Thank you previous owners!!

[TremoloGreen]

I know there have been other threads like this but can we have a new one please as I need somewhere to vent. What questionable decisions did the previous owners of your house make when designing/ fixing things?

1. Nailing fake timber beams to the ceiling and staining them dark brown. Oh, then painting over an actual structural beam.
   

1. Make that staining abvsolutely bloody everything made out of wood in dark brown. Sanding it off leaves lovely drak brown stuff staining your hands and sticking bloody everywhere.
   

1. Building a downstairs lavatory that is 85cm wide internally with all the pipework exposed. Can't be boxed in without losing the precious cm that mean a person can actually fit in there. Thinking of knocking the whole thing down and moving it to the front of the house in time.
   

1. Despite a love of naff, man-made materials everywhere else throughout the house (vinyl, laminate, polypropolene, brown stained mdf), the one place they chose to use a natural material was the worktops. Wood. A few years inl they inevitable start to look shit, especially around the sink. Rather than sand and re-oil, they just laquered the damaged tops with a really shiny varnish. I've just sanded it off and am now on the sixth coat of oil!
   

1. Deliberately ran the drains for the extension they built under the building rather than around the outside.
   

1. Ripped out a mains gas connection so they could have oil instead. Because gas central heating "dries you out".
   

1. Installed a 760 x 760 telephone box shower cubicle in a space for a 1400 x 800 one, so it could open into the extra space and you can kind of squeeze diagonally past the massive vanity unit to open the door onto yourself (good job I'm skinny) Also no radiator in that bathroom, despite it having an adjoining wall with the hot water tank.
   

1. Fitted wardrobes along a whole wall of the main bedroom with chuffing louvred doors. (Stained dark brown of course) Literally metres of a massive dust trap.
   

1. Put anaglypta over freshly plastered walls and ceilings then painted over it.
   

10. Put down random squares of mismatching carpet in two of the bedrooms without bothering to actually fix them down.

I'll stop at ten because it's a nice round number

[RaeSkywalker]

I fell your pain!! Ours:

1. carving up the master bedroom to create an utterly ridiculous 4th bedroom that is long and thin, more like a corridor.
   
2. moving the upstairs toilet out of the main bathroom and into a cupboard at the other end of the landing
   
3. not repairing the crappy garden wall, but tying a plinth to a tree
   
4. leaving blocked guttering for us to deal with
   
5. painting everything bright, revolting colours (mushy pea green, anyone?!)
   
6. being terrible at painting- massive globs of red paint on skirting boards!
   
7. putting 2 layers of plasterboard on the kitchen ceiling... Why?!
   
8. leaving the water tank so corroded it warped when touched and rotted all the floorboards in the airing cupboard
   
9. same as OP- ridiculously small downstairs loo with all pipe work exposed
   
10. putting a porch on the front of the house, but not bothering to have it wired so that the space could be lit
    
11. building a vile fire surround out of concrete blocks and cementing them in, thus meaning that the removal becomes a massive job
    
12. super glueing cheap laminate to the dining room floor, which takes 2 whole days to hammer off
    
13. painting around shelves and radiators so that when these are removed, massive colour voids are on the walls

[RaeSkywalker]

And taking no care of the garden whatsoever so that it's a bloody nightmare to deal with!!

[WakeUpFast]

Well...you bought it! Unless you were forced into it? 😕

[ThroughThickAndThin01]

I'm a bit confused. That's why you get to look inside properties OP. So you know what you're buying. You probably paid less for it if it needed work.

[TremoloGreen]

No, merely lightly cajoled into it by virtue of not being able to afford anything better.

[TremoloGreen]

Hopefully we don't have to start putting [lighthearted] on Property threads.

[PuppyMonkey]

Gas dries you out

[TremoloGreen]

'Tis well known. My mother for example, 40 years of central heating now, is a husk.

[RaeSkywalker]

Wake and Through: yes, fully aware of the benefits of viewing properties. However, a lot of this stuff only became apparent after we'd moved in (water tank, plasterboard, concreted in fireplace/ superglued laminate). It's only when you start to unpick things that you realise how daft people can actually be.

[RaeSkywalker]

And the stuff that was obvious, like the small bedroom, we clearly knew about. It's just funny!

[Jeremysfavouriteaunt]

. Put anaglypta over freshly plastered walls and ceilings then painted over it

That would make me sob actually

[loosechange]

Tell us the real fire was useable, but be fibbing, as we discovered when we had it unboarded and cleaned; a predecessor had allowed the electrician to run electric wires up the chimney.

[Jeremysfavouriteaunt]

Up the chimney? . Are surveyors picking any of this up?
This is making me nervous, we are trying to buy at the moment.

[ThroughThickAndThin01]

Fair enough Rae. Luckily then, we've had no bad experiences. (So far)

[W33XXX]

Our house 'looked' the part when we bought it but soon realised the previous owners DIY skills were not up to scratch!

1. A lovely 4 piece bathroom with stand alone walk in shower with modern shower raggled into wall, the bathroom sold us the house! On moving in and using the shower we realised it was only connected to the hot water and to adjust it you had to run (partially covered past windows!) to adjust the water temperature on the boiler! New bathroom has now been installed!
   

