I pit the short bus passengers who previously owned my house

The BBQ Pit
41

My problems are pretty much the exact opposite of all of yours. There was one previous family who owned the house before me. The only updates to the house were the switch from a coal furnace to a gas furnace and the switch from a wood burning stove/oven to a gas model. Otherwise, my house is exactly like it was when it was built… in 1904! The previous owner (the son of the original owner) was born in and died in the house. I feel like I am I pioneer or something sometimes living here. I like my DIY hobby though, so I don’t mind working on it.

So I have a question for y’all. It was mentioned several times upthread that painting woodwork is sinful. I have LOTS of woodwork - all 8" to 12" wide. It’s in good shape physically, but it is pretty dark and splotchy and would really need refinished to look nice. It makes the house kind of gloomy in my opinion. I think painting it all white and painting the walls a cheery color (other than white) would brighten things up a bit. My question is - Does painting woodwork always depreciate a home’s value or not? How much? I am just looking for general opinions on this not actual advice for my home. Actually, would a realtor be able to tell me what the right choice is in my circumstance?

42

StinkyBurrito, I’m really curious to see a picture of the woodwork. I was going to strip off the paint of some of my woodwork but it looks to be more trouble than I care to take on at the moment.

When you say that nothing else has been done, do you mean that the wiring has never been updated? What do your plugs look like?

43

Is the wood itself dark or was it stained that color? I’m no home improvement expert, but I don’t like painted woodwork that much. My suggestion (contingent on the wood actually being halfway attractive in itself) would be to strip it all, stain it a very light, transparent color, and finish with a decent hard-wearing clearcoat. Blond wood is almost as lightening to a room as white-painted wood.

44

The people who owned the house before us were cheapskates who bought discontinued models for everything. They also just hacked stuff together. One toilet has a non-standard hole in the tank - we could only get to stop leaking with marine putty. (Great stuff, that.) They build an addition, but without heat or telephone, and with no overhead lights. (Their master bedroom was in there, and it was before cellphones.) They put the garbage disposal on the wrong drain of the sink and backwards. The microwave/oven combo is in a wooden cabinet, but it is smaller than standard size. Since we didn’t want to redo the entire kitchen, we had to search far and wide for one the same size.

But the worst was the sink. We decided to get a new sink, and have a plumber install it. He found it was expoxied to the counter top. When he got it out, he found that the old sink had a flange bigger than any made today, and the countertop was ragged anyhow from a poor installation job. Since he had to rip the old sink out, and tore some of the hackwork holding it in, he couldn’t even replace it. We would up buying a new countertop (we hated the old one anyway) and doing without a sink for about 3 weeks until it was ready.

As for a disaster in the making, my daughter’s boyfriend’s parents are doing lots of work with an unlicensed contractor and without permits. That will be fun when they sell.

45

Unlicensed contractor?! Hmmf. Luxury! You should see the kind of things my father managed to DIY in the house I grew up in (and my mother still lives in)…rewiring, replumbing, structural changes and additions…without a contractor or professional of any kind in sight. My mother still lives there and won’t get professionals in to at least LOOK at 30+ years of amateur home repair, just to tell her where the electrical fire is going to start when it does.

46

I think the general dislike of painting woodwork is its relative irreversibility. Untouched woodwork can always be restored and refinished - painted, not so easily.

47

When we bought our house, one project was to replace all the old, worn door hardware. I discovered that the last owner used whatever screws he had lying around to install everything. Philips, flat, square, hex, didn’t matter. Even some metal screws. The funniest was a 3 1/2 inch deck screw holding on a strike plate. Talk about overkill…

48

Ooh! Can I play too?

When my partner and I bought our house 5 years ago we were so happy that it had a brand new furnace, air conditioner, hot water heater and some electrical updating. We figured there wouldn’t be much bullshit to repair for quite some time. Sigh. We were wrong.

  1. Decided to do their own phone wiring so they could have a phone in every freaking room of the house. When we switched to digital phones, the cable company spent an entire day out there rewiring their mess. He laughed and cursed his way through our house.

  2. They wired all the light fixtures with the white as hot and the black as neutral and didn’t bother with the grounds at all. My electrician friend fixed them for me.

  3. Used nails on the back deck rather than screws. Didn’t take care of the deck so it’s rotting and will have to be replaced.

