Some explaination is in order - a “Muldoon” is a neologism a friend of mine invented to describe a lurking home improvement nightmare created by the person who owned your house before you, which you only discovered after you bought the place.
It isn’t something merely shoddily done, or a problem sneakily concealed; it is something done in defiance of all logic or reason (or merely with a staggering lack of foresight).
My favorite example: we have hot water heating in our house, and the previous owners had lovingly made a radiator cover for the radiator in the living room - and it looked very nice, quite suited the room’s decor.
However, when we started the furnace up in the first winter, we discovered a bit of a problem: there was simply no way to access the radiator to bleed it. There was no access at all.
At first I simply could not believe it - I kept looking for some hidden panel or other which would access the valve. Eventually I had to give up, drill out the screw-heads (they were covered in wood-filler), and undo the whole thing. There was no hidden panel. Which was odd, since they clearly had built the thing years ago - they simply never bled the valve.
What are your examples?
[BTW the term “Muldoon” comes from the last name of the previous owner of my friend’s house - no offence to those with that name out there, but somehow it seems to work and has caught on in my circle. ]
We call it pulling a Brandon for a previous owner of the house. Not using primer for the high gloss red paint in the Master. (Although, that made it easier to peel off in places. Painting over the outlet covers, installing the fan in such a way that when you actually used it, you pulled the wires out.
My personal favorite was the cheap hollow door in the back room. Someone had either punched through it or otherwise broken it. What they did, rather than replace it was cover the hole with a cheap bamboo screen and staple it on.
Whoever did the wiring in our detached garage installed an external outlet (labelled as a GFI, but not, according to our electrician) with a dimmer switch on it. The electrician was quite baffled as to why anyone would do that.
And then there were the outlets with no face plates, positioned right next to the buttons you hit to make the door go up or down. If you missed and touched the wrong thing on one of those outlets, the electrician said you could get zapped.
We got all that fixed this summer, when we were having a general contractor replace the garage roof and convert the garage from having two small doors to a single large door.
ETA: Generally the rest of the stuff the previous owners did to the house was done right, which made the garage issues all the more baffling.
The interior stairs in my house have treads but no risers. Well, there are risers, but they were some kind of thin Masonite stuff and were no longer attached to the treads, but only to the three (count 'em) layers of stair carpeting. The Masonite did do a decent impression of wood when viewed from behind, in the basement stairwell.
Somewhat similarly to those who refer to past owners, we call such things “Another Fine Example of Smith Engineering.” (Their name wasn’t “Smith,” but it’s a generic enough name.) In a nutshell, Smith Engineering seemed to involve a bunch of friends, a Saturday afternoon, and a case of beer (or two) in order to complete a project. And I use the term “completion” loosely.
So far, we’ve found:
– A coat rack that was held to the wall by butterfly anchors that required drilling half-inch holes in the drywall. These things were big and strong enough to hold a car to the wall, but they only held a light rack, and even a full rack of coats aren’t heavy enough to require these things. When we took the rack down, we found these gaping holes and the anchors, which weren’t really holding much at that point. What, you couldn’t find a stud?
– Ceiling light fixtures where the mains leads didn’t quite reach the fixture leads. So let’s just use any old color of scrap wire to make the connection. White to red to green to black on the fixture. Same for the other lead. Add yellow marrettes, and it’s a colorful party! And a headache for me, when the whole damn thing nearly shorted out due to a loose marrette.
– Plastic popsicle sticks connecting the flush lever to the drain plug in a toilet tank. Yeesh.
There were plenty of other minor annoyances, but they were easily taken care of. These were perhaps the worst, though.
The previous owners here built a breezeway from the back door to the garage to make it attached. Unfortunately when they put up the walls, they put the untreated 2x4s directly on the concrete slab they poured for the floor. It is starting to rot nicely now. Which matches the top, where they apparently ran out of shingles up on the roof while working (not in the garage, there is a full bundle there) because they didn’t put a cap on the crest. So water has also been rotting the walls. I am pretty much going to have to pull down the entire thing and re-do it. And I can’t even afford to fix the garage roof right now.
A toilet tank with a hideous crack that threatened catastrophic failure at any moment, which had been cemented into place with clear RTV sealer. I replaced the toilet, and posted about it several years ago on here, after the crack started to weep.
