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 ?

We've got wires than run from utility room to toilet to office then outside. All the previous owners did was punch a hole in the relevant walls, like a raggedy 6-inch hole. Then attempted to block the howling draft by...putting a big stone in the hole.

It doesn't work...

Cold water pipes that had been plumbed around the outside of the back door so they would freeze during the winter and we would have no water. We put up with it for two years as we thought it would be a massive job to put right but only cost £200 to sort it in the end.

*hole

@ChiefInspectorParker

‘Carpet lasagne’

Well. We had quite a few!

They had decided to run electric out to the garage. But, you know, armoured cable is expensive! As are electricians.

So they dug a trench. And laid hosepipe (normal garden, not solid poly pipe) in it… and then fed cooker flex- standard grey internal wiring- through it!! Tapped it off a spur in the house and wired two plugs to it at the other end. Horrific.

The previous owners were plumbers. They cracked the water pipe (original copper still) when putting a new gate post in. Instead of fixing it- remember, they were plumbers- they poured some concrete over and around it.

We discovered the leak some years later; after a fortune in water bills and a perpetually flooding garden whenever it rained as the ground was saturated.

Not as bad as these but a laminate floor had been put down and then the skirting boards put in on top. Except they hadn't left a gap anywhere in order to facilitate easy removal. We had to pay a guy to come and rip it up, he emerged 2 hours later, dripping in sweat telling us that was the worst floor he'd worked on in 20 years of flooring.

PoorCattoThat really is mad then!

We were enthusiastic (naive) first time buyers so didn’t notice several things which have since been put right.

1. Wall lights which turned out to be plug in lamps fixed to the walls. Previous Owners (PO) had channeled into the walls to run the cables down to the plugs.

1. Our electrician when sorting the above works, discovered the lights in the wardrobe and under stairs storage cupboard were infact door bell wire spliced into the main cabling. Apparently bell wire does power light bulbs but after about half an hour they get so hot they can start a fire. Nice.

1. Similar dangerous work with the loft lighting.

1. Hadn’t tiled round the bath correctly so instead of a regular sized bead of silicon, there was a 2” wedge of the stuff. After this splitting and leaking constantly I discovered an awesome and much tidier replacement of uPVC quadrant. It’s bloody amazing and looks much neater.

1. Built the hugest shed known to humanity in the back garden - it was so big it had a front and back door. After trying and failing to open the back door, we asked neighbour if we could pop round and peek over fence. We then discovered when PO’s ‘landscaped’ (Ha!) the garden, they chucked all the soil, gravel, bricks, you name it, behind the shed. We had to clear a 5ft wide, 4ft deep, 4ft high mound of crap.

1. Fitted the lock on the front door back to front. We got the keys but couldn’t get in to our new home. Eventually discovered to unlock the door, you had to lock it and vice versa.

There’s probably more but they’re the ones that I can think of right now!

I rented a flat in Sheffield when I was younger. The bedroom was in the attic in a bit of a bodge conversion anyway.
One day I tripped whilst putting my jeans on and my full body weight smashed a huge whole in the wall. Turns out the wall was completely stuffed with newspapers from the late 80's and early 90's.

I showed my landlord and he immediately jumped to the conclusion that I had been fighting with my BF and purposely smashed a hole in the wall. No concern for the fact that the flat was basically stuffed with kindling if there was a fire.

We left soon after as there was also a major water leak into the shop below and we got blamed for leaving the taps on (we hadn't) and the washing machine also set on fire. It was a real death trap.

I know someone who bought a disgusting do-er upper which turned out to need a lot more work required than she'd anticipated, so she decided to make it look better superficially and sell it on.

Upstairs and downstairs were covered in hideous, dirty, ruckled 1960s carpet but she would have needed to pay someone to come and take it up and dispose of it. so she laid the cheapest laminate she could find over the top. She pushed all the rucks in the carpet to the edges of the room and where she laid the laminate boards on top, she nailed them down to keep the floor flattish and stop the rucks lifting the boards. Then she got some old heavy furniture from a local charity shop and put it on top of the nailed-down laminate so that prospective purchasers wouldn't see it.

Later on she decided to paint over the old-fashioned patterned wallpaper and painted round the heavy items of furniture. I gave her a hand painting the skirting boards. I'd have sanded them down, cleaned all the dust and dirt off and washed them with sugar soap but she had me slapping the paint on over dead flies, dog hair, fluff, goodness knows what.

