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 ?

Reading all these stories makes you wonder why there’s not an equivalent of an MOT for houses. Dodgy DIY or other faults csn literally be deadly.

Every single light switch and plug socket in my house is a different style. No idea why, but it annoys the hell out of me!

Plus previous owners fitted a 2nd hand kitchen which didn't quite fit the room, so there were massive gaps between the worktops and the walls

Haha I knew I would feel at home on this thread as soon as I saw the title!

My 1790 flint cottage was a DIY disaster zone. One of the worst examples was when the stripped the plaster off a very damp extension wall to let it breathe, expecting cob or flint underneath, or at worst bricks, but no, the extension had actually been built out of flimsy balsa wood supermarket fruit boxes, the type you get oranges in...

Matches stuffed into a hole in the wall and a screw screwed onto it. We like in a house built in the 1880s the walls might be made of biscuits (as far as I can tell) so I get it tbh.

The most recent bodge I've come across is the boiler in DD's new house. A friend of DSIL's family inspected it after they moved in, and immediately condemned it. The previous certificate was forged, the installation was illegal, and somehow they managed to cross the dividing wall and put the flue through next door's roof.

So that's £2k they're out and a small claims case, not to mention having to have jug showers for a month.

Not totally terrible, but we've just pulled DD2's carpet up to replace it and she was amazed that people didn't carpet their entire rooms back in my grandparent's time. You can see where they varnished the boards around the edge and then didn't bother in the middle due to having a huge square of carpet (not a rug) in the middle.

We also had a very odd square plug with one pin that is in our living room ceiling, that was specifically for powering a clock. I've never seen clocks with the same plug type.

We got rid of the wall bar-heaters, that were mounted near the ceilings above the picture rails in every room upstairs.

And we also inherited the cold slab in the pantry that we had to smash out to make room for our fridge as the kitchen is too tiny to not make use of the space.

Just found a pic of the plug we have for the clock!

I do miss the ceiling light pulls that we removed that meant you could switch your top light on (we are big light people!) then get into bed, then switch the top light off by pulling the cord.

[quote burritofan]@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…[/quote]

A spoon and an elastic band!
😂

We've just bought a house that we knew needed a lot of work. There have still been surprises. The main thing is the fact that the previous owners used cement like other people might use glue. They also cemented over the airbricks. And decked over the entire garden but on stilts so that it covered up the windows at the back of the house on the first floor (they took out a window on the first floor, and turned it into a door to the newly raised garden. Using an internal door.) We've now discovered that they decked over it because it was full of SO much rubbish. Including a pond that stretches the full width of the garden and that is full of dead fish, dead rats, and rubbish. There's also an old kitchen, and an old bathroom under the decking.

Oh the previous owner of our house did very dubious DIY

*The biggest jagged floor to ceiling stone fire surround that covered the entire chimney breast
*Massive fake wooden beams
*Artex ceilings
*Purple ceiling in one of the living rooms
*Lots of purple walls
*Dodgy wooden panelling that when removed took the plaster off (it crumbled)
*shag pile carpet on the side of the avocado bath (on the panels)
*Some sort of dangerous electric heater attached to the light in the bathroom
*A rotten leaky Porch (he added it)
*Wonky door frames
*crazy paving in the back porch
*A toilet ingressed into the wall in an old coal shed
*A wrecked Victorian tiled floor
*Telephone sockets in all the rooms even the bathrooms

And well that's just the house.......

We had an issue with the sockets in the house. Electrician came out, checking them all, lucky he did because although switched off one was connected up to the oven circuit!

New build

A ceiling rose as a junction box

A sink fitted so if you got any water on it near the taps, it simply ran off the sides

The sink is also fitted so if you ever need to do any work on it, you have to lie with your legs in the hallway, and dislocate your neck in order to see anything

Toilet fitted before the boxing was done - this means that changing the toilet seat is virtually impossible as you can't get your hand in to do the screw fittings (whatever they're called!)

Oh snd there was no water when I moved in. They couldn't access the stopcock through the hatch they had made.. to access the stopcock as they had put it too far down. So they took a hacksaw to it and suggested that would be "ok". I think my face said how very not ok that was

@ChiefInspectorParker

"Carpet lasagne" 🤣
Brilliant!

