The house we live in right now isn’t the worst I’ve ever been in, the landlord is clueless, but he means well. He’s overjoyed that he has someone living in his house that actually has a clue and can fix things or give him guidance on who to hire to fix things. He had the tendency to hire the cheapest person who claimed they could do what he needed. They’d usually show up, make it look like they were working, get paid, and never be heard from again. Then he tries to finish what they started.
So, I get to discover interesting features of the house, like the fact that the duct for the dryer goes through the garage wall and disappears. Further investigation revealed that it wound up going under the back stairs, which are plywood and completely covered in lovely green astroturf, and just ended. No vent, no trap, just open ended duct. The whole underside of the stairs was covered in lint and lint coated spiderwebs. Can you say “firetrap”?
There’s also a place where someone started framing in a wall, screwed up and wound up getting the studs out of alignment, and rather than fixing it they just wrote on the wall next to it “this was in the right place when I started! <bad word>!” (I edited out the bad word). Then they stopped, leaving bare framed 2x4s. I guess the note was a time capsule to someone like me who would come along in the future and try to figure out what they were doing.
The truly sad thing is that at first I’d dilligently repair any mistakes they’d made and spend time doing things like carefully patching drywall and add in proper support for ceiling boxes. Then I realized that the entire house was one half-assed weekend project gone bad, and even if I did my part of the project correctly it was still connected into a 2x4 nailed in with roofing nails, or insulated with newspapers from the 50’s, or wired backwards, and I just gave up. Now I ether don’t fix things or fix them just as half-assed as the previous people did.
Cursing the previous owner was a popular pastime at my old place. One example will, I trust, suffice.
There was a pool. At one point, the drain in the bottom developed a leak. Did he call a qualified pool-drain-repair guy? He did not. He plugged the drain with cement. Problem solved!
I imagine he really patted himself on the back for that clever fix.
I’m a first time home owner, I bought my 1947 home about 3 years ago. Things we’ve discovered:
The immediate previous owner had thought the house was hooked up to the city sewer line. 4 months after we bought the house, we discovered we were still on the original (exhausted) septic tank and field. We had to have a sewer line put in.
While the plumber was out for all the sewer line excitement, he said the plumbing under the house was the worst he had ever seen and it would cost about 7K to fix and get it up to code. Needless to say, I haven’t tackled that project yet.
We live in Seattle and the skylights over the bed in the master bedroom leaked badly the first winter. Eventually, we had them replaced (nothing like waking up with drops of cold water in your face!). They were an “odd” size and the skylight company was amazed - they weren’t “real” skylights at all, they were windows.
The house is poorly wired. Last year, the overhead light in the master bathroom just stopped working. An electrician said it was just a mess. He managed to get the overhead light back on, but the outlet on the outside wall just doesn’t work and he doesn’t know why. We also found out that the fuse box was CEMENTED in the wall. In order to work on the problems, the electrician had to smash it loose.
When we moved in, the back deck was newly painted white and looked great. I really didn’t know any better, but now I know that the previous owners didn’t weatherproof or season the back deck, the boards are rotting and everything will have to be replaced. This amazes me, my parents had a house on the coast of North Carolina, with all the salt air and rain and it lasted for 10+ years without any problems at all.
Roof needs to be replaced. I’ve had two estimates and the roofers are amazed by how bad the job was. There are THREE layers of shingles on the roof (I think the usual limit is 2). I haven’t had the roof done yet due to the huge cost of stripping everything off and starting again.
Wood gutters. In Seattle. Bad idea.
Mural of Hawaii in spare bedroom. Okay, this was just ugly. The worst part was the previous owners had decided to “texture” the sand on the beach. It was incredibly difficult to and that stuff off and repaint. Also, they let their daughter make dark green hand prints in the closet - those were hell to paint over.
We can’t keep the house warm, I need to have someone come out and figure out what’s wrong with the darned heating system.
The previous owners appear to have ripped out beautiful hard wood floors in both bedrooms.
I could go on - home ownership, more exciting than I had anticipated.
We have a multi-level deck that hangs precariously over a 45º precipice. The people who built the house used nice treated cedar – perfect for resisting the mold and moisture of the Pacific Northwest – and then, they painted it! :smack:
It would be way too hard to remove the paint, so every spring we have to hang over the abyss and paint the thing. No matter how we prepare it, or what paint we use, by February it looks like it hasn’t been painted in 10 years.