  4. They added a fiberglass awning to the deck and didn’t use enough hangers nor did they put enough hanger nails in so it sagged. Also they left the price tags on the hangers then painted them white but of course the tags are coming off soooo…I have square spots on all the hangers.

  5. Jerry rigged the garage door openers such that the octopus of wiring coming out of them has rendered me terrified to use the light bulb socket so that I might actually be able to see when I go into the garage at night.

  6. They stuffed fiberglass insulation into the air intakes in the living room. That has been the biggest WTF? so far.

  7. Did a ridiculously shoddy job of covering old nail holes in the walls. I mean really , how hard is it to make a slip people?

  8. All but two rooms in the house were painted yellow. Granted they were different shades of yellow, but yellow nonetheless.

  9. One room still had the original wallpaper, circa, 1940 still on the walls. The back entryway has some ridiculous checkered wallpaper that will be violently torn down when we redo our kitchen.

  10. After remodeling the kitchen, they completed the ensemble with a cheap industrial florescent light stuck in a pan ceiling.

  11. When “redoing” the kitchen floor. Rather than tearing up the olive green linoleum, they just slapped those peel and stick square tiles down. Problem is, the tiles have different color shades on them, to make them look sort of like stone. Well they clearly didn’t lay them out before sticking them down because they clumped all the yellowish stone colored tiles in one area so it looks like a perpetual piss stain. :mad:

  12. When they bought the house (they had it for 10 years) they tore out the beautiful koi pond the previous owner installed and put a hideous shade garden in. They topped the diseased maple in the shade garden and hastened it’s sickness. We had to have it cut down in the fall and had the damned shade garden gutted too.

I’m sure there will be plenty more suprises as we continue to make the house ours. Their last name was Perry, by the way, so whenever we fu#$ something up we say we “Perried it” :stuck_out_tongue:

49

Aha! Now I know what to do with our dirty, old, peeling in places, vinyl kitchen floor.

50

All this talk about covering hardwood floors with carpet reminds me of what we found two houses ago.

There was some rather hideous carpeting in the front bathroom, and my wife wanted me to replace it. We decided what kind of flooring we wanted, settled on a budget, and I went in to tear out the carpet and see what was under it. Are you ready for this? Marble. They had covered a marble floor with indoor-outdoor carpeting. What an awesome bathroom that ended up being once I had it cleaned up!

51

Heh reminds me of my friend’s use of “Muldoon”. :smiley:

Except she uses it as a noun: “Look, we just found another Muldoon under the carpeting”

52

Along similar lines, my inlaws installed a lovely fieldstone fireplace in their previous home. Beautiful, hand-selected stone, laid out in a specific order for maximum beauty and effect.

The next owners painted over it. The inlaws are still scandalized.

53

In my own previous house, I encountered:

  • One upstairs bedroom with hideous, bright red pile carpet. There was no padding, and the carpet wasn’t tacked down, so it had buckled;

  • Under said hideous red carpet, the remains of the black asphalt floor tile adhesive used be some previous owner to attach some kind of flooring once upon a time;

  • A upstairs hallway with noxious blue-green indoor-outdoor carpet, also not nailed down, also buckled.

  • An upstairs bathroom with the ceiling wallpapered with some kind of fabric (ceiling-fabric’d?), apparently to hide the huge cracks in the plaster. The fabric had been shellacked with several layers of oil and latex paint in lovely shades of titty pink and curdled cream. Yum! The trim in this bathroom had been painted kelly green, except for the bits that were painted metallic gold.

  • Two more upstairs bedrooms, the floors of which had been defaced by the previous owner by the world’s crappiest refinishing job. First they sanded across the grain of the wood. Then they applied shit-brown stain. Did I mention that the floors were yellow birch, which is quite porous and doesn’t take up the stain evenly? The floors looked as though they’d been painted with poo.

Underneath the hideous, buckled carpeting and crap-brown stain was lovely yellow birch flooring. I hired someone to sand it down and refinish it and it was beautiful. I repainted the bedrooms, hallway and bath as well. The whole upstairs was spacious and filled with light. I wish I could have taken the whole upstairs with me when I moved.

54

Hmmm. I think an electrical fire that totals their house will be the only way they can afford to retire. Plus it would help declutter the place.

