DIY cutting corners.

[RedDeer]

AIBU to think that cutting corners/costs is going to cost you more in the long run, in terms or DIY, repairs etc.

While I understand sometimes you need to do a quick emergency repair job, or funds are low etc.

When we bought our house the previous owners seemed to cut costs with DIY jobs. To the point that some were dangerous (fitting a wood burner that was found on the side of the road, the top wasn't even attached). Resulting in us paying lots for a new one to be installed properly.

Or just this week our flat roof needed work, the previous owners cut cost by just re fiberglassing over the rotten roof. Roofers said they haven't seen one that bad in a while.

I could give lots more examples. New plaster not sealed so paint peeling, bollers not fitted correctly and so on.

Well it didn’t cost them in the long run did it

it is costing you

Pretty shocking your survey seems to have left you so in the dark though

I’m pretty good at DIY but I think the key is know where to get professionals in.

I’d never go cheap for electrics / gas / plumbing.

Painting, putting up shelves, wallpapering etc is fine.

Yep!

We had a house with an extension upstairs and other diy projects downstairs. When we started to do our own renovations, we discovered that the bodger had built a bedroom extension that would probably collapse in a heavy snowstorm. Not picked up in the survey.

We removed cladding in the kitchen and found bare live wires behind.

Shockingly poor bodging.

Depends on the diy though! Boilers, electrics, gas pipes... Id definitely not attempt those! But painting, wall tiles, flooring (not carpets!) replacing floorboards, insulation... yes, they're within most people's grasp.

The state the electrical wiring was in, in our 1960s house, it's amazing the place didn't burn down or kill someone. Where there shoukd have been junction boxes, wires twisted together with a bit if sellotape round them, lots of loose connections causing shorting out, earth wires not connected, etc. Luckily we wanted to change the sockets for aesthetic reasons, so we discovered the horrors early on. No way any professional electrician had done that.

A significant fraction of the time people are doing DIY because they are cheapskates anyway, so unsurprising they may do a crap job and use poor quality materials.

That said when I look behind the facade the pros who built my house took some serious shortcuts.

I'm afraid this is just the way it is with a lot of homes OP, everything looks reasonable on the surface when you're viewing to purchase, but when you actually get down to the nitty gritty, that's when you discover that they used 6" nails to attach the skirting board, and that plumbing for the dishwasher is propped up with a stick that was hidden in the cupboard by all the previous owners junk, etc.

Personally, I always use the right tools for the job, and do it right first time, otherwise it just ends up costing more to do it properly in the future, and of course it costs you double the amount of time, having to do things twice over.

I don’t think it’s bad diy, it’s do the job with minimal effort as quickly as possible, I have a list too but the worst one was nailing down carpets, the nails were all over the carpets, and so hard to get out

I think some people have no clue and just do things on the cheap. We've had houses where people had tiled over bathroom tiles twice....the problem was the ones underneath had blown so the whole lot fell off the wall. Another house we thing the owner had moved the boiler....gas engineer said it was unsafe. Another house where the owners has filled the cellar with rubble and breached the damp course. None of these issues came up on our surveys....which are often filled with nonsense like 'Ivy growing on the side of the house could present structural issues in the future' or other obvious stuff.

You'd hate my stair runners then. Lots of staples in them. All put in to stop it moving around. And all hidden in places like the border webbing where you can't see them.

They were in the middle of the carpets, absolutely backbreaking, I did it on my own

Yes, it's not the fact that someone DIY the job, it's cutting corners that's the issue. Almost having a "that will do" attitude.

But it worked for them

it is not working for you

Buy cheap, buy twice. That’s always been my motto.

That's the crux of it. The bodger will know what he's bodged, i.e. live wires held by sellotape, etc., so he'll know what's behind the panelling etc and know not to mess with it, screw/nail into it, etc. Likewise the example of the botched roof - he'll know it's not safe to stand on, but someone else won't and could rightfully expect it to be safe to withstand an average person's weight and go straight through it.

Same with electrics. The guy who owned our house before us clearly had a fetish for electrical work - loads of outdoor security lights, lights in the loft, switches in the hallway and bedrooms for the outdoor lights, etc., TV aerial points in all rooms, a few outdoor sockets for the garden/garage/shed, etc. It all looked fine and everything worked. UNTIL you start digging deeper, until you want to isolate one circuit to say, convert a single socket to a double, and then you find the idiot has bodged it really badly, i.e. crossing cables between different circuits, wiring lighting into the socket circuits, wiring extra sockets into the lighting circuits, etc.

Then the upstairs/loft circuity started popping it's fuse randomly for no obvious reason. The electrician we brought in couldn't believe it, how bad it had been bodged by all the "extras" and literally couldn't work out what went where - he spent most of the first day with his tester trying to work out which circuits were connected to what/where. He ended up virtually re-wiring the loft and outside lights as they were too inter-connected to indoor switches/indoor sockets, etc., so he basically just gave up on the existing wiring and started again. Had to cut away various pieces of panelling/boarding etc in the loft as the junction boxes/connections had been put in before they were boarded over, so completely inaccessible. An absolute nightmare.

We had some horrors in our house - dodgy electrics, wooden panels hiding a hole in the ceiling, bunk bed slats being used instead of floorboards.

Like others have said - some things you have to spend properly on. E.g. when we had the house rewired! Other things are fine to save money on, such as our budget kitchen units which were all we could afford 20 years ago and are still going strong (although they are admittedly a little tatty now).

It sounds like you got a very basic survey op

To the point that some were dangerous (fitting a wood burner that was found on the side of the road, the top wasn't even attached).

surely you saw this on your viewing?

and how do you know they found on side of road?

They came back to the house to pick up their post. And told me they found it at the side of the road, as I asked them when it was due to a chimney sweep.
It looked ok from the outside so didn't see it when viewing the house.

if the top was missing, surely immediately evident?

The top wasn't missing. It wasn't attached as in sealed. It was just resting on top.

Sounds like you have bought a real dud OP, how upsetting.
The roof sounds horrendous. Flat roofs are a dose anyway IMO.

Some people just bodge houses back together because they have no money or are tight and refuse to do stuff properly, often to the point of making a place extremely dangerous.

That's why when you buy a place you have to give it a really good going over.

Ive had to fix a whole range of stuff on my place, but it is mostly cosmetic and is easily done rather than being structural and expensive.

I've certainly learnt a lot to look out for if I ever buy another place.