We bought our house from a physicist who worked at a nationally known research centre and who re-wired it himself. Numerous electricians since then have said that his wiring scheme is "interesting". It's safe and it's legal but clearly worked out from first principals. One even drew a diagram of the central heating electrics so any future sparks wouldn't have to spend half an hour following the cables like he did.

Macerating toilet with external waste pipe which wasn't lagged.

Basically you used the loo then had to look out of the window to see if it was frosty (or visa versa) If it was frosty you couldn't flush. Found this out by flushing a toilet full of wee and loo roll when the pipe was frozen and the toilet filled to the brim and overflowed onto the bathroom floor

An interior electrical wall socket... in the greenhouse outside. Cables from an extension block trailing up the garden to the shed.

When I bought this house, Jesus where to start?!? I knew I’d need rewiring done. Ok. Couldn’t find a single socket for appliances in the kitchen. Eventually found a regular multi plug board screwed to the cupboard under the sink with everything plugged into it 😳. The wooden floor turned out to be laminate glued directly onto the 60s underfloor heating tiles, whole lot had to be stripped down to the concrete. Redoing the kitchen we found an extra METRE of kitchen behind a false wall. They’d cut the room small it must have been cheaper to tile the smaller room. Oh, and Barry loves Jennifer written under every fucking strip of wallpaper we removed.

DH is a chimney sweep and he has come across some right horrors. There was the electric cabling that went straight through the chimney. Several woodburners that vent into a roof space instead of a chimney. Or were the chimney lining only extends a metre or so Even a woodburner that didn't vent at all, it was purely for show, much to the shock of the new buyers who were looking forward to using it.

Weird feature on the living room ceiling.
Hard to explain, sort of a big 3D square race track round the central ceiling light that had 3 exit roads that went to the alcoves in the room.
Turns out it was sort of trunking that had cable in for the wall lights running off the main light. The owner was an electrician!

Brand new bathroom but they didn't seal the bath so when we had a shower on the first morning it was also the first time we met our downstairs neighbours! Who were lovely but we had to learn to seal a bath PDQ!

Plywood under a roof with tiles resting on top (cost a fortune to fix)

We aren't selling up soon but currently there's a square of carpet missing in DC's room because we removed something built in. The bed is covering it so you wouldn't notice but if we moved out without replacing the carpet (which we're planning on once the elusive decorator appears!) the new owners would have a fit!

I viewed a house with a conservatory. When going out of the door to look at the garden we found it had been built over a pond and we would have to step in the pond to get out. All internal paintwork was navy blue too.

Moved in,bathroom at end of the kitchen type of terrace.wanted a shower after a long day moving in.
No power for the shower to work whatsoever.
Next day called an electrician out and he found it had been so badly wired the cooker had to be switched on to work the shower!also,this was winter when buying the house so viewings of garden in the dark/rain and they seemed reluctant for me to go outside far.
On moving in I found the back garden had been used as a dumping ground for old carpets,fridges,radiators,all with six foot of scrambled covering it.
Cost me thousands to get that house right again.

A flat we bought - a major doer-upper, it was in a right old state.

However he took it off the market just before I was going to view it the first time, in order to ‘improve’ it by putting in the cheapest possible kitchen, with such dodgy electrics, everything fused the first time I tried to turn the oven on!

He could have saved himself that expense - we had to rip the whole lot out anyway.

In our first house the wallpaper in our bedroom had just been superglued on at the edges. Most of it just ripped off but the seams were a bugger!

@Flatdisco

Matches stuffed into a hole in the wall and a screw screwed onto it. We like in a house built in the 1880s the walls might be made of biscuits (as far as I can tell) so I get it tbh.

Using matches as a handy alternative to a rawl plug when putting in a screw is pretty standard. My Dad taught me to do it in the 70’s.

@thenewduchessofhastings - the combined bathroom ceiling light/heater was pretty common in the 70’s too!

PP have mentioned coloured ceilings. When my parents bought a new build house in the 60’s they were told they had to pay extra for each white ceiling, whereas a coloured one, from the standard range of emulsion paint offered by the builders, was included in the price. They had to make do with coloured ceilings apparently which annoyed Dad!