Alas, they’re not doing electrical work - more like building gazebos in the front of the house, telling the inspector it is temporary, and hoping he doesn’t notice it when they return. :rolleyes:

55

Oh my. We had a house in Chicagoland. We were the second owners, and the house was about 50 years old. As close as we could tell, the previous owners were long on willingness and short on cash and know-how.

When we owned the house, it was still on a private well and septic tank. The septic tank was to high enough, buried in the backyard, that you couldn’t run a drain from the basement to it, without needed a pump. Never the less, the previous owners put a washer and drier in the basement. The washer dumped into a laundry tub, which emptied into a hose that drain into the sump. The sump pump then kindly moved all that water, detergent and lint into the back yard and dumped it onto the lawn.

One of the bathrooms had at least 3 layers of peel-and-stick linoleum tiles. It also had vinyl wallpaper over ceramic tiles.

Said basement would occasionally get water in it (hence the need for a sump). To keep the washer and drier dry, they had build a platform to raise them off the floor. As the platform got old/rotted, they would slap a new layer of wood on top, including part of a table top and scrap lumber. One of our first weekends was spent shoveling compost out of that corner, when we ripped the platform out.

One of the bedroom had an interior wall covered with wooden shakes. Exterior wooden shake, full of splinters and rough edges.

There was an above ground pool in the backyard, which sat under an apple tree. The pool hadn’t been cleaned in a couple of years. Hip waders are your friend in this case. The decking around the pool (outside, right?) was made out of plywood, covered with astroturf. No, that would desolve the glue in the plywood, why do you ask? Under the deck, they had covered the ground with those white landscaping rocks. Ok, good idea. Keep the weeds down. Except it went like this. Carry in bag of white rocks. Drop it on the ground. Take a knife and split open the bag, top to bottom, down the front. Peel back the bag and spread out the rocks, using the bags instead of a weed barrier. As the bags had degraded, we were constently picking out pieces of shredded plastic and raking little white rocks out of all parts of that yard.

That house pretty much used up all our DIY desires.

56

In our present house, we found after a while that between the dryer vent into the crawlspace and the dryer vent on the outside of the house, there was nothing. We ran new hard vents where they should have been. By the way, if you have a weedwacker, get a metal dryer vent. A plastic one won’t stand the beating.

Two houses ago, we rented a little 2 BR ranch. A big selling point was the garage-made-into-a-family-room. Later, we noticed the floor still sloped to the driveway. It had been paneled, but the paneling was not vertical. It was squared to the floor. It was surreal, like the family had given Daddy a staple gun, and that was all it took to drive him mad. When fall came, we noticed the cold wind howling in through the base of the family room walls. Nobody had thought to seal the seam. We could see daylight through there. I don’t remember how many cartridges of caulk I used.

57

When we moved into this house, I decided to paint the living room. Once upon a time, someone had painted the woodwork with an oil based paint. Then painted over it with no primer. And painted over it. And painted over it. There were at least 10 layers of paint on the trim, and you could run a fingernail along the woodwork and bring paint off in sheets. It took forever to remove all that paint.

58

When I bought my first house, I knew it had a lot of promise, but the previous owners boggled my mind.

[ul]1. They cut a quarter-circle out of the dining room wall and put corkboard and those 12” gold-flecked mirror panels in there.
2. They used the same gold-flecked mirror panels and gold & brown carpeting to make a checkerboard pattern on the basement ceiling. (I must say, it was very retro, or 1970’s Hugh Hefner, or, well, something. It was notable.)
3. The bar in the basement was upholstered in black leather, with quarters (yes, actual coins) glued into the spots where those little buttons would be.
4. They built the basement steps (half of a semi-circular stairway) out of flagstone, but didn’t bother to level any of the stones or the steps.
5. They build a second-story wraparound deck with 4x4s sunk straight into the ground. I mean in the dirt, no concrete, nothing. It listed at about a 30 degree angle, and wobbled in a light breeze.
6. They had a custom bathtub of poured concrete and flagstone. There’s no way anyone could ever take a bath in that; we had to haul a jackhammer up to the second floor to get it out, because the weight of the tub was caving in the basement ceiling.[/ul]

The wiring, plumbing, and heating were all odd too, but not quite as striking as their decorating choices. It was a fun house to remodel, but I’m glad it’s my ex-husband’s problem now instead of mine.

