What DIY mishaps or odd choices did the previous owners of your house leave for you to discover?
Posted by naalbinding@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 149 comments
Our guy loved balancing shelves. He built entire fitted cupboards in the main bedroom, then the storage inside them was barely more than Jenga blocks.
R2-Scotia@reddit
I left a 240V UK socket in my kitchen in Texas. All done safely but not to any local code.
V65Pilot@reddit
What did you power off of it?
thewanderingidiot62@reddit
Probably kettle
V65Pilot@reddit
No need. you can buy kettles in the US that run on 120v. I had 3..
R2-Scotia@reddit
They take ages
V65Pilot@reddit
Let's address this supposed claim.....I timed my US kettle, against my UK kettle. Yes, they take longer to boil...depending on the kettle. My new US kettle took exactly 45 seconds longer to boil 1.7 litres of water, than my new UK kettle did, both comparable in price and quality, maybe it has to do with the amps being pulled...? UK kettle fused at 13 amps, with a little leeway, US kettle can pull 20 amps, again with a bit of leeway(quite a bit, as I've regularly pulled almost 30 amps through 20 amp US breakers..... Conversely, my older UK kettle took 1 minute longer than my new US one..... So, while a kettle may hold water, your argument does not. But, it's fun to rile up the Americans with it....
Verbenaplant@reddit
45 seconds is an age to wait for water. it’s meant to be all done and dusted by the time adverts are finished on the telly,
V65Pilot@reddit
I have one of those one cup boilers now, it's great. Put the cup under the spout, 45 seconds later, I have a cup of hot water.
R2-Scotia@reddit
Amps are not a unit of power
V65Pilot@reddit
doesn't change the fact that the times are close enough not matter
R2-Scotia@reddit
A UK kettle is literally twice as fast.
V65Pilot@reddit
They literally aren't. Source: I timed both.
R2-Scotia@reddit
Power is the only material factor, and 3.1 kW is more than 1.6 kW
Source: you did the timing wrong
V65Pilot@reddit
How do you time wrong? 😂😂 Fill the kettle to 1.7l, turn on, time how long until it boils and turns off.....45 seconds between my UK kettle and my US kettle in their respective homes....
R2-Scotia@reddit
The UK kettle is more or less double the power and boils water in more or less half the time. Obviously you made a mistake in your experiment. The physics is quite simple.
V65Pilot@reddit
😂😂😂
thewanderingidiot62@reddit
Yeah but more power = faster boil. We are an impatient bunch when it comes to a cuppa.
V65Pilot@reddit
True...but it was 45 seconds...
OldGuto@reddit
You can get 240v in the US, there are even specific sockets for it.
V65Pilot@reddit
US 240v is two phase, UK is single phase
BuBBles_the_pyro@reddit
No one gets between the british and a cuppa
itsfourinthemornin@reddit
Bathroom. They've tiled the entire room floor to ceiling including the window sill and chosen white and blue for said tiles. There's lot of pieces shoved in and looks rather "hope for the best". It's held up the years I've lived here but I don't dare see what is underneath.
Bunch of the window sills are coated in a good few layers of paint. When we moved in, ex added on to them... thankfully everything is getting blasted inside next summer.
Currently working on the garden, now I've wrangled the front, side and hedge under control I'm working on the back. Have neighbours both sides again so don't have to contend with overgrow from them either (aside from thorns on one side). Just had a fence and gate put in. Strimmed it all the way down, raked and doing some digging to pull up a few weed roots and finding all kinds of paving flags, rocks, stones, bricks and the like. Plus attempted walls of some sort with paving flags and rows of bricks. Lots of digging to do this summer!
Hot-Cat-2451@reddit
90s single story extension had the roof beams just resting on the support beams. Not fixed in any way and old newspaper had been used for insulation.
Depress-Mode@reddit
Extension made of a single course of breeze blocks.
Kitchen was essentially a plasterboard box inside the original 1930s kitchen, the walls were still tiled as they were when built and it had the original light fittings above the drop ceiling.
deltree000@reddit
FYI a course is a horizontal run. A whyte would be the vertical section.
zviiper@reddit
Maybe they’re just very very tall breezeblocks?
Significant_Froyo899@reddit
I’ve got the same extension. What a bastard
NoIndependent9192@reddit
We have a second floor landing leading to two double bedrooms but no stairs, landing floor, or doors. Just blanked off door frames and rooms with floor boards. It’s been like that for 130 years. The guy the house was being built for died just the year after the house was ‘completed’, we believe that they cut back on the final build to get it completed so he could move in before he died. One day we might complete the job.
elmundio87@reddit
they installed the main water valve 6 inches away from the circuit breaker
Fit-Bedroom-7645@reddit
Buried around 70 concrete blocks and over 100 bricks in the back garden. I would have minded if it was to level it out or something but it was still completely wonky. And there's an inbedded cable going diagonally across the wall from one low socket to a high one in the kitchen, definitely not to regs, I only know it's there because of how shoddy the chase has been patched up.
