Was it a foreclosure? That sounds pretty irrationally angry.
Viewing this from the side: My inlaws had a gorgeous natural fieldstone fireplace in their home. They painted it. Each stone a different pastel color. I often wonder if the new owners ever took that paint off and, if so, how long it took.
My fav was a house I owned about 15 years ago. I was working at home, and needed a second phone #. I flipped open one of the phone jacks, and lo and behold, there were the requisite 4 wires there. I figured there would be no problem getting the second line put in, so I called & ordered it from the phone company.
They installed it, and it worked… in about half the jacks in the house. Of course, the main jack where I needed it was one of the ones that didn’t work. It had 4 wires, I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t getting the line. So I started following the wire as best I could.
After many hours of searching, I found one 4’ section of phone wire strung in the back of a storage closet that had… 3 wires. Like, not even standard phone wire, just 3 wires spliced to standard 4-wire phone cord on either side. Why they did 3 is beyond me - you only need two per phone line.
Truly a WTF moment.
Oh man, carpeting in the kitchen and bathroom. 
Who ever thought that was a good idea?
Overall, I love our new house. But I really have to wonder about the previous owners sometimes:
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The back deck has boards fastened down by NAILS instead of screws. In Montana. Where it snows. And the snow shovel catches on the popped nail heads every time I clear the deck.
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The master bedroom had no door. Not even a door frame. Just a hallway from the living room. And they had teenagers!
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The back of the house has no hose bibs. Yeah. The back. Where you’d plant a garden. You have to connect two hoses and run it around to the front.
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The master bedroom’s shower has a floor-to-ceiling window (non-frosted, non-coated). That’s not so bad considering that it faces a beautiful view of the mountains and there are no houses visible from that window. But you can see into the shower from the living room!!!
I’ll probably think of more…
All of my bathroom lights were wired with speaker wire. While this doesn’t mean much to me, my dad was prety excited about it and replaced it all for me.
Although my house has a new and working heat pump, it also had floor heaters left behind that didn’t work. When I pulled the floor heaters out, I found that the carpeting didn’t go all the way to the wall there.
You can see in the spare bedroom where the carpet fell about 3" short of the wall. Instead of cutting a 3" piece of carpet and seeming it, they just stapled down a 6’? strip of carpet over the top so it is all lumpy and weird there. Why not just cut it to size and make it fit?
The laundry room had linoleum in it, and they must have torn the linoleum right in the middle of the room - so they just stuck down one of those stick-on tile pieces right there. The linoleum was a patterned lavendar color and the stick-on square is bright white and seems to be an extra thick industrial type flooring.
There is some nice stone and masonry work around the front door, problem is - when they painted the house bright! yellow, they opted not to tape off the stone work.
When we went to install some lighting in our very short hallway (10’?) we found that one end of the hallway is 4’ across and one end of the hallway is 4’6" across.
Good god, I pity whoever moves into my mom’s house when she either moves out or dies. It’s been the victim of 30-odd years of homemade repairs by my father, whose work practices resembled Tim Taylor’s, with fewer personal injuries, tacked onto a house whose original builders had never been introduced to the concept of a plumb line.
Anybody watch *Holmes on Homes * on DIY? He gets these things all the time, work done supposedly by licensed contractors.
I would imagine there is a market out there for Cleaning Up After Contractors Who Don’t Know a Nail from a Jackhammer.
Heh! I caught that show once. It reminded me of a home improvement version of the old Edward Woodward series The Equalizer.
Yup, I watched it a few times - amusing and depressing by turns.
I like how he’s willing to get in there and completely tear everything out and do it all over from scratch. I think a lot of people would try to do patch jobs.
Even I, who can barely hammer a nail, sometimes says WTF were they thinking! So if I can tell it’s not the right way to do it, surely the contractor should!
Nope. If I were to guess, he was doing some serious drugs. His severe change of moods from day to day would suggest so, as does the background we got on him after purchasing the house. (he also carried a glock with him everywhere he went and dropped it at least twice in our presence! :eek: ) We still have no idea why he did any of this. I can’t think of a single thing we did that might have angered him.
Ah well… Even with all the issues, we still got the house of our dreams (post fix-up. It’s good to have a Bog.)
Wait, they left their brother behind?
But it’d be great to have cable jacks, phone jacks and surround sound outlets all over. What’s the problem?
Did you miss the part where a bunch of drunken buddies put all of those in?
I suspect it was the installation in one day by drunken morons that led to the issues.
Presumably, whatever problem exists isn’t who put it in. Don’t never told us what exactly they did wrong.
I spent about an hour with a phone company guy tracing every phone wire in my condo/villa shortly after moving in. My phone service kept cutting out during storms, which would kick off the alarm system 'cause it thought someone had cut the phone lines.
We eventually found that the previous owner – an older retired lady, apparently – had installed a phone jack outside. And not near anything, like the back porch or on the deck. It was located right next to the AC fan. Every time it rained, water got in the jack and caused a short.
We wondered if she was anticipating AC-related outdoor emergencies (“Operator, help! the AC fan has chopped off my legs and I can’t go back inside to place a call!”)
She also carpeted all the bathrooms, which I hate, but can live with.
The “sweet little old lady” who owned my house had a rotting eave repaired by filling in the rotting parts with about a pie plate’s worth of spackle and then painting over it. That “repair” has of course crumbled all to shit in the past year, showing how damaged the wood really is.
She and her husband had a screened-in porch added to the house about 15 years ago, and whoever did the addition didn’t (a) tie the roof and shingles into the existing roof correctly or (b) install flashing where the new roof met the house siding. (The porch’s roof is lower than the rest of the house, so it butts up against siding on two sides.) So now I have to have the roof repaired both where the porch ties in to the house, because it leaks into the house, and where it overhangs the eave, which rotted and continues to rot because the shingles don’t overhang it far enough. The short-term bill for doing that: around 700 bucks. Plus the self-inflicted dumb-ass fees. The long-term bill to have the roof replaced correctly and then rotting siding replaced: 7000 bucks. The short-term should be done this week; they say I’ve got a couple years to do the long-term, provided I don’t mind the house continuing to rot in the meantime. :rolleyes:
Oh yeah. I’ve got the indoor-outdoor carpet in the bedrooms and family room, too. Of course, over hardwood.
That’s not to mention that they pulled out all the original moulding, replacing it with cheap moulding from Home Depot. There is not a single properly mitered corner of moulding in the entire house. As I go over the house, I’m replacing the moulding with thicker MDF; cheap, but easy to cut and miter properly.
Glad to see I’m not the only one that bought some0one else’s fcuk-ups. Not that I’m glad to see this happen to others, but still …