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Original poster

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

208 replies

Bakewellisntjustacake · 22/08/2021 05:05

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 ?

To ask for the most ridiculous diy you've found in a house
OP posts:
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6
R0SEMARY · 22/08/2021 21:54

@Twofurrycats

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.
This is one of the best bits of advice I’ve seen on MN.
Lunaduckdrop · 22/08/2021 22:16

Every room had wallpaper stuck directly onto plasterboard, no plaster skimming underneath. It was impossible to remove the paper without damaging the plasterboard. Infuriating!

Grapewrath · 22/08/2021 22:20

One of my previous houses had two doors to the kitchen. Now, for some reason the owner mustn’t have wanted one of the doors so simply took off the door frame, shut the door, used mastic around it and wallpapered over it

SarahAndQuack · 22/08/2021 23:10

We're in the process of buying the house we rented for the last few years. In England, if you rent, in theory you should feel reasonably secure that the electrics will have been checked, that sort of thing. We have found:

  • a ceiling light with no obvious earth wire, held to into the ceiling with a hefty gob of blue tack (it did have an earth wire, it just wasn't at all clear when the whole thing plummeted downwards once we unscrewed the outside fitting).
  • multiple large screws once used as picture nails in the walls, bashed sideways and painted over when no longer needed.
  • a lot of asbestos dating from after the time when people had been gently suggesting asbestos might be a bad idea.
  • wallpaper held on with blue tack and/or what looked like pritt stick.
  • an electric cable that ran out of the downstairs window, up the outside of the house, and through the upstairs window. There were little grooves in the window frame to let it pass.

To these, during out time there, the landlord added

  • several unfilled holes in the ceiling while he decided where to put the smoke alarms.
  • a door he fitted during a literal snowstorm, unpainted. Oddly enough it swelled shut quite fast.
  • a 'solution' to the half-inch gap between the window and the frame in our baby's room that involved nailing those plastic-and-metal strips you fit to the bottom of a door to keep the draught out, to the edge of the window.

However none of these were quite as bad as the house we went to view where the door came off in my hand. The estate agent was the most phenomenally unflappable women I've ever seen, and she didn't even blink while continuing to tell us what a great property it was.

Cherrysoup · 22/08/2021 23:16

So many!

Previous owners fitted a wood burner, we finally had the chimney swept a few years ago and he couldn’t sign it off because it isn’t lined. So effectively, it’s a box with fire in it when lit.

Whenever he used a screw, it was at least 2 inches long, for no good reason.

There was some weird Ariel for the TV upstairs, but I think it was diy, so when he left, he removed it, along with any electrics he had done eg power to the shed. We had the whole place re-wired eventually.

Racingadmin · 22/08/2021 23:22

We bought our house from someone who turned out to be a cowboy builder

Fridge (wasn't supposed to be left anyway) wired into the mains electric

False orange pine ceiling in kitchen covered up the plumbing to upstairs shower which was just hung from the real ceiling on curtain type hooks

Gas fire fitted to badly that is was condemned on the day we moved in when we could smell gas and called British Gas out

Spare kitchen tiles used to tile the porch step (didn't notice when we looked around the house ) . They cracked in the first frost

Internal door to garage completely blocked with an integrated oven

SarahAndQuack · 22/08/2021 23:25

Oh, and I forgot one of my favourites:

Several window panes are perspex. The house is in a conservation area; it dates to the mid-eighteenth century and most of the windows are rather lovely old wavy glass (with really shit paint encrusting them, naturally). But clearly at some point, a previous tenant smashed some windows and was too cheap to admit it, so he just cut a square of clear perspex to size and popped it in. I was so confused when I first tried to clean them and they wouldn't come clean!

allthegoodusersaretaken · 22/08/2021 23:31

DH built some raised flowerbeds a few years ago. What he failed to realise was that plants have roots - they were only about 20cm deep!

NewPapaGuinea · 23/08/2021 06:19

a ceiling light with no obvious earth wire, held to into the ceiling with a hefty gob of blue tack (it did have an earth wire, it just wasn't at all clear when the whole thing plummeted downwards once we unscrewed the outside fitting).

Depending on the age of the house, not all houses have lights with earth wires. Does mean you can’t use metal light fittings.

jakeyboy1 · 23/08/2021 07:47

When we moved into our current house their were multiple problems left by previous owner including; a tap held together by bluetac and conversely a light fitting that had a tap washer in it 🤷‍♀️

Whatthechicken · 23/08/2021 07:56

I thought I had a beautiful old fashioned street light in the garden. It was covered in ivy, this weekend the husband started to remove the ivy, only to find it’s not a street light, it’s an old telegraph pole with an old fashioned lamp stuck on top.

Mydogsnotfat · 23/08/2021 08:06

A previous house had all the kitchen cupboards painted day glo yellow with gloss paint.

cinnabarmoth · 23/08/2021 08:14

The previous owner of my sister's house added a few quirky touches, my favourite being the hatch from their dining room to about 1/4 of the ways up the stairs. It's probably where they kept their telephone, but it's just oddly placed!