I suspect beer played a major role in many of the design decisions at our place. I could list dozens of things - you can read about the decorative beamin the excerpt here. Another example, not mentioned in the book, was the aluminum turkey pan suspended just below the (10-foot) ceiling. To catch the drips? (An upstairs bathroom was in the vicinity upstairs, although not directly overhead.) We never quite figured it out.
Our basement was finished when we moved in, but parts of it have a very Dr. Seuss look to them - no 90º angle in sight. Then there’s the front half of the basement - one huge room, a tiny half bath that you have to go out of to change your mind, and one tiny bedroom. Hmm. Couldn’t have divided that up a little better, eh?
Not really a Muldoon, but a “oh crap” moment just the same.
In the house I just moved out of…
I was very pleased to find hardwood flooring in my daughter’s bedroom; so I pulled the carpet up. I peeled back a corner of carpeting from my other daughter’s bedroom… and I found another hardwood floor! Woo Hoo! I cautiously pulled up carpeting in the hallway… yep! Hardwoods there too! I was so excited I continued to pull up carpet into the living room…
um yeah, the hardwood ended at the hall! Doh!
Oh well, sez I, I needed new carpeting in there anyway.
Enright3, when I bought my first place, a small studio apartment, I noted hardwood floors under the carpet. Planning to refinish them, I took up all the carpet and padding, only to find out that a 4’x4’ section in the middle of the living space was replaced with plywood.
Not a muldoon either, but the entire second floor of my house is on a single 15 amp circuit, all plugs and lights in 3 bedrooms +1 bath. There are probably 3 plugs on the first floor that are 20 amp homeruns, and they couldn’t bother to pull even 1 extra circuit up to the second floor.
Heh, the wierdest I ever saw house-hunting was a tiny furnished bedroom tucked away in an otherwise unfinished basement - with a rather large bolt lock on the outside. :eek:
Perfect I suppose for imprisioning mad relatives in a Victorian romance, but the reasons for having such a room in the modern era remain somewhat obscure - unless I suppose one was in Austria.
I actually have a reasonable explanation for that - I was briefly considering putting one on my room to keep my sister out when I wasn’t there. No prisoners required.
Unbelievable- while reading your post I was amazed at how similar it sounded to the house I just moved out of. Then I read your location- I just left a 1956 split level in Bloomfield, NJ (just up Grove Street!), where the entire bedroom level operated off of a single 15 amp breaker. Three bedrooms, hall bath, master bath, three ceiling fans, plus attic lights and exhaust fan. Must have been the same builder.
My whole house ran off a 60-amp panel – kitchen, furnace, washer, 3 bedrooms. That’s the first thing I replaced. I’ll bet the lights dimmed if they tried to use the toaster at night. It’s not a muldoon, exactly; I guess it made sense in the 1930s.
I guess that’s a little large for a trapdoor, but I would have been tempted. You could put your desk next to it and drop disobedient minions into a pit.
I was thinking of the kind you can stick a padlock over. Yeah. That’s creepy. The only non-creepy explanation I can think of (and it’s really reaching) is if the door didn’t stay closed and you wanted to keep the pets out of it. Some critters can do door knobs, right?
We call them “Pulte Features”. We live in a house built by Pulte Construction in the 1970’s (when they were run out of Michigan for their construction practices). You could see when they were running short of materials for example. The 16" on center for studs became more of a suggestion than a rule. The house across the street from ours had studs that did not all go to the top. They had a heck of a time with finishing their new siding.
FWIW -
my old place had a tiny. butt-ugly room and bath down - it was built by “class-concious” “owners” for the live-in “help”. NOthing was too cheap or demeaning for the lower-class. There was also a gate to keep her out of the back yard. Nice people, huh?
I got into a discussion about shoddy practices in my Edwardian vs. his Victorian. He won - he is now stuck with a circa 1890 toilet installed in CEMENT (not concrete, not adhesive - real, live cement). Until someone wants to rip up that floor, there will be a succession of poor souls doomed to find replacement parts for a 100+ yr old toilet.
That’s not an ugly and out-of-place section of plywood. Put some colorful lights in the ceiling above, and it’s a home disco, complete with small dance floor.
Can you tell I’ve been speaking with realtors lately?
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