To ask for the most ridiculous diy you've found in a house

[Bakewellisntjustacake]

This is one of mine..

This is an outside tap that has been fitted onto a water pipe in the basement there is no drainage in the basement so we have to keep a bucket under it as it leaks.

The previous owners couldn't be bothered to either sort out a drain in the basement (understandable as expensive) they also couldn't be bothered to fit an outside tap actually outside so they attached it to a water pipe in the basement and ran the hose out of the window up into the garden and watered the plants like that.

It's not even cut into the plaster board right! Obviously it's on a list as long as my arm to fix.

Anyone else got some 'interesting' diy stories ?

Our house was owned by bodgers. We were first time buyers so a lot of it escaped our noticed.

The most annoying: the chimney breasts are wallpapered. It's fairly cheap wallpaper, so easy to soak and remove. At least it would be, had they not run bath sealant across the top to make it look neat, so if you try and remove it, you take some of the ceiling with it

When getting the house re-wired we learnt that the previous owners had used an old margarine tub as a junction box up in the loft.

We have a cupboard in the bedroom that goes out over the stairs. This would be a really useful small walk in wardrobe type space, except that the previous owners fitted a turquoise blue sink into it. Just a sink, so it's like having part of an en-suite in a cupboard in the bedroom. It's on the list to have removed along with many other jobs.

The central heating and water system that had been completely plumbed in with cold water plastic pipes.

Though the worst was the actual electricians (sub contractors from the builders we were using, not ones we had employed ourselves) who forged the certificates. Our wires are old and brittle, and if you don't replace whatever bit you've been working on carefully, a wire can snap as you put it back in the ceiling or back on the wall. They couldn't work out why the earth wasn't right, even though they'd just wired it correctly (the wire had snapped as they replaced it) so they just forged the whole lot. We only found out because I was so concerned about some of the crap they were telling me (nuisance tripping is apparently 'to be expected') that we got an electrician we knew and trusted to come and check their work. So glad we did!

We discovered a long list of poor DIY once we had bought our house and moved in.

The worst being I was sure that I could intermittently smell gas in the kitchen one day but DH said he couldn’t smell anything. Then the smell would go so I wasn’t sure. We went out for the afternoon and then came home and upon opening the front door was hit by an overpowering smell of gas. We turned it off at the Mains and called National Grid who discovered 5 leaks in the meter. The repairman said the meter had been tinkered with by an amateur, and arranged to have the whole meter replaced but he could not believe what had been done to the meter (sellotape over cracks etc).

I was beyond furious . Massively irresponsible to endanger life just to save money. We had a newborn at the time and I was all for contacting the previous owners and letting rip at them but DH said let it be.

Awful bedroom carpet in 1970s purple but what made it worse was there was a gap between the bed and the window where they had obviously run out of carpet. They had made a patchwork effect of lots of little strips of mismatched different coloured carpet samples all squashed together to cover the underlay.

No carpet fitter would ever do that so I assumed the owners bought a roll of cheap carpet without properly measuring the room first.

Wallpaper that was supposed to look like wood that had been varnished.

Just remembered another
We had a new kitchen fitted . The existing boiler was only a couple of years old & situated low down . We didn’t realise the kitchen fitter had sawn off part of the gas boiler to make the worktop fit until the smell of gas became so bad the boiler had to be condemned
Husband lost his shit over that and after weeks with no boiler the kitchen company eventually paid for a replacement boiler

My first flat had a tiny kitchen so a previous owner had created a 2 ring hob by taking a 4 ring hob and hacking it in half. They had then connected the hob to the gas supply using a bit of garden hose. 😯

Polystyrene tiles fixed to a bedroom ceiling with grout to hide a crack, 5 different tiles used to tile the bathroom including some very obviously kitchen tiles, wood chip painted navy blue and potato printed with gold moons and stars, ply board varnished mahogany and put up all round the living room to cover up both blown plaster and 70 years of layered wallpaper…

A student flat where they'd divided the lounge in two down the middle to make two bedrooms.

We each got half the sash window (so it had to be open or closed for us both), and half a ceiling rose.

Moved into my first house just over a month ago.

All the taps are the wrong way round. Hot comes out of the one labelled cold. Cold out of the one labelled hot. But I have hot running water. In my previous rental it had a 40 year old water tank that for over £1.50 in gas to heat and get hot water. Luckily I had an electric shower and bought a dishwasher.

@BearPear

We bought our last house from a policeman, apparently the blue-light brigade have a reputation for enthusiastic DIY. We found that electrical work was his “specialty”. Every little job we needed doing was always a much bigger job because he’d bodged things and a proper electrician either had to put it all right or leave it entirely. He’d wired a plug into the bathroom by running it off the immersion heater, that one in particular sticks in my mind.

Haha we also brought our house from a policeman.