Caveat Emptor! It is well worth the expense to have a licensed/certified home inspector to go over a prospectife home purchase and give you a writter report. The house may be a bargain “fixer upper” or an overpridced ‘dog.’ At least you will know what you are getting for your money.
We purchased a new home 50 or so years ago and with the many improvements it should not give a buyer any headaches with the exception of the low voltage relay switches on all of the lighting circuits. These were the latest and greatest at the time in this area at the time. Fortunately they can be bypassed and replaced with standard toggle swithches with a little work.
The previous owner of the first home I owned had obviously fancied himself as a handyman. I would regularly find petty little bits of shoddiness when repairing things - wrong fittings, the trusty twisted wires, patched up pipes. The ultimate came when extending the place. This involved taking out an external supporting wall to extend the room. It turned out that the large window in the wall had been added later by simply cutting a hole in the original blank wall, and putting in the aluminium window. I don’t know how many years that window frame supported the roof.
The oh-so-charming house I lived in when I was married featured such lovely things as the chimney sawed off just below the roof (but the fireplace left intact), the hall light wired incorrectly that was a fire hazard waiting to happen, the cracks in the plaster that were wallpapered over (and the wallpaper covered with paint), the basement toilet hooked up to a water line, but that line not connected to the sewer, and the bathroom wallpaper that was attched with scotch tape.
Oh, and all the outlets save one or two were on the same circuit, so power outages were fairly frequent. Did I mention all the windows except two were nailed and/or painted shut?
And people wondered why I was so happy to leave there and rent a new place…
Ivylad and I were busy getting out SC house ready to be put on the market. In one of the bedrooms the wall paper was peeling. It came off fairly easily, so we happily yanked off the paper in sheets. It was as easy as peeling a ripe banana.
Imagine our surpise when we found not one but two fist-sized holes in the drywall. So the previous owner had punched the holes, and rather than fixing it, ran out with the wife to buy wallpaper. :rolleyes:
Oh, good grief, too many to list now, but right off the top of my head were the doors. The exterior doors (three of them) were all cheap, flimsy, hollow interior doors, and one of them was actually installed backwards, so the hinges were on the outside. They were all changed for normal exterior (solid) doors before we even moved in.
The previous homeowner had fancied himself quite the handyman - but was not.
Oh, dear previous-home-owner. Too many to list. My favorite, however, is the louvered closet door in the den (for a coat closet), where one of the louvers at the bottom had broken (where you might accidentally kick it, I guess.) Repaired with cardboard. Not even cardboard cut out, but cardboard torn and stuck in so the jagged edge was the one that showed. Painted white to “match”. The crazy thing is we didn’t notice it for years because it was down near the floor, but once we did…
Also, crown molding used as a chair rail.
Also an air filter that didn’t fit, so they folded it until it did.
Also there’s no, um, whatchamacallit switch on the electrical box, as we found out this past ice storm when we tried to put in a generator and found out we couldn’t without the generator attempting to supply power to the whole grid. Fixed that last week.
Take off the migraine-inducing wallpaper, and discover another layer of wallpaper. Take that off, and discover that the drywall was all backward - the cardboard-y side facing out.
Look to replace the lamppost in the yard, and discover that the previous one had been spliced onto the previous-previous one, and that the underground electrical wire had been allowed to set in the cement.
Redo the bathroom and discover that the tile had been put over the old tile, which was over a rotting wood subfloor.
The sad part is, I had a very expensive home inspection.
I last posted in that thread in June, since that post I made another wonderful discovery - the insulation under the house is in terrible shape and has to be replaced. The home inspector didn’t catch this at all and the insulation guy was amazed.
Some more:
Five (FIVE!) layers of wallpaper in the bathroom, each more hideous than the last. Turned me off wallpapering anything forever.
Cheap plastic “tiles” in the bathroom, glued to the regular drywall (not water-resistant greenboard, as one should use in a bathroom), with no grout in between the tiles; they were all just smack-dab right up against each other. When we pryed them off, the drywall behind them was all moldy and mildewed and gross.
Mirrored tiles in one room that were put up with what could only be described as Super Industrial-Strength Everlasting Never-Fail Miracle Glue. We had to pry them off and shattered every single one of them, and completely ruined the drywall in the process.