Before she put it on the market she changed all the bulbs in the place for 40w, so it was a bit dim.

One of the bedrooms didn't have an electricity socket at all, so she ran an ordinary extension lead from another room around the walls, under the edge of the laminate, then sealed it in. The end of the extension lead was under the bed, with bedside lights plugged into it.

She sprayed the kitchen units different colours using leftover car paint from a friend who worked in a garage. It looked good, though she didn't know how durable it would be.

It was bought by a young couple for about 50% more than she'd paid for it. They thought it looked lovely and fresh, apparently. It made me realise how some people just see the overall picture, not the detail. I've always wondered what happened when they realised what they'd bought.

Not sure whether this counts as DIY but when we were redecorating DCs room in our old edwardian house and pulled up the carpet there was the outline stain of a body on the floor boards! Someone had expired in the room many years previously (which i suppose was inevitable in a house of that age). We moved DCs to the smaller bedroom!

On another note; do surveys not show up a lot of this bodging? Ours did so at least we knew what we were getting! And we did ask for the electrics and plumbing to be tested just in case.

Jesus Christ is here stories 😱

I work in a DIY store and SELL the items for these bodge jobs. I often recommend they get a qualified tradesmen but I see them at the till with some 'no more nails' and superglue and just know they haven't listened!!

*these stories

One cottage we bought had the wooden front door posts planted in plastic plant pots and surrounded by earth under the carpet!

@Shedbuilder I bought a house that used the dim lightbulb trick! We knew it was a fixer-upper but Jesus wept, the difference it made putting in proper lighting and taking down the owner’s “curtains” (cigarette-scented rags stapled to an old broom, held up with one curtain bracket and one SPOON AND ELASTIC BAND). Suddenly, bodges like your friend’s were revealed…

On the other hand, I cheaped out when painting our bedroom floorboards and only bought enough paint to cover the visible floor, not the stuff that would be underneath rugs…

Our first house had a bathroom with three mirror tiled walls (including the one facing the loo!), a really deep shag pile carpet and bamboo canes stapled to completely cover the fourth wall then the ceiling papered with jungle print.

Why bother fixing a leaky stoptap and pipe when you can just dig a hole underneath it and fill it with sand?
That's what we found when we moved in. All the floor joists around it were completely rotten.

Yesterday we found an electrical appliance turned on and buried in the loft insulation. Hadn't been needed in many years by the looks of it so no need to be left on. It was burning hot and very likely would have caused a fire if not found.

A double socket right next to the bathroom sink. Illegal and crazy.

Every single one of my grandparents lights are upside down. All door handles twist or lift to open the wrong way and part of the wall where an old light switch used to be has been filled with cotton wool and painted over. The paint soaked the cotton wool so it looks like a hairball sticking out

My grandad SAYS he did this to make it more difficult for burglars to get in
No reason for the upside down light switches
The wall was pure laziness and possibly the closest thing to him to fill the hole?

All of these things I suspect is actually just because he is and always has been, absolutely pish at diy.

burritofan, I it wasn't her house you bought!

I still feel awfully guilty, 20 years or so down the line, for the way I left those skirting boards. And that kitchen: it looked good at first glance but when you looked more closely it was dreadful. She just spray-painted over the congealed food and grease... Those poor people.

Whoops, I hope it wasn't her house that you bought...

Too many awful things to mention as I bought two to renovate both of which were an absolute nightmare and the home of crap DIY.
The small thing that pissed me off the most though was a very large (and crap) patio, the previous owner had removed the middle 4 patio slabs and grown a weedy lawn there, no idea why. Everytime it was mowed there was grass all over the entire patio.
No idea why either as there was an actual lawn beyond the patio.

Many things, but the stand-out item was the radiator valve inside a stud wall.

The previous owner of our house had blu tacked the broken fridge door back on! To their credit it somehow still worked for the first 5 years of us living here and was the least bad of many bodged jobs. They also wired a standard plug socket to an outdoor pond pump with no outdoor safefty protection or overflow, so when it rained the water would have just gone into the socket .

The 'new' boiler was also a bodge job and made an awful loud firing sound. It had been incorrectly fitted and the engineer who we got out to replace it said it could have exploded! Lastly the roof tiles weren't actually attached to the roof, but slotted next to each other a bit like a jigsaw, so we also had to replace that.