I’m slowly working to undo the shoddy home “improvements” made by the previous owner. It’s never easy, though, for there’s always a surprise that makes fixing up their mistakes an order of magnitude greater than it wuld be in any other house.
Last Sunday, my girlfriend and I started to tear up the cheap laminate flooring that covered the floor underneath. It was beautiful oak hardwood, in pretty good condition from what we’ve seen so far. First “what the fuck were they thinking” moment: they covered up a beautiful hardwood floor with laminate flooring. I was reminded of the women that shave off their eyebrows and draw them back in with eyeliner.
Laminate flooring is supposed to be installed as a “floating floor” that snaps and locks into place with no adhesives or nails. At the joints, though, they nailed it to the hardwood below. With brittle Chinese brads. That have almost no heads. Which are nearly impossible to pull from the hardwood. Second “what the fuck were they thinking” moment: they nailed down laminate flooring.
painted over beautiful hardwood trim around all doors
painted over every transom window
used the lid of a tin can nailed in place and painted over to repair a hole in the plaster
used the back sun room of the house as a storage shed for their lawnmower
said we could keep the above mentioned lawnmower and the first time I used it a neighbor said it was his and had only loaned it to the previous owners
moved out their stuff and moved into an apartment and left behind the belongings of their retarded brother who we had to help pack up
because the drain was blocked, let the washing machine empty onto the basement floor
let an animal urinate regularly in one spot on the otherwise pristine hardwood floor making for dark stains
on the day we were to take ownership, we showed up at the house they were all sitting around watching tv, with no packing done and said “oh yeah, we’re not going to be ready to move today.”
The previous owners of my house wallpapered over plastic cuphooks - the stick-on kind that fall off in a light breeze. The bigger surprise was finding that they had wallpapered over an old cut-throat razor blade.
My Dad would thoroughly agree with this pitting. The previous owners of the house had painted over an awful lot of mahogany wood that was used for window sills and skirting boards. Dad spent a lot of time stripping the paint off, tutting at their wastefulness.
They did some other crappy, lazy things, but that got to Dad the most.
And as for number 9 on madmonk28’s list, the people buying my parents last house on them agreed a sum for the fittings Mum and Dad were leaving behind, then just as the keys were to be handed over asked if they could agree on a price for said fittings.
The previous owners of our house nailed down some of the carpeting with with what looked like railroad spikes.
There was a bunch of other crap, but at the moment, I can’t remember all of it. The only other thing I can think of is that in the kitchen sink, the hot water turned on on the right, and the cold on the left. However, later we found out that that could have been done before they owned it.
They also painted what is now my parents’ room in this hideous, shit-colored brown color, in texture paint, that was a bitch to remove.
Not to give too much credit to fools, but did they have dogs? My parents had dogs and their claws totally destroyed their hardwood. I had laminate in my last house and the dogs didn’t leave a scratch.
I worked at the Home Depot, in the Floor and Wall Department, for a couple of years, and we were expected to push that crappy laminate flooring on customers. I even installed it a few times. What a pain in the ass. Because it was basically particle board, a mere breeze would ding or crack the tongue-and-groove edges, rendering the piece of flooring practically useless. And the tongue and groove rarely met so well as to create a flush surface on top, which is similar to real wood flooring, only without the option to sand it down.
Yeah, that stuff is horrible. What would you rather have on your floor: wood, or a picture of wood?
A neighbor of ours found that a prior owner had wired the electrical receptacles in their basement with speaker wire.
My house is always an adventure when it comes to repairs and remodels. I found an open ground problem in the kitchen, and discovered that whoever had run that line had tied the ground to the metal of a no-longer used vent, and had for some reason just wadded about 15 feet of line into the wall.
Knowing where they’d moved to I was in the car and round to them as fast as shit off a shovel…I got everything back apart from the light bulbs which I said they could keep seeing as how they were obviously poverty stricken.
My sister, the previous owner of the house, painted everything white. Not a speck of color on anything, including the oak woodwork.
I suppose I should be glad, as at some point in the history of the house every surface inside (AND out) had been painted a nauseating minty/seafoamy green. In the kitchen, at some point, the walls had been painted a dark mauve with bright blue woodwork.
I’m still working on scraping the woodwork.
(Won’t even mention the multiple fuse boxes and how weirdly this house was wired)
Heh, a friend of mine called these little do-it-yourself surprises “Muldoons” for some reason, and the name has stuck with me. My house was full of 'em.
The previous owners installed shag carpeting in the basement rec room, and then decided to add a large closet - which they built over the carpet. Made getting rid of the (awful, orange, '70s vintage) carpet interesting.