The work is shocking. Bath not fitted properly causing leaks, shower not fitted properly so more leaks, bad wiring and poorly fitted windows. We find more and more as we decorate.

We once viewed a house with a small living room where the owners had built their own furniture and fitted it around the walls. It was like you would find in a caravan - a wooden structure fixed to the walls on 2 sides of the room, with loose seat cushions on top of the platform base. Each base section had a circular hole cut into it so that it could be lifted up and things could be stored underneath the seating. We were invited to sit - it was very uncomfortable, the seat cushions were sliding around on the platform base and the back cushions were vertical against the wall, so you had to sit bolt upright.

It was quite bizarre, but the owners were obviously very proud of it and gave us a full demonstration!

@PoorCatto

Moved into my first house just over a month ago.

All the taps are the wrong way round. Hot comes out of the one labelled cold. Cold out of the one labelled hot. But I have hot running water. In my previous rental it had a 40 year old water tank that for over £1.50 in gas to heat and get hot water. Luckily I had an electric shower and bought a dishwasher.

Is the hot coming out of the left-hand tap? Because that is how it should be; the hot tap should always be to the left. If so I would just change the taps over.

We had a spotlight in our hallway that we couldn't figure out how to turn on. Turned out it wasn't wired in so it was never going to work.

In the house that we just bought my electrician brother took out an entire bin bag full of badly and/or dangerously installed wires/plug sockets etc.

A rental, but the day I moved in my dad was helping. He started putting boxes of books on the built-in alcove shelves to keep floor space clear. Everything fell straight to the ground. Shelves had been put up without rawl plugs; instead, used tissues shoved in the holes and screwed into?! That house was a 10-minute walk at most from a B&Q as well.

We went to view a house that had a wall of fitted wardrobes with lots of odd shaped little doors. Triangular/oblong/square to fit the space and all had huge wooden handles . It was like Alice in Wonderland. The bannister spindles in my house are not straight up and down but fitted at a jaunty angle !

The first house we ever bought looked lovely but when you started to look closely, we found it was a big old bodge of poorly done DIY!

• They did an extension off the lounge into the garden to create a dining room, but left the existing sliding patio door, so we had an internal patio door
• They had laid new kitchen floor tiles over old kitchen floor tiles, which were laid over lino. When we finally dug them all up, we gained about 2 inches in height in the room!
• The kitchen cupboards had been 'hand made'- by someone who used bits from Ikea, B&Q and Homebase and cobbled it together to make a kitchen. None of it fitted properly, the doors weren't hung properly, and there were no backs on any of the cupboards so if anything fell down the back it was lost forever!
• There was a light switch fitted in the middle of one wall in the lounge which didn't do anything. We followed the cabling as far as we could go but actually couldn't find the end of it and we never found out what the switch did!
• The electrics were appalling and in several rooms there were extension cords which had been wired into the sockets, and then light fittings wired into the extension cords.
• They had cut out the plasterboard under the stairs to create extra storage (which was handy) but just reused the plasterboard to make a door by sticking some hinges on it. It wasn't even cut straight so there was this big jagged gap between the 'door' and the frame.

I had no idea about DIY but even I was walking round the house saying 'Why have they done that?!'. We ended up calling it the House of Why

@BillThePony @BearPear Ours also was bought from a policeman! How weird!

We once spent New Year friends renting a (very cheap) cottage halfway up a mountain. Got there exhausted late at night, but in the morning it emerged that the elderly farmer who owned it — it had been his late mother’s — had provided our water by running a hose pipe down the hundred yards of rocky field that separated the cottage from his farmhouse. This had, unsurprisingly, frozen solid in the night, and he was running up and down the field chopping at it with the blunt edge of a hatchet to try to break the ice. Then he hit his foot and the air ambulance had to come.

An internal window.

Previous owner had divided a room into two, leaving one room without an external window, so they created an internal window from the bedroom into the hall.

Shared radiator.

This ones even better. Divided another room into two, and rather than fit two new radiators, left a whole in the wall so the existing radiator could serve both rooms. Genius!

One thing I've learnt from renovating houses is that the first person through the door should be the electrician. The amount of dodgy and dangerous stuff he's found in old houses has been shocking. Earth wires that aren't earthed, live wires cut and left under floorboards, bypassed meters. The worst one was a socket for a washer that was running from the immersion heater circuit, lashed together with tape. The kitchen floor was live.

@TroysMammy

Wallpaper that was supposed to look like wood that had been varnished.

Oh I had that too. They must have liked it so much as they later used actual wood planks on all the downstairs walls. It felt like living in an Alpine chalet. I'm sure it was very chic in the 80s

No. They're plumbed into the wrong side. Hot comes out of the right hand side of every set of taps in the house. But it does have the labels on the tap the right way round. Luckily my long term intention is to rip out both the bathroom and kitchen. I'll get it fixed then.