OddlyDown@reddit
My previous house had a small open-cast mine in the garden back in the day, then that became a small scrap yard. At some point that was full and turfed over. Years later I bought it.
Digging anywhere in the garden was always ‘exciting’.
Fit-Bedroom-7645@reddit
I was absolutely blown away by the amount of plastic wrappers, drinks cans and bottles, sweetie wrapping and Capri sun pouches I found about a foot underground when digging the front garden. I could figure out if they'd been deliberately dump and covered over, or maybe gradually got there over time, they were everywhere. A lot of the best before dates were 80s and 90s.
Causerae@reddit
Is that the age of the house? If so, then they probably covered up areas with trash from workers and/or kids with fill dirt
Fit-Bedroom-7645@reddit
House is mid 50's but it's possible the driveway was done 80s/90s so that could be a possibility.
Frap_Gadz@reddit
A diagonal cable is a big yikes! Was that the only dodgy wiring or had the DIY electrician carried out any other works?
Fit-Bedroom-7645@reddit
That's the worst I've found so far, but there's a fair few single-to-double socket conversions which look crap but aren't exactly unsafe. There was a couple of bare wires, one coiled up, presumably had previously fed an outside light, switch was still there so would have been live if switched on. And one under the floor in the crawl space, that one didn't appear to have a switch anywhere so was just chilling out live.
bumbleb33-@reddit
We have glass and nails and old posts and other rusty stuff that dates back 100 years of crap that has just been hidden in a corner and buried. It's become a wood pile and eventually we'll have to concentrate on clearing it enough to slab it for safety
OrbitingPlanetArse@reddit
My first house had one of those wall mounted radiant heaters in the bathroom which were quite popular in the 1950s / 1960s.
I found that the comedian who installed it had decided that neither the upstairs lighting or upstairs sockets had enough overhead to run the heater. So they ran a spur from each circuit into common connections on a junction box, and then a single cable to the heater.
And that was after I bought my first shredder to get rid of the mountains of pornographic magazines I found in the loft.
SuzLouA@reddit
Why did you shred the porn? Don’t you know you’re supposed to leave it in the woods?
OrbitingPlanetArse@reddit
If it was someone else's stash it get destroyed with no arguments. You never know what the hell is in there.
naalbinding@reddit (OP)
I'm no electrician, but that sounds rather hairy
Did the shredder get ...gummed up... at all?
OrbitingPlanetArse@reddit
No thank god I was spared that.
bumbleb33-@reddit
That's it! No more internet for me today! I was eating ffs 😩 😂
davehemm@reddit
Was it a nice thick creamy soup?
bumbleb33-@reddit
Worse. Potato salad!
Murde_r_edrum@reddit
Thats so unfortunate 🤣
ResplendentBear@reddit
Toilet waste pipe leak "fixed" with old sock.
Lights on the landing that glowed when off.
Hole down to main waste pipe in garage.
Lock on front door fitted backwards (screws on outside).
Various potentially deathtrap electrics, including kitchen lights on same circuit as oven. (Turn off the oven isolator, no lights).
And the winner...boiler flue totally unsecured. It was all just sorting of balancing on itself and just collapsed when the old boiler came out.
yossanator@reddit
Sock? How?
ResplendentBear@reddit
I didn't see it a very surprised plumber found it. They stuffed it in/around the joint in pipes.
We were saved from a terrible sewage leak by the laminate membrane, (even though they should never have put laminate in a bathroom so that should have been on the list).
phatboi23@reddit
this is usually due to a weird circuit and older LED bulbs from what i remember.
AlternativeAd1984@reddit
One of the radiators in the living room was connected with odd bits of pipes. I don’t know what you call them (corner pipes?) but there were parts that were made entirely of joined together corners, making the total pipe work length 2-3x longer than needed. Mad bastard just used bits of whatever he had lying around at the time, painted it all silver to resemble a cyberman.
yossanator@reddit
Giggling like fuck at the Cyberman reference - it makes total sense. Love it.
banwe11@reddit
Not a bodge as such, but when I moved into my house that was last decorated in the 1980s almost all fittings were screwed with flat head screws. I had forgotten how much of a pain they are to unscrew compared to philips/pozidrive which we are used to these days.
yossanator@reddit
I hate them with a vengance. I feel your pain.
V65Pilot@reddit
I'm still angry electrical sockets still use standard screws. That said, I got one the other day from a supplier, and they were Phillips head.
yossanator@reddit
Damn right you have every cause to be angry!
I'm one of those weirdos that likes them to be aligned. If I have to suffer them, at least let them be symmetrical.
