10-15 years (she had bought it 15 years previously…) and that much of the damage was old and cumulative, and not our doing. It was so bad, in fact, that he ended up moving in to the house for about six months so he could just work continuously to get the place into some sort of repair. (This was the same landlady who would come and dig up my plants and flowers and replant them at her house, but that’s another time, another story.)

  1. My current house (not sure if this counts, though). We bought the house because we were first time house buyers, and had no clue – the house looks beautiful, but yikes…it’s turned out to be ‘interesting.’ (Had we known at the time, we would have had a housing inspector look at it for us – we have learnt a serious lesson here!)

This was built originally as a holiday home, and it’s in the middle of a woods, 20 miles from the nearest town. The guys who built it knew nothing about houses, but tried to build as much as they could on their own, from what we’ve found out. Over the years, we have found, amongst other things:

– that there was no seal between the bricks and the inside wallboards, so that when a nest of red and yellow hornets went up inside the chimney, hornets were constantly getting into the house.

– that there was a huge, gaping hole in the living room wall simply covered by a tacked up piece of fabric – it opened up directly under an outside crawl space.

– that when they built the chimney, they let all the bricks and cement just fall down inside the chimney without bothering to clean them out – loads of fun the first time we tried to sweep to clear up chimney fire damage!

– that they not only thought having floor to ceiling sliding glass doors in every room would be cool (7 sets), but set them in place with NO flashing or caulking. We found this out when I decided to have all of the doors replaced (they had used cheap doors, and when the seals between the glass leaked, the doors went all opaque), and the handyman fell through the floor in one room after removing the door – the floorboards in every room were rotted. A 3 day, $200 job turned into a 3 week, $4000 job

– that they didn’t put wetboard in the bathroom behind the shower, and just used ordinary wallboard – which, when it gets wet, falls on you in huge chunks.

My handyman has done so much work trying to correct all this stuff, he finally just suggested he put up new doors and then build a new house around them…it’s bonkers, really…

37

Oh, I forgot one. I was working for a guy who was restoring an old semi historic home and I was trying to remove an old fire place mantle. I lodged the pry bar between the mantle and the wall and as I started to pull a paint chip broke free to reveal that under many layers of paint that mantle piece was in fact marble. Cleaning it up exposed a few small chips and scrapes but for the life of me I can’t understand why anyone would have thought it more attractive to paint that beautiful stone. Needless to say the owner was thrilled.

38

While I was in high school, my folks bought a house for the land that it was on. It was an acre lot in an area where most lots were 1/4 - 1/8 that, so they were willing to put up with some oddness, at least temporarily.

The folks who built it obviously considered themselves to be very handy. The oddest things I remember were:

There was a covered back porch/room, completely enclosed by windows and every window was a different width;

The kitchen cupboard doors were all cut out in an arch-shape, so that 2/3 of the top shelves were really hard to reach, even the top shelves below the counter;

The kitchen and bathroom floors were covered with kitchen counter tiles; and

Someone had replaced one of the lawn sprinkler heads with a shower head.

Since the grass was high when we moved in, I found out about that last one when I hit it with the lawn mower.

39

Former owners, please tell me why-

A living room ceiling with no lights. It does however, have screws and washers every few inches, to hold it up, after someone stepped on it from the attic space.

Phone lines, all around the baseboards, that don’t work.
Never mind, I don’t want to know about these.
They will be ripped out and replaced.

Carpet. Ugly gold. Padding held down with every staple and nail strip available in the store that day.
Maybe it was going to try and escape?
With beautiful wood floors underneath, thank goodness.

Coats of paint. Many. Inside and outside, including the concrete porch, and metal posts. Apparently done by someone who had never heard of scraping the old paint OFF.
Same paint, sloppy as possible. A 3 year old could have done better.
Clue. When you still failed the stay-in-the-lines coloring test by fifth grade, do NOT attempt to ‘spruce up the place’ for the new owners. Save us both some trouble. Really. I mean it.
Some people should have their hands removed if they even reach for a paint brush.

Kitchen cabinet doors that won’t shut, stay shut, or open again without chunks of paint coming off.
They are also crooked, BTW.

A ceiling fan/light that wobbles. Terribly. As in, scary.
C’mon folks, it shouldn’t just stay there by magic.

Wallpaper. Both bedrooms.
Two layers, the first one directly adhered to the drywall.
Co-winners of the ugliest pattern ever made.
And yes, on the ceiling, too. Argghhhh.

Every plugin and lightswitch needs replaced. Nuff said.

So, your poochies tore up the floor in the laundry room, did they?
And, when you nailed plywood over it, half assed covered it with skanky linoleum, you still kept them there? The smell…Thanks. So much.

Oh, there is more.
I’ve just blocked it out for now.
Justifiable Homicide comes to mind.

I love my little house.
I just wish you had never lived here.

:rolleyes:

Stop. Stop Now. Must sleep.

40

OK, let’s see…

The original part of the house is excellently built. From c. 1950 and it’s built like a bunker. I mean the slab and all load-bearing members including the original external load-bearing walls, and the original roof are honest-to-goodness 4+ inch thick, bundled-rod-reinforced concrete. You almost need a &^%$ anti-tank missile to poke a hole in my south wall. I laugh at hurricanes and it’ll take a Richter 8.5+ to knock the core house down.

However, the guy that had his hand on it between the 60s and 90s wanted to “improve”…

DIY cistern/solar water heater system. And I don’t mean a kit, I mean assembled from various and sundry assorted parts, I think the only major subsystem store-bought was the pump. With some sort of defect that resulted in that the hot water eventually rejoined the cold water pipe and was rerouted to the entire system, annulling the entire exercise. Eventually ripped it out completely.

Continuing with the plumbing. The property had a “service house” out back that was converted to two extra apartments (w/o proper zoning permitting!). Plumbing was installed using, apparently, whatever spares and scraps were available.

THEN the main house laundry room was relocated to the back of the carport, and the water supply routed from the out-buildings back inward. The inner yard kept flooding at repeated bursts of the pipes. Eventually bypassed them altogether.

No sense that all drainage has to eventually lead to one lower point, in turn higher that the street drain. So the water goes every which way before clearing the area. No internal drains in carport, and it doesn’t slope out.

North-side roof gutter not sufficient to handle water load (sole downspout all the way over at ONE end) so in heavy rain it Niagaras over the edge, And did I mention he left no overhang, so the waterfall is flush to the wall all the way down onto windows he installed with a sill that slants inward back towards the house. The Master Bedroom extension to the house was made with the worst-leveled flat roof ever, multiple water pools form.

Now to the power. The out-building electricity provided, that’s right, with an extension cord, tapped into the 220V outlet for the laundry room dryer, overhead, to a single 50-amp breaker. Redid the whole thing to get them power from the main meter via a proper buried wire and a proper box.

Overhead light fixtures not conected to a “box” but simply wired to holes poking thru the ceiling and screwed/mounted directly to the ceiling.

Numerous ungrounded or reverse-grounded plugs.

Additions of power wires to the expansions of the original house was done not in conduit pipes, but entombed right in the masonry, as in, they chipped and poked through the concrete and block to put the wires thru, then directly put cement on top of the work. This means that even under paint, you can tell where the wires were added, and that that entire line and plug/switch is immovable and unrepairable.

The breaker box had to be replaced completely.
And this guy worked 30 years for the PR Power Authority. Must have been in accounting…