Our house has hot water heating. Bleeding the rads from time to time is necessary. The previous owners built a nice-looking rad cover for the living room, but without allowing for any access to the rad - indeed, we had to remove it to bleed the rad when we installed a new furnace. Which was a problem as they had carefully sunk each screwhead and plugged 'em. We had to drill the plugs out.
The oddest thing was the previous owners’ dedication to wallpaper. That stuff was everywhere, often with different patterns on different walls of te same room, or even in contrasting panels in the middle of otherwise beautiful wooden cupboard doors with original art-deco handles.
In the bathroom upstairs, they had wallpaper on the ceiling. Needless to say, there was a solid layer of mildew underneath it. We also discovered that they had wallpapered over the original vent and had installed a new one - which vented into the attic.
Worst though was they had this horrible rotting wallpaper made of some sort of woven grass in the bedroom. That stuff was damn near impossible to remove, and stunk - bad.
I had to pull up two layers of linoleum in our upstairs kitchen- our house was split into two units, and we still rent out upstairs. The top one came right off the bottom one. The bottom one was ashpalted to the oak hardwood. That shit would not budge- I used the big heavy floor sander on that and got most of it; the cracks are still black with tar, though.
And that was just the beginning of the problems. It’s been about six years now and I think I have fixed everything, but I’ve thought that before only to have something pop up that makes me bang my head against the wall for its sheer stupidity.
madmonk28, you own a house in DC, isn’t that about standard with old houses in your neighborhood.
Previous owner geniuses in my house have.
Removed those pesky radiators and installed forced air heat. In the process of removing said forced air , they didn’t fill in the pipe holes in the floor. Where one radiator must have been difficult to remove, the replaced the flooring with a piece of 2x4 lumber. They left the wood in the entry way in such bad shape that we had to cover it up with stone.
Never bothered to fully replace the roof of the house, instead just kept patching it. When we bought the house, there was evidence of water damage in various spots and the roof leaked. I called a roofer who told me that based on the fact that it leaked in four different places, he thought that it would need to be replaced. The total cost of a new roof with all the old crap hauled away was $3700. This included new gutters which the house needed. When they removed the old roof, they found a section which still had the original tin roof still in place and that had pockets of water trapped in the roof. They also found a small bush growing on the roof.
The let Ivy grow on the side of the house. I paid one of the roofers guys $140 to hack it off from the front and back of the house. Poor guy spent all day in the sun hacking it off with a pry bar and a machete.
The bathroom mirror was being held up by a jar because the previous owner had it hung from a screw that had come out and pulled some drywall. I fixed that with a drywall anchor that cost maybe 20 cents.
The master bedroom was painted in a high gloss red. He managed to get paint splatters of it on the ceiling fan. At some point, I will buy new blades for the thing.
There are others but those are the one that stand out.
Our house was remodeled in the 70’s, and it shows.
The biggest complaints I have:
1- The entire house has paneling. Every room, the closest, the stairway… cheap panelling.
2- At some point, the previous owner got himself a new central heat and air system. because of this, we have older heating grates and such that have no purpose now, that weren’t removed. I have no idea what to do about them.
3- the bathroom is carpeted. Pink carpet. It goes well with the pink cabinents, not so well with the blue tub, tub tiling, sink, and toilet.
4- the kitchen and dining room are carpetted with indoor-outdoor carpetting that looks terrible.
Installed a second-hand dishwasher, with… no plumbing. (Luckily The Bog installed it in a couple of hours - he’s good like that) We assumed (yes, I know) that there was plumbing since the device was there.
Left us a washing machine that took forever to fill. Turned out the filter on the water pipe needed to be cleaned.
Left his fully filled waterbed in the middle of the master bedroom. I had to go out an buy an adapter to empty it so we ended up sleeping in the living room the first night.
Had the septic pump replaced, but didn’t get them to determine WHY it wasn’t working in the first place. First rain, the alarms went off. Again, The Bog was able to fix it himself.
Left the house and garage unlocked the day of closing and every door in both places open to the elements. All our stuff was in the garage (40’ x 60’ detached garage) and could have been stollen by anyone who came up to the house.
Took a sledge hammer to our 1966 Dodge Charger on his way out. Caused about $3,000 worth of damage (most of which The Bog, once again, was able to fix himself) Since it was under a cover, we didn’t realize it had been vandalized until about 3 weeks after we’d moved in. The police are still looking for him.
There’s more, but I can’t think of them all right now. I have a list at home!