I've lived on quite a few boats and brass slot heads are fucking everywhere. Can you imagine my suffering? :-)
OldLondon@reddit
Fucking woodchip wallpaper everywhere seemingly put up with no more nails. Oh and not DIY but whoever built our house got the mortar mix wrong for the bricks so hit any mortar joint and it’s literal concrete, only industrial powered drills even touch it
Zavodskoy@reddit
So for context the guy we bought the house off of was a builder so did what I am assuming is any work done to the house either by himself or with the help of his mates.
To name a few:
He left us a flat screen TV mounted on the wall, which I initially thought was an act of kindness until the day after we moved in when I lifted it away with the wall to plug a HDMI lead into it and discovered it was hiding a palm sized hole in the plaster-board that he'd made to feed cables through, it wasn't a neat hole though, he'd clearly just smacked the wall with a hammer.
The big light in the bathroom died about 2 years after we moved in, wasn't the bulb or the fuse so was above my pay-grade. Electrician plies it from the ceiling and informs me "I'm lucky that thing hadn't burnt the house down already" due to how badly it was both wired and installed
Cistern for the toilet randomly stopped filling up, couldn't fix it myself so got a plumber in. He advised he could fix it or he could just install a new fill tube, valve and float arm as he'd bought the cheapest possible parts I could find and he was amazed it had lasted longer than 6 months from us moving in and it was very likely anything he did to fix it would not last long.
Sink in the bathroom would fill the sink up with the tap barely on, tried drain unblocker and jamming one of those metal snakes down there but nothing helped, it was driving me mental so I asked the plumber from above who fixed the toilet to take a look, he informed me that it looked like Stevie Wonder had done the piping for the sink while drunk. He charged me about £20 in labour to fix it but it hasn't overflowed once since
Husky_dan@reddit
Previous owner “installed” a 4 gang extension in the bathroom. Stuck it to the wall and drilled through the flooring and the ceiling below, so that it could be plugged in.
Rarely used nails or screws to affix things opting for either silicone sealant or if outside some kind of bitumen type substance.
Not a single thing the guys did in the house made sense, and the garden was just as bad.
Only thing I’ve come across which I’ve thought “yeah good idea” was/is the washing line posts being masts from a sail boat. Only downside is I’ve got the highest washing lines in the neighbourhood!
dinraals@reddit
Bathroom extension that the past owner did themself, and decided that waterproofing and ventilation in the bathroom was optional, and now we have a mouldly bathroom. Same owner also decided to use the baseboards as the floor in the living room and bedroom
wizard710@reddit
We had 5 distribution boards.
The house still had its original 1960s single core steel wiring. The previous owners had lived there for 30-40 years, got old and passed away so we were buying it through probate.
They obviously didn't want to do any modernisation so every new thing they wanted, a new distribution board went in:
Dissidant@reddit
I think DIY mishaps is doing some heavy lifting. About the only thing saving the property from already being demolished is theres a higher level of restrictions on terrace properties than detatched ones, and this was a mid terrace so there was a structural element to consider on the homes on either side.
Jin-shei@reddit
Aha hahaha. I am in month 3 of a 2 week kitchen reno. We have so far found rotten floorboards under the shower and my office, caused by their plumbing where water was meant to drain uphill. We found electrical cables sorting on top of hot copper pipes, providing the exciting risk of electrocution in the shower. We found concrete poured over the original quarry tiles, a tarp stuffed into an open chimney, a third of a chimney removed without support, and the output from our house draining into the garden, rather than the sewers. The oven has been running off the kitchen lights at a 45 degree angle, right where you might drill off you were replacing a kitchen. To top it all, ikea sent us the wrong design stuff so we've been playing tetrus with the units.
Basically they were lunatics with zero taste or ability. We are 26k over budget and so trauma bonded with our builders.
Oh and I got hospitalised with sepsis in the middle of this. We've lived in five different Airbnb with the dog. She now believes all builders, plasterers, electricians, stone masons, and plumbers are here purely to play with her and she gets up to wait for them at 830 every day. She is exhausted
Jin-shei@reddit
Adding, the attic lights also came off the kitchen, and the chimney above the unsupported bit had begun to collapse. Our surveyor spotted none of this
D0wnb0at@reddit
Built a garage with a slanted roof but didn’t bother with a gutter/drainpipe
OrbitingPlanetArse@reddit
Thought of another one:
When my grandmother died, my stepfather and I cleared her house prior to putting it on the market. The kitchen had one of those old twin tub washing machines in it, and it did not fit through either of the kitchen doors. (Eventually we angle-grindered it apart to get it out of the back door and into my step-dads Volvo).
The only conceivable way that machine had got into the kitchen was by taking the kitchen window out and lifting it in .... somehow.
