Or slapping paint on everything - I know paint can be removed, but it is a major hassle. I recall one show where they painted a guy’s window frames, I think it was - that he had spent countless hours refinishing. He was in tears (as I would have been, too).
I knew people who had an old farmhouse. They kept having kids, but the house was a 3 BR 1 bath. They needed another toilet, but there was no way to do it. The guy ended up putting one in the kitchen. I shit you not.
Unfinished drywall walled in a toilet in the corner of the big farmhouse kitchen. I had a meal with them once, then found excuses when asked back.
I can only remember two when we were house-hunting back in the late '90s:
The Racetrack: This was a perfectly normal California tract house (nothing special) on the ground floor, but when you went up the stairs you came out from a little pod in the center of the area–which opened out on the entire top floor of the house completely open, with wood floors. In other words, the pod with the stairs and door was in the middle, and the whole top part of the house was a big oval. We speculated that the owner had kids who liked to race their Big Wheels up there or something.
Prince’s Suburban Retreat: The master bedroom suite was purple. The walls were purple. The carpeting was purple. The bedroom set was purple. I like purple, but…ugh. No.
Too risky what?
I have nothing to compare to most of these - either they weren’t for sale or my real estate agent steered me away from them.
I just had Orange House. Generally, I didn’t care if the previous homeowner had radically different taste. I wasn’t taking their furniture and I could always paint. But the one home had painted two of the large living room walls in make-your-eyes-bleed, bright neon orange. I have no idea if the place was otherwise ok. I had a headache from just being in the room and couldn’t judge the rest.
This one was a rental: the Micromicologist’s Paradise.
It’s in a part of the Spanish coast where people have been buying apartments intending to rent them out over Easter and the summer… pretty much since the tourist boom of the '60s. Some of them put up the same apartments for rent at not-much-lower rates for the rest of the year, or with a 10-month lease. This one offered a 10-month lease and was about 200yd from a gorgeous beach. 2B1b6-8m. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, and some six or eight different kinds of mold: IANABiologist, so I can’t really be sure. Placed in the heart of Spanish tile-making country, the hallway floor was coming-unstuck linoleum; the kitchen was the first room to the right. Even more unstuck linoleum; the walls were tiled only to waist height, with the upper half wallpapered (and the wallpaper also curling up). The ceiling needed a coat of paint. The cooler part of the fridge contained two separate growths of mold on the eggs shelf, plus a large one on the body’s top left corner; the freezer had three distinct patches.
The next room on the right (I completely bypassed the bedroom on the left) was the bathroom; mold on the shower curtain, mold on the peeling linoleum floor, mold on the ceiling, which was peeling down in stripes; there were at least three coats of pain peeling off that ceiling - it needed to be completely scraped off.
After opening the fridge I asked the agent whether she had visited the house before (she hadn’t). After seeing the bathroom, I told her that, while I understand a “2B, first row from the beach” will always rent in the summer no matter what, I wouldn’t expect to be able to rent it as-is to anybody who’d actually seen the place. She admitted it was “a bit too run down”.
I don’t really remember it myself, but apparently the bathroom to my childhood home had gold shag carpeting for the first couple of weeks before my parents got a chance to pull it out and replace it with tile.
We had a bathroom with carpet too (not shag, somehow - just some ugly short pile stuff). I don’t even want to think about what was growing in and under that carpet.
A common tactic for don’t-give-a-shit landlords is to simply PAINT over existing mold colonies. A very temporary quick fix to get the place looking good enough to rent.
Paint doesn’t STICK very well to mold, though.
I had a memorable apartment during my college days and I discovered first hand this deplorable tactic. While taking a shower, I found myself with paint chips adhering to the bottom of my feet. Inspecting the shower floor, I could see the various layers of paint-mold-paint-mold, like some macabre lasagne.
We won’t even discuss the cockroaches.
~VOW
House of Elvis. Our neighbor died and her daughter was hoping to rent it out. Small non-descript bungalow notable only for having about a thousand decorative Elvis plates and other memorabilia hung on the walls, and (un-ironically) velvet Elvis paintings and tapestries everywhere. Elvis, Elvis Everywhere! The daughter said she would either put the Elvis stuff in storage OR advertise it as a mini-Graceland. Which might really be a draw for fans of The King.
I have, myself, seen a house crammed full of stuffed animal heads and taxidermied animals ‘fighting’ each other in glass cases. Plus shelves, racks, brackets on the walls made from mummified deer legs, an antler chandelier, a glass top coffee table (with real dear legs), multiple bearskin rugs, a box for holding logs for firewood made from animal paws, and a flock of taxidermied ducks suspended on invisible wires from the vaulted ceiling - too creepy! Guy who owned it had moved it all into his new house from his old double-wide trailer. (invited us to stay for lunch - venison burgers, of course!)