1. Blocked waste drainage from bathroom. Turns out the owner had washed building debris including old mastic, masking tape etc down the sink/shower/bath. Water was backing up and we had tried clearing the pipes internally with no let up in the speed of draining of the water. Having no rodding eye, my husband eventually smashed away some section of downpipe only to find all the debris blocking the pipe.
   

1. They had increased the width of a window to the front of the property including new lintel etc. Instead of plastering the wall on which the window was located they decided to build a false wall and rehang a very large radiator. The radiator fell off the wall around 7 months after moving into the property and was only stopped from hitting the floor by our sofa - turns out they had not built any sub-frame below the plasterboard to take the weight of the radiator. Wall has now been re-built with adequate framing
   

1. Hall lighting was on a four way circuit and every time you hit a switch random lights would come on/off. Would take approximately 15/20 minutes to turn lights off!! House has now been re-wired!
   

1. Lovely large area of decking. Insufficient sub-frame also poorly installed. Posts that existed sunk as not concreted in, some decking boards only had one fixing point therefore boards would sink or spring up when you stood on them! Now ripped out and awaiting slabs to be laid!
   

1. Whole house had been plastered and painted before sale, plaster hadn't been sealed before painting and within weeks of moving in the paint started peeling off the walls!
   

1. Poorly fitted kitchen - needs replacing badly though have to wait until we have saved up!
   

Ideally I wouldn't have done so much work so quickly after moving in, but we love our family house and have no intention of moving in the foreseeable so I suppose it is jobs that are done and out the way.

[StarOnTheTree]

Put anaglypta over freshly plastered walls and ceilings then painted over it

That's a crime against humanity! Why even bother with the plastering?

My worst was the damp walls in the kitchen and dining room that had been covered with polythene and then boxed in

And no I didn't see any sign of damp or polythene when I viewed the house.

[loosechange]

No. We paid for a structural survey too as it was an old house. I later thought we should have got back to the surveyor and complained.

[MangoBiscuit]

Jeremysfavouriteaunt you and me both! We've been fighting the damned anaglypta for 6 years now (almost all gone), so reading that actually made me feel a little queasy!

[TremoloGreen]

The anaglypta - the only reason I can come up with is that they either liked anglypta and/or they wanted it to match the rest of the house. The front half of the house has lath and plaster walls so it was probably done to hide the bumps. The back part is a modern extension but they've still put it in the study. In the sitting room and hall, there's a mix of freshly plastered and old walls because some were knocked through or new extension etc. There, they just put anaglypta on all of them rather than get the old ones skimmed while the plasterer was already there

[TremoloGreen]

Covered with polythene and boxed in

[TremoloGreen]

W33XXXX - the bathroom!! That's outrageous! I'm glad it's fixed and you're happy with it now. I'm dreaming of a modern bathroom.

[Cheesybaps]

Oh, I'm going through the joys of renovation at the moment! Off the top of my head:

Ceiling tiles everywhere! Not only fugly but a fire hazard. Taken down to reveal that they were (mostly) stuck onto nice new plaster. The huge blobs of adhesive are refusing to budge so we will have to re-board and plaster almost all of the (perfectly good) ceilings.

Pulling up the flooring revealed (in one room): Lino > floor tiles > lino > lino > underlay > carpet. TAKE THE OLD STUFF OUT WHEN PUTTING SOMETHING NEW DOWN! Most of the other rooms were similar, if not as bad.

Terrible terrible thick flocked/foamy wallpaper. Hard enough to remove in itself, harder when painted over in gloss paint. It has taken me about 3 - 4 weeks to get the house stripped!

The porch is nice and looks lovely when the light is on in the evening. Trouble is, the only socket to turn the light on is IN THE HOUSE. Pretty rubbish when it's pitch black and you can't see the lock to open the front door!

The "conservatory". Oh god, the conservatory. It's actually more of a lean-to really. A complete 70's bodge, I have no idea how it's still standing.
After removing the awful homemade cupboards, the stud wall came away with it. It looked like MDF had been cut and placed in the space, no supporting timbers, basically not a wall at all! Discovered that the whole structure wasn't built in brick and rendered as expected. It's what only can be described as concrete slabs bolted together.
Considering it's been standing for 30-odd years, looks solid and hasn't fallen down thus far, we decided to keep it! (We did ask our structural engineer).
We've properly built stud walls, insulated and boarded the whole thing... it actually looks like a room now!
Oh, other than the fact that the main drain cover is in the middle of the room and we will have to make some kind of hatch with the new flooring. Why on earth you would build over that I have no idea.

Oh, and our staircase is completely illegal and doesn't meet building regs either. That was a nice surprise!

[Cheesybaps]

Oh, and to add - when the shite walls fell out of the conservatory, it revealed that it had never been wired properly. The plug sockets and lights were connected via extension lead, plugged into extension lead, plugged into extension lead.

How did the house not burn down?!

Despite all this, I do actually love the house, it was a massive bargain and it will look great when we're done! Just ripping my hair out at the moment!

[MrsMarigold]

In ours you could sit on the loo and open the dishwasher at the same time WTF?

[SquirrelledAway]

When changing the oven we found that the live had been wired in to the earth and vice versa. We're still wondering why the house didn't burn down too.

Previous owner had also fitted the bath himself but (a) neglected to get any fall on the waste pipe and (b) failed to glue any of the pipe joints together, so we had leaks everywhere.