Brokella@reddit
Had a full structural survey that didn’t find: radiators upstairs & downstairs different bores so didn’t work. Turned on shower, water came through the wall fitting, lights that had switches and looked great, were in fact defunct, a fascia board on roof apex was broken in two with obvs tile displacement (we left it all to the surveyor, never again!)…plus so much was wrong it cost £56,000 to put right (inc rewiring house & new central heating). Bad times.
SweetMaam@reddit
Crappy inspector did your survey.
OrbitingPlanetArse@reddit
I would have thought you would have a case against the surveyor
bumbleb33-@reddit
Wired the shower into the cooker socket and many other "fixes" like that
saz2377@reddit
I have something similar, but its my washer!
RaconBang@reddit
Plastered over wallpaper, you know, the usual
JohnLef@reddit
Oh Jeez you've reminded me of the nightmare of the last house I lived in. Gas condemned three times (garage, lounge and kitchen). The lounge gas fire was connected with 11 elbow joints. It looked like Escher had trained as a gas fitter.
When we redid the kitchen we found the entire kitchen was wired off the back of a socket in the lounge. Explained why things would trip whenever we boiled the kettle! DIY'd by an ex fireman who thought he knew what he was doing.
UnnecessaryRoughness@reddit
We had a lounge/diner that ran the full length of the ground floor. Previous owner decided to divide into two rooms so built a partition wall - on top of the existing carpet!
We discovered this when we decorated the dining room and tried to remove the carpet, which was attached to carpet treads that disappeared under the wall and out the other side.
ribenarockstar@reddit
The most dramatic one was that they removed the supporting pedestal from under the bathroom sink and left it supported just by the caulk that was sealing it to the wall. I didn't clock this until I had the bathroom painted shortly before putting the flat on the market and it fell off the wall... the sale photos were taken while it was still in the process of being fixed and if you look really closely you can tell the sink is being held up by the loo rolls stacked on top of the under sink cabinet.
100flavors_of_crazy@reddit
A lean to that was literally leaning, attached by a bolt to the wall. How it hadn’t blown over or just fallen down is a mystery, I put my had on the main front post and the whole thing moved!
CaleyAg-gro@reddit
Laminate flooring laid in the bedroom, on top of the old carpet.
txteva@reddit
Anything important, like beams to hold up decking, was under built and possibly dangerous.
Conversely things of lesser importance, like bit of wood raising up a shoe shelf, were made so secure that we nearly did an injury removing it.
The carpet in one room was super glued down and in the barely attached.
The network cables used to tie up tall plants outside was also interesting.
MoarCheddars@reddit
A friend bought a house which had a gas pipe running through the chimney stack. The bit where the hot gases go.
occasionalrant414@reddit
Everything in the kitchen was running feom daisychained extension chords. Including the tumble dryer, fridge, freezer, washing machine, induction hob, microwave, and dishwasher. The only thing not was the oven.
House is a suspended floor type so it was easy to get under the kitchen floor and do the wiring properly. Still a pain in the arse.
AnonymousOkapi@reddit
Had a lovely hole in the kitchen ceiling when I moved in. The tenants claimed it was a slow leak the landlord never fixed. It was, in fact, caused by no one bothering to put up a shower curtain -.- Pipework was all absolutely fine.
ContactNo7201@reddit
1 - overflow of the tub not connected to anything. They apparently didn’t take baths. We moved in with small children who loved the splash in the tub. Mind, none of the water went over the top of the tub as well, there’s the overflow. Which said water came out of the kitchen ceiling a week later
2 - we also had to replace tiled walls and floor in bathroom as well as wall between bathroom shower and bedroom other side as the tiles were not sealed and grout failing. Found no less than 3 separate layers of failed tiling.
3 - the outside front door lights were installed by putting a hole through from outside into the house and plugged into regular plugs in the house. To use the outside lights, you had to plug in or unplug
4 - discovered the kitchen white goods/ appliances were not slot in under counter. Rather pieces of kitchen counter were balanced on top.
They took these white goods with them so we walked in to bits of wood on the kitchen floor
5 - kitchen sink with built in draining board was apparently was held up by partially resting on the bits of wood (then in floor) and the taps. First use of full sink of dishes, sink collapsed.
WaltzFirm6336@reddit
Owner builder added an extension in the 1980s. I don’t know where to start. Probably the light switches.
There is no light switch in the kitchen. There is a light switch for the kitchen on the wall next to the door in the room next door, and one in the room below which has an open staircase up into the kitchen. Only it’s on the opposite wall to the stair case.
Oh, the house, a not massive 4 bed also has 6 external doors. Two into the kitchen. Neither near either of the light switches.
oldie349@reddit
Bath and shower water frequently leaked through poorly applied sealant into the room below, discolouring the ceiling. Cascading consequences led to refitting two bathrooms.
Vequihellin@reddit
Things stuck to walls with 'no more nails' that had no business being stuck without proper fixings. Absolutely destroyed the plaster on the walls. Whole chunks just pulled completely off.