SarahAndQuack · 23/08/2021 09:54

@NewPapaGuinea

a ceiling light with no obvious earth wire, held to into the ceiling with a hefty gob of blue tack (it did have an earth wire, it just wasn't at all clear when the whole thing plummeted downwards once we unscrewed the outside fitting).

Depending on the age of the house, not all houses have lights with earth wires. Does mean you can’t use metal light fittings.

It is an old house, but I don't think that was the issue - whoever had done it had earthed the light, but not with normal colour-coded wires, which is not what you want when it's held on with bluetack and falling out of the wall!
Rosebel · 23/08/2021 10:15

When my parents brought their house they had to paint my sisters room about 6 times as the old paint came through. Even worse 3 of the walls were purple and one waa orange.
Our landlord put tiles on the bathroom floor that cracked as soon as we stepped on them, despite leaving them for over 48 hours. We then discovered they were wall tiles, not floor tiles!

BananaMilkshakeWithCream · 23/08/2021 10:42

When we took up the decking we realised it had been levelled using pieces of cardboard. There were electrical wires going through the beams in the loft and we smelt some burning up there and the current from them had scorched some polystyrene balls. The coal shed was wired from the house in such a way that our electrician told us that had we been mowing the grass and mowed over the wires which had been spurred off the house, we would have been electrocuted. We moved out of the house for about a fortnight within a week of moving in for a full rewire 😂

BananaMilkshakeWithCream · 23/08/2021 10:55

Oh and there was another house that we were going to buy but didn’t. It has three bedrooms but bedroom two and three were so weird. I think they may have been one big bedroom before as you had to step into the corner of bedroom 2 before turning 90 degrees right into bedroom 3. I mean, it would be great if you wanted bedroom 3 as a walk in closet but not as two separate bedrooms. No thanks.

sueelleker · 23/08/2021 11:09

@Mydogsnotfat

A previous house had all the kitchen cupboards painted day glo yellow with gloss paint.
Had Del-boy been at it?
Gobbycop · 23/08/2021 12:27

Hahaha well I'm a cop but to redress a little balance I'm good at DIY.

I'm currently working through an old farmhouse and I completly agree with a previous poster calling it a why house 😂😄

I also agree with getting funky electrics looked at, no idea why shite electrics always seems to be a favourite.

There's nothing stand out horrendous at ours just a general poor standard of finish either DIY or professional.

A good one though saw me rummaging in a wall void while doing an upstairs bathroom recently.
I was pulling out the useless polystyrene insulation and other shit left in the walls.
Found a cable that I gently pulled out, not terminated to anything and when tested of course live.

Some people really just don't care about there's or another's safety.

It was so easy to just connect to a closed junction box and screw to a joist.

AngeloMysterioso · 23/08/2021 13:41

My DH has done a DIY bodge job Blush one of the floorboards in DS’s room was sunken down at one end, so instead of taking it out and relaying it properly (like I suggested), he just nailed a sheet of MDF to the floorboards around it and put the carpet back over…

IchHabeSiebenFlowers · 23/08/2021 16:44

Thanks, NewPapaGuinea, will give that a go on the next chimney breast!

HollyGrail · 23/08/2021 19:35

My favourite repair in my house, which is over 100 years old, is a flattened out sardine tin nailed over a bottom corner at the back of a cupboard - presumable to keep the mice (or rats) out.

WeAreTheHeroes · 23/08/2021 19:44

We found one just yesterday - unlikely to be DIY, but stupid nonetheless: the isolation valve for the toilet was behind panelling. Said panelling was installed in such a way that the only way to reach the valve was to rip the panelling off. Good thing we're planning on redoing the whole bathroom and loo.

Another one was a saniflo and electric towel rail wired to the same socket. You want a saniflo on constantly, but not a heated towel rail. Turned out the towel rail had the wrong kind of cable and it had burned through at some point too.

Buddywoo · 23/08/2021 19:59

We bought an old house 25 years ago. The vendors had extended the house by building a double storey extension to the rear. They had also knocked the sitting room and dining room into one room. We were informed that he was a builder and everything had been done properly. We had a full structural survey with no major problems found. The main problem we had was a flood as he had plastered in the outflow from the loo into the wall of the new bedroom. Of course the ballcock went and we had major flooding coming through the bedroom wall.

We sold and moved and the new owners took over. The wall they had knocked down was a load bearing wall and the double storey extension was not tied into the existing house. The two structures started to separate and the new owners had to move out for several months whilst it was all sorted.

LadyPoison · 23/08/2021 20:21

I bought a house in the early 90s which hadn't been decorated since the 1970s.

The hall, landing and stairs were papered with some purple and orange lupins which had a wiggle in the middle. Horrible but destined for redecoration as soon as we got around to it.

A few days after moving in I leant over the bannister to call to the children and saw the paper upside down. It was actually a Wisteria pattern that had been hung the wrong way up!

Guess which was the first area decorated!