A ceiling fan in the dining room. The box for the fan was installed completely wrong - it was just nailed to one joist up in the ceiling. We were wondering why we kept getting a crack across the dining room ceiling (we’d repair it and it would crack again in a few weeks), and when we took down the ugly-ass '70s-era fan after about a year, we realized we were lucky it hadn’t torn down the whole ceiling. (When the fan was on, it vibrated the whole ceiling, causing the crack. We put up a simple light over the table, and the crack has never reappeared)
My parents bought the house I grew up in new build in 1973.
As such I don’t really have DIY horror stories. I have official, liscenced, union contractor/builder horror stories.
The chimney was hollow and filled with sand, and had to be completely rebuilt within 3 or 4 years.
But, the kicker was after they’d moved out and sold the place. I had the opportunity to meet the new owners while I was visiting a neighbor. He explained why there had always been drainage problems in the upstairs water systems: during the remodel he and his wife did they had to replace some of the piping. When the plumber cut into the drain line to the sewer system, they found a 5 foot length of 2 by 4! :eek:
My parents knew they’d made a slight error within about a year of purchasing the house. That was when the builder moved to Argentina, IIRC. :smack:
Cheap plastic tiles glued onto the beat-up Formica kitchen counters. Just glued. No grout or sealing. No staying in one place, either.
Another tile travesty: glued 12" square ceramic floor tiles over old and loose linoleum tiles.
At the top of the chimney, a brick broke or fell out. Replace the brick? Nah. Just cut a chunk of wood to fit and glob some sort of mastic to hold it in. Chimney sweep said we must never ever use the fireplace until the whole chimney is inspected and properly repaired.
Don’t need that water pipe in the garage any more? Squish it with pliers and fold the end over, then sweat-solder it. Well, at least they didn’t glob it up with chimney mastic.
When it came to electric, they were severely color-blind and couldn’t tell white from black or green. I found one wiring box in the garage that had a black wire, a white wire and a green wire all wire-nutted together. Oh, no cover plate on the box, and no fittings to hold the wires to the box. The Romex jacket ended outside of the box, leaving the naked wires to pass into the box. Why didn’t this fool save the box and just wire-nut this all together and nail it to a joist?
They also must have found a close-out deal on 300-ohm TV antenna “twin lead” - coax from the cable TV company comes in, and was stripped so its center wire and outer shield could be twisted together with the wires of the twin lead. They also used some of this stuff for phone wire.
Some renovations at the plant included a new feeder sewer to the main trunk.
The field maintenance shop was on the new feeder. Being the utilities engineer I was called when the manhole overflowed next to the shop. Inspection of the manhole where the feeder "side tee’d into the trunk showed a 2x4 in the feeder blocking flow.
The plumbing foreman called the carpenter shop foreman. “John: whose job is it to cut a 2x4?” Zell: you KNOW that is a carpenter’s job!" Well John send one down here pronto we have an emergency and it’ a carpenter’s job as you say."
My husband’s ex-wife’s brother is responsible for some real eye-rollers in our house. I wasn’t around at the time, of course, but my understanding of the story is that there was some sort of water stain in the ceiling, which led to him tearing out the wall to find the source of the leak, which he wrongly thought came from the master bathroom (it was actually a roof leak). So he put back a section of wallboard in the kitchen, did not prep or prime it, and wallpapered over it. (We found this out when we removed the wallpaper to paint the wall, and found that the paper tore down to the wallboard, requiring that we have a contractor come out & seal, float and retexture the wall before we could continue painting). He also left the master bath shower completely torn up & unusable, with a big broken section of wallboard, tiles torn out, and even a hole in the ceiling of the floor below (which is in our utility room - there is a plastic bucket attached by bungee cord to “cover” the hole). My husband being a world-class procrastinator and not wanting to spend money on getting the repairs done, I’ve had to live with this for over 10 years now.
We had a house which looked like everything had been bought at a discount joint…all windows different sizes, styles, light fixtures cheap and tacky, even the moldings in the same room were different!
Also, all of the ork was substandard-we found that room light switches were miswired, plumbing fixtures jerry-fitted. The guy even used leftover bathroom tiles in the kitchen…oh, and he also forgot to connect several electrical outlets.