Then there's the DIY electrics. Several Sockets were spurred off a lighting ring 😱 that had to be completely stripped out.
There was a wire run out of the wall to the shed to power the light in the shed that we have no idea what it's attached to. We had an electrician in and she couldn't find it either. We turned off the electrics completely at the breaker and husband got up on a ladder to cut it (we had an exterior ring installed to power the shed properly and a dangling wire not protected from the elements was a safety hazard) and when he cut it, it was still live! Even though the electrics were off at the breakers! We can't work out where the hell it's coming from. So we've had to put a terminator block on it, wrap it in protective plastic and stuff it into a hole in the wall and plaster over it. We can't find it under the floor to remove it properly. Electricians can't find it. It seems to stay live even with the breakers off so god knows what it is.
The closest room to it is the bathroom and we had the floor up in there and it's not there. It's possible it's been fed down the cavity from the loft somehow? But we have no idea. Absolute nightmare.
onefourk@reddit
Sounds like potential (badoom-tish) free electricity to me 🤔
Vequihellin@reddit
If we could find where the hell it was coming from and actually wire it properly, you might be right. But it was an interior grade wire literally strung through a hole drilled in the side of the house. We can't pull it back in and it's an absolute hazard. It continues to baffle us. Underneath the bathroom is the kitchen, we had part of the ceiling down in there to check if it was somehow under a joist. Nope. My money is on it somehow having been fed down the cavity from the loft. But it's a mystery.
vectorology@reddit
An intermittent electrical fault in the kitchen. I now have to rip out a half to two thirds of the kitchen to find it, so guess who gets to buy a new kitchen six months after buying the house and putting in central heating and new flooring everywhere.
Ginger_Chris@reddit
This monstrosity, which I discovered when there was a water outage, which caused the wood that was allowing the valve to move and close, to move. This in turn meant that the valv was constantly open, which lead all the excess water to drain down the fake overflow pipe, flooding our bathroom.
There are also issues with all 3 extentions, dodgy insulation, bubbles in the concrete of the kitchen floor, a large shed with a hidden room used to grow weed, a large concrete and breezeblock 'hottub', 3 phase electrical wiring and other oddities.
WulfyGeo@reddit
They believed a suitable way to patch walls was to tape newspaper over them and then wallpaper on top
EpponeeRae@reddit
I can't even work out what the newspaper is meant to achieve in that scenario!?
Significant_Air_1662@reddit
Yeah should have done it the proper way with masking tape like they did in mine…
Scottish_squirrel@reddit
No dry ramen noodles?
EpponeeRae@reddit
You didn't choose the mask(ing tape).
Sparkly1982@reddit
I peeled all the wallpaper off my walls to reveal several holes that go through into the next room had been papered over. The one in the kitchen is still there as it has the radiator on one side and the kitchen cabinet on the other and it isn't getting fixed properly until the kitchen cabinet comes out (next year, hopefully)
Scottish_squirrel@reddit
We bought from the builder. The list is long. Mainly the plumbing in every single house on the street.
philff1973@reddit
Put turf over paving stones. Took me a year to realise why the garden was waterlogged, put some fork holes in lawn to help drainage and found it. It would have taken them ten minutes to take them out before turfing.
tricks_23@reddit
The previous owner of my house thought he was a DIY ace, including wiring...
We had moved in with a 3 month old and they left some of the multipoint plugs which we plugged the baby monitor in to. But he'd plugged the multipoint plug in, then installed a radiator in front of it. When the heating came on it overheated the plug and tripped so the baby monitor turned off. We had many sleep deprived arguments about why did the other switch the monitor off before we figured it out. That prompted us to get an electrician to come and rewire. The electrician was baffled at the choices and went under the stairs to find a random wire sticking out of the ceiling of the understairs cupboard. He touched it and the light in there came on!
Deathtrap! Got it all rewired and that was our wedding gift money all gone.
neverafter55@reddit
They had tiled over tile.
Ciaobellabee@reddit
Painting the window sill with gloss, which is normal and fine (even if they did a shit prep job), but then apparently painted the excess up the side of the walls round the window???
So I just have peeling shiny patches round the living room window than I need to sand and prep before I can decorate.
Also putting sealant round the shower screen on the bathtub to try and stop it leaking, which didn’t work and caused me a right headache to fix.
Enough-Ad3818@reddit
We bought a house in a nice area, detached, and were thrilled it was in our price range. We were amazed the owners had wanted to sell at such an affordable price.
We since found:
Concrete sunk into the garden where the dryer had been. Instead of digging it out, they just filled it in with hard-core and a layer of topsoil, before seeding it...in two different locations. We couldn't figure out why there was a dry, burnt patch of earth in two spots of the garden.
