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 ?

Wooden louvre wardrobe doors recycled as doors for the bedrooms and bathroom. The bathroom was at the top of the stairs and anyone who came up could see you sitting on the loo through the louvres....

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

Ditto.

@LoislovesStewie

Not dangerous DIY but silly. I knew someone who bought a house and found out that the previous owners hadn't moved furniture to paint the whole wall but had painted around the furniture. Obviously they had to redecorate anyway, but it made the room look really odd in the meantime.

One of my clients bought a "newly renovated" seaside guest house. They previous owners hadn't even bothered to remove pictures and mirrors from the walls, nor move beds etc, so it wasn't just behind big furniture like wardrobes where they hadn't painted, it was behind bed-heads, pictures, mirrors, chairs/sofas, bedside tables, etc.

When I moved in to my current house there was a water butt in the garden, merrily collecting rainwater from the gutters. Which is fine, except the previous owners had fitted the tap at the TOP of the butt, not the bottom, so it was impossible to get water from it. When we finally got around to emptying it the water within was stagnant and foul smelling - we binned the water butt and bought a new one!

Previous owner needed to freshen up the dining room before putting it on the market. They painted only the bits you can see and even painted around a hanging picture on the wall. 🤣

Victorian terrace, untouched since the mid seventies. Apart from woodchip literally everywhere, the only surviving ceiling rose and the oak bannisters were painted in light blue gloss over many other coats of paint, tiles around the bath fixed over wallpaper, wood panelling on every wall in the kitchen fixed to a substantial wooden frame reducing its size by about 2ft either way, a boiler that you had to lie in the floor several times a day to relight the pilot light and many many other things....

Motion sensor lights. Not outside, where they might be useful. But inside. Great when you were busy doing things. But useless once you sat down. Every chair had its own broom handle or mop to wave around to avoid being plunged into darkness until we could get it fixed.

One wall in the extension built with fence panels.

Carpets laid directly onto painted concrete floors.

One side of garage converted into a dining room and built above - the ceiling of the dining room goes from normal height to about 6’4”.

Side extension built, but didn’t move the gas and water meters, so they were then situated inside. The window to the downstairs loo also then looked into the new extension - they hadn’t blocked it up. The bricks of this extension do not match the rest of the house.
En-suite - took some of the space from the adjoining room’s fitted wardrobe. Instead of making good in that room, the new wall was hidden by a mirrored wardrobe door.

Oven powered by a light switch outlet, not a proper, safe, oven outlet.
The wiring to the tv on the wall went horizontally from the wall light - across the middle of the wall.

I once rented a student house where the siting cupboard on the landing had somehow been tiled and turned into the shower. No windows, no extractor fan. A few months into our tenancy it caused a massive leak into the living room below.

^ Airing cupboard

There's a switch behind our sink that no one knows what it does (and my sister lived here for 3 years before me, she has no idea either).

In my previous house (council property initially then I bought it) I discovered the reason the house was hard to heat and damp downstairs was that someone had wallpapered over the hole where the airbricks had been in the living room AND kitchen, and then painted over that with lots of layers of waterproof wash proof paint.

The toilet wasn't bolted down either, someone had also boxed in the storage space over the stairs... without thinking to remove the junk they'd stored there (1980s lampshades, magazines of a 'wild bush' nature and some broken kids toys) - I sold up and ran off before I could find anything else, as every job involved planning it.. then starting it.. then re-planning to take into account of the previous bodge jobs!

Pink toilet roll stuffed into a hole in the wall and then they papered over it 😂 that was a nice wee surprise when we took the wallpaper off. We had to replanted all the walls as it wasn't the only hole 🙈 we also found some old pants down the back of the radiator when we took it off to decorate 🤢 I think they just have been placed on it to dry, well I hope so!

One of the previous owners of my house has fancied themselves as an electrician. Metal light switches put on upside down and not earthed. An electrical socket in the conservatory in defiance of building regulations. Light fittings in the bathroom and conservatory that were not designed for a wet environment . . .

