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 ?

Previous owner clearly liked reading on the loo. Every Sunday he would buy the weekend paper and paper the downstairs loo with it so he could read it all. There was about 4" of Sunday paper to remove and it took WEEKS to hack it off.

Current property we took a short cut and bought a semi derelict project. Started from the assumption that everything would have to be redone and we weren't wrong!

I'm another one who bought a house from a policeman. Every light switch in the house was upside down, and slightly wonky, which was really funny because he'd been a qualified electrician before joining the force.

The previous owners of our house had a leak from a pipe leading to the shower which was making the wall on the adjoining room damp. So instead of removing the shower panels and fixing it properly, they 'fixed' it by painting it with damp-proof paint, then we bought it and they fucked off.

It all looked fine at that point so we redecorated and put wardrobes against the wall in the adjoining room. After a while I noticed huge bubbles under the paintwork. We couldn't afford to replace the shower at that point so we got a plumber to turn off the water to the shower (doors were broken anyway so it shouldn't really be used) and redecorated. But the plumber hadn't turned the valve properly and some water still came through .... It was all fixed when we eventually replaced the shower.

The house also had a weird smell when we moved in, it was like stale body odour, the previous owners had masked it by leaving the windows open when we viewed. It turned out to be two small gas leaks - it didn't smell anything like gas.

There were other bodges too, but those are the worst.

I was looking at the brochure form when we bought, the estate agent described it as having a 'refitted' kitchen. Which is strictly true as I am sure it was not the original kitchen, but it certainly wasn't recently refitted!

Light switches inside wardrobes. And the wardrobes didn't have handles on the doors, so you had to open the drawers at the bottom to get hold of the doors, so you could open the doors to get at the lightswitch!

When we were looking at houses, I found one that had created a dining room by having a big square of lino in the living room surrounded by a wrought iron fence.

We also viewed a property that was actually done to a really high standard however had some really questionable choices. The worst being the bathrooms. To create an en-suite, they taken a corner of the house bathroom and built a partition wall, so the main bathroom was now quite small and a very strange shape. To house the pipe work in the new bathroom, they’d created a wall about three feet high which was tiled. Above this was the shower, so you’d have to sit on the wall to shower. As this was an internal room, they’d used a completely clear glass door for light, which was right next to the bedroom door, so not only would you be showering while sitting on a cold, wet wall, you’d also be in full view of anyone who came into the bedroom and anyone who happened to be standing in the hall.

A door connecting the dining room and kitchen that had been wallpapered over…we were surprised to find a door when we took the wallpaper down 😂. No discernible benefit to not having a door there either.

Oh and the same house had one of those configurations of 1950’ssemi’s with a bathroom and a separate toilet next door. There was a sliding door between the two which basically meant if two people were using the toilet and bathroom at the same time you had to take your pick who got privacy

My BIL and his fiancee bought their first house. It had 3 layers of flooring stacked on top of each other in the hall and front room. The doors were filed up so much, they were hollow at the bottom of the panels. The lean to type "conservatory" had a raised floor made from pallets screwed together with layers of mdf sheeting and lino on top. It bounced when you stood on it.

The oven was wired with ordinary cable and plugged into a normal socket 🤦🏽‍♀️ luckily we bought a new oven so found out pretty quickly!

Not a major DIY choice but I once moved into a house and found a kitchen sponge nailed to an outside windowsill. I was baffled and added it to my list to sort out after unpacking/moving admin etc. It wasn’t until a few days later when it poured with rain all night that I realised its purpose - the gutters above the sponge were completely full/blocked and a heavy stream of water fell onto the windowsill beneath it. The sponge absorbed the loud taptaptap sound from the stream!! Definitely one way to deal with it, but getting the gutters cleaned might’ve been more effective

The back window doesn’t actually fit the frame so the previous owners just stuffed it with newspaper. Unfortunately it wasn’t something we noticed until we moved in.

Similarly the back door didn’t fit the frame - in fact they had replaced the back door (no idea why) with the garage door.

And for reasons I absolutely can’t fathom removed the landing light fittings, plastered over and then glued the switch so it can’t be used.

I have a lot of regret buying this now.

In our house an electric shower had been wired in to the same circuit as the electric cooker. Lucky we weren't fried or electrocuted. When the electrician looked at the circuit board there was charring.

My new build has an upside down handle and you have to lock it to unlock it etc. It does have writing on the handle so you can see it's upside down. We snagged the handle as it didn't work at all and it was fixed so it locked but still upside down. I can only assume that the Middle eastern chap that fixed it and had limited English couldn't read it 🤷🏻‍♀️ lovely guy though did so much great work for us....and hey, it works!!

Went to view a house, many years ago now.
It had a downstairs cloakroom.
This cloakroom was painted navy blue. Not bothered as we would decorate to our taste.

However, the basin and toilet pan were also painted navy blue as the owner's five year old, wanted to 'help' and so, the child was allowed to paint ( very badly and scrappily) the basin and enamel pan , of the toilet.

Owner thought it was cute!

The extractor fan in the bathroom ceiling was permanently on, making the house sound like an aircraft. It turned out that the switch was in the loft.