Fitted all the internal doors the other way around, so you had to enter the room and close the door to get to the light switches.
Bath was fitted with loads of random elbow joints and different sized pipes. It was also fitted backwards, so the shower was over the sloped part.
Half a kitchen was left in the attic. It wasn't even the same kitchen that was in the house, so goodness knows where it came from
Had removed warm air flow and replaced it with central heating, but didn't remove all the ducting for the old system. They just used them as shelves.
Pulled a spur off an electrical socket, but didn't chase through the walls and secure the wiring. Instead just U clipped the wire along the skirting. The socket it fed sparked three times in the first week,l, and tripped the fuse each time, so I cut the power and removed the spur.
There's more than I can't remember, as we moved in 11yrs ago, and we've pretty much sorted most of it, but there is still a small sense of dread when I come to do something DIY, that I'll find some ridiculous bodge job I hadn't previously noticed.
Qrbrrbl@reddit
This was in a rental property but the owner lived in it before we moved in.
He had installed a double plug socket inside one of the kitchen cupboards
Directly underneath the sink
Right next to the waste overflow / dishwasher waste connection pipe
bighaz1@reddit
Every single upstairs light is wired off one switch at the bottom of the stairs
Specialist-Web7854@reddit
Lots of wonky shelves and rails. I don’t think they’d heard of a spirit level.
msmoth@reddit
Ooh we have a few!
Single skin extension built to the side of the kitchen. A drain inspection cover in it had been cemented shut but everything from the kitchen (sink, washing machine, dishwasher) were all draining directly into this drain which had been all but completely blocked up for probably years.
They fitted enormous sinks in the bathroom and downstairs loo. They're so big they impede access to the downstairs loo in particular. Bathroom sink was against the wall under the window so nowhere to fit a mirror.
The electrics in the garage were safer and better fitted than the electrics in the house. A load of kitchen appliances were wired to the wrong circuits. They'd also fitted an induction hob - not my favourite but fine, except it's not parallel to the kitchen wall and not flush with the worktop so collects dirt and crumbs all around the edges.
Patio slabs were 'laid' in the back garden just directly onto bare earth with no aggregate/sand/anything used.
The funniest stuff though came when we stripped the wallpaper on the stairs and landing and found tiny pieces of paper that had been used to patch areas where they'd not cut the correct amount. It was like a badly wrapped gift.
Flaramon@reddit
A single, home-burned disc containing secretive photos of a random female. Said female looked to be of age, but the photos themselves were creepy. Shots from behind/over doors, from the sofa, from behind her, etc. The disc was discovered during a boiler repair, when the maintenance guy hands us the disc (thinking it was ours) and says "it fell from somewhere up there".
To make it even more suspicious, this was sheltered accommodation for the homeless. Vagrants, myself included, spent up to 12 weeks at a time there to take a break from the streets & access support.
The police took the disc and statements as to how the disc appeared.
I never heard anything further (and I never expected to).
GiantSpicyHorses@reddit
Where do I start. Firstly, our house is a 1780s cottage with beams and limecrete on top, so no floor voids. So, instead of building a timber floating floor in a shower room for pipework he cast a 4in concrete base with channels for pipework. When the seals on the pipework failed, water got into the concrete and then into the beams. With the insane extra weight on them they started bowing and alarming amount. Had to rip the entire thing out, try and straighten the beams with sistering, and fit a new shower room properly. We also found black rubbish bags used as DPM, stud walls constructed from scraps and gripfill, insane plumbing and waste water management, and unsersized steel hidden as fake beams holding up most of the 1st floor. Fortunately we've pretty much renovated the entire house now so there shouldn't be anymore surprises left.
oktimeforplanz@reddit
The previous owners "helpfully" repainted the doors for the cupboard under the stairs and the 'airlock' door between the front door and the rest of the hall. Both had so much paint on them that we couldn't shut them properly. The amount of paint on all of the painted surfaces is cringeworthy, frankly. The guy was a painter & decorator and I hope he puts more effort into the work he does for clients than he did his own house.
batgirlsmum@reddit
Next door is higher than us, they have a retaining wall to stop their driveway falling onto ours. The chap that originally live here was a tiler. A few years ago we replaced the retaining wall as it was starting to disintegrate (mid 50s houses). Took out the old wall to find loads of tiles and other rubble from his job stashed behind it.
BryOnRye@reddit
Removed some flapping wallpaper and found a piece of hardboard gaffa taped to the wall.
BryOnRye@reddit
And behind that is the old door into the kitchen. The door opens into the kitchen but there was a breakfast bar installed in there so the door was jammed shut.
Intelligent-Ad5258@reddit
Covered up rotten joists in kitchen from a major leak.
3words_catpenbook@reddit
2 owners ago had a stairlift.