We had a friend my DH and I both worked with went to his house,he'd wallpapered over the central heating pipes. Looked at several empty houses where people had papered round the furniture
My late FIL put everything on the walls with nails instead of screws.we had a local authority house,they had a company put double glazing, when we decorated the hall,the front door didn't fit properly,they'd just stuffed newspapers round the door frame

Early 1980s, bought a house that the builders (who built an extension) had run out of funds. They were not actually builders, just 4 blokes that fell out with each other and couldn't keep up repayments..

1. No kitchen whatosever
2. Nail through wiring somewhere in celling of kitchen shorting out the electrics when light turned on.
3. Loo installed in new loo room under stairs. Had no square walls whatsoever, and even the sink was on an angle. This was true of every wall in the place that wasn't original.
4. Had to lift floorboards upstairs to resolve electric issue in kitchen. This revealed the cause of the problem. They'd swept the floor upstairs into the ceiling void, in there were 197 empty beer cans. There was a pub/off licence across the road.

Oh,a few years ago we had a well known company re build the conservatory, fitter put dog flap on upside down,not DIY I know supposed "experts"

When we moved in we found an internal door that had been plastered over on one side but not the other, it had been hidden by a massive wardrobe when we viewed.

Previous owners had built a new kitchen extension, and removed original door from old kitchen to the lounge. On the lounge side they plastered over it neatly and put a radiator over it. On the old kitchen side they just left the door there on the hinges, so when the wind blew through the door shook and plaster fell off the other size.

Utterly bizzare.

Pictures of two examples from my house - previous owner plastered around the light fittings as we found when we changed them, and seems to have polyfilla’d tissues into some holes in a cupboard (?). There also doesn’t seem to be a straight line or right angle in the whole house, including the 20th century extension 😑

I’m so sorry to say, I found out upon me in our of our flat, that my DH had painted our DS room without moving the furniture!

House we moved to had a new bodge it. We were forever finding new bodge jobs. First was in the main bathroom. He did not put in an over flow. First we knew was by this water, from our DC splashing in the tub, came out via the kitchen ceiling below.

The kitchen sink was not affixed to anything. Was resting upon two pieces of work surface either side that were on appliances we thought were under counter that they took with them. Found out when we moved in and found the pieces of work surface on the floor. When I put something in the sink, it fell down

Outside lights actually had a cord that fed into a hole drilled through the walls and plugged in to an outlet. To turn on/off, you turned the socket on/off

When we had the bathroom redone, we also found three laura of wall tiles. He just tiled over and tiled over again

We had plugs in upside down for no apparent reason but the best one was a switch on the wall outside the bathroom, we couldn't work out what it did.

One day I turned it on and forgot about it, half an hour later I went to the loo and the water was steaming....lo and behold we had hot water inside the actual loo. Turns out the switch somehow heated a separate water tank just for the toilet water very odd indeed. Must admit it did flush things away better lol obviously we've had it removed since.

@Wagglerock

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.

Looks better imo to have skirting board sitting on top.

I have no idea why but I once lived in a house where the previous owners had put a dryer under the stairs and built a stud wall around it with a small cupboard door where the dryer door was to take the washing in and out, we had to knock down the wall to get the dryer out, absolutely bizarre.

@Mydogsnotfat

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

Apart from it not being your choice of colour, what is the problem there?

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 blue tack and falling out of the wall! Depends how long ago it was done, might be old colours. I grew up when red, live, black neutral and ?brown earth was still around, and it's not so long ago that earth changed from green to green and yellow.

This house had an illegally installed boiler, and a gas leak, to name a couple of issues.

There were some really interesting bodges, mostly electrical. And an en-suite (sans loo, thankfully) that discharged into a gutter.

Every room had miles of cable, mostly speaker wire coming out. This place was high tech in the 80s.

Oh and we removed the woodchip to discover that they had altered the layout by moving an internal wall about a foot. There was a concrete in-fill through some original parquet and the next door room’s parquet appears.