Our first house’s previous owner must have bought a job lot of awful fake wood panelling which he used with abandon, nailed straight to the “feature” walls, glued to the kitchen walls and best of all, boxed the bath in with it. It was hideous but at least it was easy to get rid of since he was so crap.

The upside down door handles may have been done on purpose, if the previous owner had an over-sociable dog. My friend had a lovely intelligent pooch who was deeply attached to her master, and had learned to open lever doorhandles by leaning on them. Sometimes, as when retreating to the bathroom, a chap would rather be alone, so he deliberately reversed the doorhandles so that they had to be pulled up rather than pushed down.
I believe that in some parts of Canada, lever doorhandles are not allowed, as bears have learned to operate them; knob-style handles are compulsory.

We viewed a house with quite a large sitting room with recessed spotlights on the ceiling.
Each spotlight had its own individual switch so there were sixteen switches on the wall inside the door.

Chasing out a wall to fit new sockets and the chasing tool cut out. Hmmm, the socket it’s plugged into is now dead. Turns out the socket had been moved and the wire ran diagonally which is a complete no no, which of course I’d gone straight through. Luckily the RCD saved me.

@IchHabeSiebenFlowers

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

Use a knife to cut the join between the wall and ceiling.

We bought a fixer upper and there were many examples for this thread but the best one was this.

We found, early after moving a flat head screw driver which had been bent at a right angle, we just kind of looked at each other and carried on with our work.

Now this was an odd house in that it had been split into an upstairs and downstairs flat and so the owner had converted the downstairs loo into a shower similar in size and feel to a caravan toilet/shower. It had an electric shower unit in there that functioned as normal at least at first. One day after our shower (it was freezing so we had it together so we could hand towels and aim the electric fan heater) the shower refused to turn off with the normal on/off button. We just kind of shrugged and tried to turn it off at the spur switch before realising that there shower unit was infact off (no pump noise) but the shower was still running. After a few minutes of faffing and flapping we thought OK well theres a shut off on the tank right? This was a old fashions insulated tank on the floor above and the water was basically just being gravity fed. So we go up to find it. Look and look and cant see it. Eventually we spy the shut off (if you dont know this looks like a little slit on the pipe that you twist to shut off.) but because of the dodgy pipework its impossible to get a tool in to turn it.

We are both just standing there confused when it hit me. The fucking screwdriver!!! Sure enough we grabbed it and the angle it had been bent into was the perfect shape to fit into the space to reach the shut off.

We renovated that house and built a brand new bathroom shortly afterwards but we had to shower in relay (one person turning it on with the other downstairs and vice versa to turn off) using 'the crow' as it became known, for over a month.

The previous owner was a landscape gardener who thought he was amazing at DIY.

• to fit the conservatory over the whole back of the house, he capped the stench pipe that goes up to the roof and boxed it in. The smell now comes out of the drain that is right next to the door.
• instead of fitting the conservatory up to the boundary they left a tiny gap between the wall and the boundary line. It's now full of debris.
• to extend the sectional garage, he took some of the panels from the back and added them to the sides. They then added a plastic wall at the back. This extra bit of length and plastic back wall was slightly lower than the rest of the garage as the floor was uneven, so it constantly flooded. We've now replaced with a large shed that is on a raised bit of concrete to avoid flooding.
• the paved back garden he designed slopes slightly towards the house so water runs towards the house.
• fitted a boiler in the kitchen but didn't fit the pipes properly so it used to leak right above the plug sockets.
• the outside front light and dining room light had the earth wire just dangling down inside so it kept popping the bulbs.
• none of the walls are even
• because of the cavity wall insulation we have to keep running dehumidifiers and opening windows to reduce mould. It also causes the main bedroom door and the bathroom door to stick
• the side panel of the bath hasn't been fitted straight. So to correct this he's used a lot of sealant and white cardboard.
• when we had our bedroom bay window changed we found the frames didn't fit the window size so there was newspaper between the frames. We're getting the downstairs bay window changed this year. Dreading how bad this one is as well.
• built a wall with fancy upright bits in the front garden. The upright bit next to the house blocks the only window in the front room from opening more than a tiny bit.
• there is a missing bit of tiles above the cabinets in the kitchen on the outer wall. He filled it with newspaper. I don't know what it was as there isn't anything on the outside wall.
• drilled through the pvc window to feed the aerial cable into the front bedroom.
• to match the fitted wardrobes he bought a set of normal drawers and stuck them to the wall and then fitted the carpet around the drawers. So if we remove the drawers we have to remove the carpet as well.

I could go on.

We missed all of this as we were naive FTB's

The whole upstairs if our first house was carpeted in very cheap, nasty carpet. We lived with it for a while until we had enough saved for new carpet.
We ripped out the ild one and found that the underlay was in hundreds of small pieces, irregular shapes, none more than a few inches. They were tacked to the floorboards, each piece had a minimum of six tacks. It took a whole day to get the tacks out.

Bought a house with nicotine stained pitch pine cladding in the living room (whole other story, yuk). When we removed it we saw that the surface-mounted wiring to the light switch that was underneath the cladding and which zig zagged haphazardly across the wall was the kind designed to connect telephones.