1 owner ago didn't need the stairlift. Somebody removed it, presumably to rehome. Somebody also left 6 inches of live cable sticking out of the ceiling!
megan99katie@reddit
The oven and gas hob igniter fused into the same plug
manual_typewriter@reddit
Buried junk in the garden.
Salt-Trade-5210@reddit
There was a piece of wood about 2 feet long and 6 inches wide jammed at the bottom of the soil stack where the dirty water from the bathroom and toilet went round a bend and into the sewer. I discovered this on Christmas eve when the upstairs toilet overflowed onto the floor. Not the Christmas gift I was hoping for!
DogtasticLife@reddit
An inset ceiling light over the bath/shower that wasn’t earthed properly, which I didn’t discover for about 10yrs.
I was too distracted by the bile coloured deep pile bathroom carpet that reeked of urine, ripped out before I moved in.
Violet351@reddit
On my survey it said the kitchen ceiling was a fire risk (it was wooden). when I had it taken down, there were three other ceilings above it and they asked me if the kitchen lights worked because it was short strips of wire attached together with sellotape
Murde_r_edrum@reddit
SELLOTAPE
chemo92@reddit
Whoever did the kitchen tiles left all the plastic cross things that place the tiles and just grouted (poorly) over them.
yossanator@reddit
I've had that as well.
CaptH3inzB3anz@reddit
Here we go! My house dates back to at least 1876, it's Victorian, I knew it would have some issues, due to its age.
Badly half built wardrobe in one of the bedrooms, made from odd bits of timber and held together with hundreds of screws, it took me a day to take it apart.
2 little alcoves that had been covered with hardboard and papered over, there was so much space you could actually fit a wardrobe in, so they provided a lot more space.
Rear French doors leading out to the rear courtyard turned out to be internal doors that had not been treated, so were starting to rot.
Had some builders in to do some plastering in the utility room , they started clearing the room and discovered a gaping hole in the wall, the previous owners had removed a considerable amount of the stone work wall so they could feed and electrical cable round the exterior of the house, so as to power the washing machine, the hole had been filled up with insulation and once that had been removed you could actually see daylight coming through a few holes, builders had to rebuild the wall before they could continue.
All the windows were original Victorian sash windows, half had been painted shut and the paint was pretty much all that held the windows together, had to get them all replaced.
The hallway on the first floor had a plaster board partition, with a door, the partition wall did not go all the way to the ceiling and had a 30cm gap at the top, I tore that down to create more space.
ChelseaMourning@reddit
My parents moved into a place a while back and started to remodel the bathroom. The previous owner had also remodelled at one point, and had simply tiled over the tiles that were already there. Just a dot of grout in each corner and stuck over the top.
yossanator@reddit
Found a ragged hole larger than my fist on a wall that went from living room to the bedroom. It was a few off the ground and had been obscured by a sofa on one side and chest of drawers. It was for TV aerial cable. I shit you not. Clearly the previous owner wasn't a DIY person.
SignNotInUse@reddit
Im fairly certain whoever plumbed in my flat was on acid. I have 4 stopcocks, a bathroom sink that pulls a vacume when you take the plug out of the bath, an ornamental overflow pipe, and the crowning achivement the w bend under the kitchen sink. Whoever plumbed in the kitchen sink drilled the hole for the drain in the wrong place and decided fuck it I can make it fit with multiple pipe elbows.
markvauxhall@reddit
2nd floor flat. Boiler from the 70s. Which we knew about when buying and planned to replace.
Got a plumber in after buying, who after laughing and photographing it to show his mates, told us that replacing it and installing a compliant flue would need scaffolding hiked throguh the ground floor flat and put up in their garden.
Decided to keep the boiler from the 70s.
Which I'm sure the the decision making process the previous owner went through as well. And I'm sure it's the decision making process the person we sold it to went through.
lordsteve1@reddit
When previous owners had redone the whole house they’d just cut all the cables they didn’t need an at one end and stuffed them into the eaves and wall cavities. So doing any work in those spaces now is like a spaghetti lottery of not knowing which wires might still be live or connected to something you actually need.
frankchester@reddit
Two slices of yellow and green sponge scourers glued to the wall behind a shelf.
A Coldplay CD in the skirting board. That one felt like a threat.
AndyMarden@reddit
The loft was full of steam. Plumber can find and we going the culprit: the lump has got rusted and locked to full on and it was pumping back up into the feeder tank .
The previous owner had installed the pump under the middle of the kitchen floor and then fixed pendant parquet flooring all over the kitchen.
Thanks.
AndyMarden@reddit
Oh yes, and a house built in 1895 that had live and wires inside metal conduit for the lighting circuit. The live wire was red and the neutral wire was... red
bondinchas@reddit
Sounds right, both wires carried that new fangled electric which could kill you.
Capable_Tip7815@reddit
The kitchen units were fitted over the flooring.
The bath is the wrong way round.