59

The paternal side of my family (the dead ones) carpeted everything because old people break hips. No hard surfaces + no throw rugs = no slipping.

Yeah, I don’t think that’s a good reason, either.

60

Heh-I’m the lucky one, here. I get paid to fix all of the crapfully done by others home improvements. I’ll give y’all the best that I can think of over the last 15+ years:

  1. Power to a dishwasher that started with a tap off a 20A circuit, emerging from another box with #14 wire (rated for 15A) which went into a third box, terminating at a duplex receptacle, and from there a used piece of outdoor extension cord (orange, with paint spatters) which is #16 wire going into the dishwasher. No covers on any boxes.

  2. Water line run to a second floor bathroom which used a few pieces of almost every plumbing method known to man: started in the basement as copper, transitioned to PVC, then to CPVC, then to vinyl tubing, back to PVC, and finally arrived at the sink. No evidence of all purpose primer on any joint, and fishing the plubing through the walls wasn’t attempted-the pipe ran up the stairwell wall, secured with electrical staples.

I’ll never forget that house, because someone must have been really bored while on the john, because then played a round of tic-tac-toe on the sheet vinyl of the bathroom floor, using a knife. (I wish I’d had a digital camera back then)

  1. A three season porch attached to a dwelling had issues. The side door opening was a parallelogram, and the window sill capping was formed to trap rain and direct it into the wall assembly. After removing the covering, I found a 6 x 6 corner post which disintegrated when squeezed-destroyed by termites and rot. The home inspector said it was sound 6 months before when he’d inspected the place. I say he’s a lying sack of shit.

  2. Looking around a house for the circuit breaker panel, and it’s nowhere to be found. The service cable comes through the wall on the outside of the kitchen, so they had to have taken it somewhere else, right? No-the breaker panel was hiding behind the Wheaties and other cereal-they’d hacked the back out of the cabinet, sawed the hinges off the panel door and hung the cabinet over it.

  3. Bank gave me a foreclosure property to get turned around so they could list it. It was an owner occupied construction loan/mortgage, and they had some stuff done very nicely. However, when the gas company pulled their tanks (LP) nobody winterized the joint, and nobody told me. It’s now May, and after repairing the service tee at the well pressure tank, I flip the well pump breaker and I hear water flowing, but the pressure isn’t building.
    Then I suddenly realize that this 5 bedroom 3 full + 2 half bath dwelling doesn’t have an access panel for any of the tub plumbing, and there are no shutoff valves in the crawl space, either. There was freeze burst damage in every bath, above the ceiling of the entry foyer, and the dishwasher fill solenoid split, too. Repairing plumbing, creating access panels, patching drywall, and repainting was many thousands more than they wanted to spend.

  4. Lady reported flickering lights in the family room when she ran the disposal or dishwasher. Husband had remodeled the kitchen a few years ago. A four gang wall case had switches for the kitchen lights, family room lights, lights in hallway, and disposal. Upon my arrival, the box cover was warm, and the lights would flicker if the counter was pounded on. Hubby had decided to use the wall case as the splice box for half of the house, and use as few wire nuts as possible. How? By stuffing wires into the quick connect holes, and also into the quick connect RELEASE holes. Two of the switches fell apart from repeated arcing and overheating as I began to remove them.

  5. Doing a basement closet build job, and I hear water dripping on the floor. Only a handful of drips, but still. Lady goes out for a while, and shortly after she returns, it happens again. Both 2nd floor bathrooms which share this waste riser are free of any evidence of leaks. Chatting with the lady, we put it together that the leak manifests itself only after a toilet has been flushed, but the toilets aren’t leaking, that I can see. Then she mentions that her husband was proud of himself for adding a few shelves to her pantry closet that weekend-he’d gone and bought a new stud sensor and other stuff for the project. A little measuring later, it was determined that he’d mistaken the DWV riser for a stud, and managed to drive four nails into it. Oops!

  6. An appliance service call to service a garbage compactor, in a very nicely remodeled kitchen. The homeowner proudly spoke of the nice floor tile he’d done, and admittedly, it was beautiful. But, he’d done things kinda backwards, the floor being last, so the compactor couldn’t be removed for servicing-not without disturbing a large granite countertop. Enjoy your new trash drawer, Sir.