If the guy asks if you want to meet his wife after lunch - run.
That reminds me: one of the houses we saw had a blue living room. Blue carpet, blue walls, blue ceiling, blue furniture. And the odd thing was, everything was exactly the same shade of blue, so it was hard to tell where one thing ended and another began. Very disorienting!
House-hunting in southeastern Wisconsin provided some interesting experiences.
Urine house. Clearly I’m not alone in this experience. Reasonable looking house with a couple of bedrooms upstairs. I opened the door to one bedroom and the overwhelming smell of cat piss hit me, at which point I realized just what the “strange house” smell in this place really was.
House on the lake, and we do mean “on” the lake. Cute little Craftsman-style bungalow with nice woodwork and built-ins. The region had been having truly extraordinary rain, and the house is in a floodplain, so I was not surprised when the agent warned me that the house was showing evidence of seepage in the basement. This did not prepare me for the couple of inches of water that confronted me when I went down to the basement. I could have floated little boats down there had I wanted to.
I think you do not understand how these things work. Older farmhouse, beautiful HUGE kitchen, advertised as having two full baths. Downstairs bath is serviceable although squeezed into an odd space by the kitchen, probably from when the house was first plumbed. The *upstairs *bath, on the other hand, consisted of a toilet and a fiberglass shower enclosure placed in a framed but otherwise unfinished addition over the kitchen. No plumbing - they were just sitting on the plywood subfloor. Oh, and I could see the sky through the unfinished roof, too.
Merging amoeba house. Big, oddly shaped house with lots of rooms, many with strange window placement. As we toured the house, we realized that some previous owner simply combined two adjacent multi-story houses to create one mega-house. On one half of the mutant combo-house, the old outside stairs had been framed in to create the inside staircase.
Something I encountered in many houses in the area was a toilet in the basement. It’s often in or near the center of the basement, and frequently poorly framed in so it looks like a public restroom stall was teleported to the spot.
I’ve seen an enclosed toilet right smack in the middle of the basement, too! Might as well just set up a port-a-potty. Or a really big bucket and a box of trash can liners (which I have, unfortunately, also seen).
Hehehehehe the thought of that made me LOL. Of course I added my own “with a scared Wal Mart customer sitting on it.” 
You bastard, thanks to that visual I just about peed myself while spraying coffee out my nose.
I think I would love that.
What is it with people sticking toilets just wherever? Every time we have a real estate thread here, people talk about these weird toilets (and we saw a couple ourselves when we were looking). It just seems so odd to me - just stick a toilet, complete with plumbing, some bizarre, random place.
I always assume it is in response to someone living in the home losing mobility.
“Granny can’t get up the stairs anymore without help - better put a toilet on the ground floor anywhere we can, and pronto”.
There was the “owner is home” house that we looked at. First, a very large, very suspicious-of-us dog was in the foyer right when you walked in the door, sitting inside a cirle of fencing that looked like he could quite easily knock down / jump over / chew through it if we made a sudden move. Then we went upstairs and I opened a door, just as the owner said “Don’t open that!” But is was too late. A cat ran out, then the large dog gave chase, and it was pure bedlam. Barking, screeching, owner shouting “I told you not to open that door!”, things getting knocked over.
Then there was the house that was really spectacular, except that the staircase leading upstairs had stairs that stuck out of the stone wall about a foot, with no risers and no railings. It reminded me of those stairways in the video game Doom where you had to haul ass b/c they were slowly retracting back into the wall. There was really no cheap way to replace them with normal stairs, as the wall was kinda curved and the stone work was pretty well in there. I guess we could have, but it was already at the top of our budget. We don’t have kids, but my main worry was going up there after a few glasses of wine and eating shit onto the hardwood floor below.
And then there was the Open House. This was a 20’s Craftsman Bungalow in which the previous owners had removed every single wall. You walked in to one giant room with a kitchen against one wall, and a staircase against another that led upstairs. No pillars, just a giant empty space. The agent was a little evasive when I asked the not-unresasonable question of how the hell the upstairs wasn’t going to collapse and crush us.
It’s almost like this thread could be subtitled “A Toilet Doesn’t Go There”. Between the middle of the living room, the kitchen, the entry way, on a bare un-plumbed floor and the Wal-Mart stall in the middle of the basement, I’m starting to wonder if there was some strange do-it-yourselfer toilet placement contest.
When I was hunting for a townhouse last year, I ran into a one interesting one, though it isn’t in the same same league as some described here.
The Call-Center House: This townhouse had a finished basement with a laundry room, a living room and a small bedroom. Normal enough. In the living room, every 3 feet or so along the wall, there is a panel with 4 phone jacks and a set of 4 electrical outlets directly below. There must have had over 30 separate power outlets and over 30 phone jacks in this one room in a random suburban basement.