The grass in the garden is in clumps.
Loquis@reddit
Putting decking in a small courtyard, completely surrounded by walls, and overlooked by loads of trees. Leaves, needles all fell through the cracks and just rotted everything away. Icing on the cake. It completely covered the drain cover, thankfully I'd already pulled it up and cleaned underneath once when our downstairs toilet blocked and needed to look in the drain.
ShitBritGit@reddit
The flat I'm working on now - and it wasn't previous owners, it was how it was built.
I'm on the 2nd floor and it still has the original tongue and groove floorboards which squeaked and banged with every footstep - it was my intent to replace the floor before I'd even finished buying.
Turns out the joists weren't quite at the right height so the joist had a 2" batton loosely nailed to the top. The floorboards were then pinned down with fairly short nails - so the boards weren't actually connected to the joists. On top of that nothing was level.
So in each room once the floor comes up and the 2" battons removed, I have to make new battons so the top side is straight and level, these are glued and screwed to the joists. Then using 22mm floorboards (the original were only about 18mm) I've finally got a floor that is actually nice to walk on.
And I haven't even mentioned the wiring yet...
painful_butterflies@reddit
Previous owner decided to tile the bathroom, but instead of doing it straight to the wall, they put a quarter inch MDF board all over the walls, then tile onto that. Meaning when a patch of the grout blew.
We found that instead of a fairly quick fix of re-grouting, we had to strip the whole bathroom, removing the MDF, then redoing it.
Super thrilled with that.
No_Pea-1@reddit
I purchased my late mother's house which she bought at auction as a renovation project a few years prior. I have to refrain myself from getting annoyed at her!! But I suppose I know which jobs I shouldn't attempt to do myself.
Uneven laminate = gaps = water ingress from mopping = skirting board completely dry rotted...
Blocked the chimney without putting a vent in so that made the plaster wet... The DIY plaster over the gap looks very uneven.
Tried to remove woodchip wallpaper and just used lining paper over it when she gave up. It looked terrible. It didnt even take me long to bring it back to plaster, maybe 3 days.
Wallpapered over uneven walls and painted the wallpaper.
Ashamed_North348@reddit
Our first house was once owned by someone who worked in the planning dept of the local council, we reckoned he passed his own plans!
I think it was the house that Jack built, Jack of all trades master of none.
Lessarocks@reddit
A ton of hair and curler pins (little old lady) down the bathroom sink. When I unblocked it with the plunger, I gagged so much.
Dutch_Slim@reddit
Lots of wall lights. Plugged into sockets and then the flex plastered into the walls. Ceiling lights with no discernible connection to the lighting ring. Every hole filled with newspaper and mastic. Sockets that weren’t properly wired in. We’ve finally stopped finding issues, but it was quite an interesting experience for the first few years of living here!
WraithCadmus@reddit
None of the doors latch, they don't even have strike plates in the frames. I suspect the old lady who lived here before me was losing mobility or had rheumatism and couldn't work a door handle any more. Or it was just the style at the time (most modernisation seems to be from the mid 80s).
Useful-Sail-4203@reddit
"yes"
I bought my house as a probate sale from the kids of the elderly couple who finally died after living there since the 60s. House is 1920s.
Apparently their son was some kind of handyman or builder and did most of the work himself. The whole house is full of bodges and subpar workmanship. You can still hear the echoes of "fuck it that'll do" if you listen hard enough.
OrbitingPlanetArse@reddit
Sounds very similar to my brother's house ("he must have worked bloody hard to cods it up this badly.")
naalbinding@reddit (OP)
I call that kind of guy Mr Bodge-Job. He's loved in soany places!
GiGoVX@reddit
Wait until I sell my places...... People aren't going to like me 🤣
I'm never going to mention the electric cable to a pair of sockets in the kitchen aren't channeled and shielded. Nor are a set in one of the bedrooms 🤔 may or may not be my doing 😂
confuzzledfather@reddit
I don't know enough about electrical safety to know if that's really dangerous. But if it is please make sure the buyer knows about it!
RazzmatazzFit2723@reddit
We bought our house with some DIY solar panels installed, basically two boxes with a zigzag of water pipes installed and connected into the hot water system and all painted matt black. They were hidden away in a south facing valley roof. Our first task was to fit central heating so the old system all came out. It was a few weeks later, when we got round to sorting the roof that we discovered that the previous owner, who did the installation, had just drilled numerous large holes through the tiles without making any effort to seal them, so every time it rained water poured through into our loft, without us realising
not-my-circus1992@reddit
They raised a floor in one bedroom. Don't know why. But they also raised it by laying wood down in layers, unsecured. We're getting it sorted by a professional soon but until then we're playing the lottery every time we walk on it.
MDeltaC@reddit
Didn't do a mist coat. Hours of paint scraping that I'll never get back.
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