Thank you previous owners!!

[TremoloGreen]

I know there have been other threads like this but can we have a new one please as I need somewhere to vent. What questionable decisions did the previous owners of your house make when designing/ fixing things?

1. Nailing fake timber beams to the ceiling and staining them dark brown. Oh, then painting over an actual structural beam.

1. Make that staining abvsolutely bloody everything made out of wood in dark brown. Sanding it off leaves lovely drak brown stuff staining your hands and sticking bloody everywhere.

1. Building a downstairs lavatory that is 85cm wide internally with all the pipework exposed. Can't be boxed in without losing the precious cm that mean a person can actually fit in there. Thinking of knocking the whole thing down and moving it to the front of the house in time.

1. Despite a love of naff, man-made materials everywhere else throughout the house (vinyl, laminate, polypropolene, brown stained mdf), the one place they chose to use a natural material was the worktops. Wood. A few years inl they inevitable start to look shit, especially around the sink. Rather than sand and re-oil, they just laquered the damaged tops with a really shiny varnish. I've just sanded it off and am now on the sixth coat of oil!

1. Deliberately ran the drains for the extension they built under the building rather than around the outside.

1. Ripped out a mains gas connection so they could have oil instead. Because gas central heating "dries you out".

1. Installed a 760 x 760 telephone box shower cubicle in a space for a 1400 x 800 one, so it could open into the extra space and you can kind of squeeze diagonally past the massive vanity unit to open the door onto yourself (good job I'm skinny) Also no radiator in that bathroom, despite it having an adjoining wall with the hot water tank.

1. Fitted wardrobes along a whole wall of the main bedroom with chuffing louvred doors. (Stained dark brown of course) Literally metres of a massive dust trap.

1. Put anaglypta over freshly plastered walls and ceilings then painted over it.

10. Put down random squares of mismatching carpet in two of the bedrooms without bothering to actually fix them down.

I'll stop at ten because it's a nice round number

my friends once bought a house and were so chuffed that it had a brand spanking new bathroom suit.

Not so chuffed when they turned on the shower only to find out it was all completely for show and not plumbed in at all!

*suite

That's awful!

We had an unsupported chimney too in the kitchen extension. The surveyors missed it (the structural survey was clearly done with a blindfold on). The roofer didn't when we tried to get the leak sorted.

Agatha after the jeyes fluid and letting it air out try painting the floorboards with Zinsser BIN primer, it should lock in any stains and smells.

On the other hand, I sometimes feel bad for any future owners of my house. I've painted over the skirting boards so many times they look awful

And our bathroom fitters and tilers did a terrible job but we can't afford to replace.

Our current house was a project. It had been owned by the same person for 65 years and needed re-wiring, re-plumbing and every room needed decorating.

All that was expected, it was just made a bit harder as two rooms had been painted all over, walls, ceilings and floors in bright pink gloss.

They had also used 4 inch nails to hang pictures which took off what little plaster the electricians hadn't destroyed.

When we were sanding the woodwork to repaint after we moved in we discovered that the bannister had at one point been painted bright red. The rest of the woodwork upstairs had been a very bright turquoise (hopefully not at the same time as the red bannister) and the woodwork in the master bedroom had been Barbie pink. I assume during the changing rooms era of horrifying home decoration.

It's what ours DIDN'T leave...

Absolutely no lights at all in the master bedroom. Nothing. Just a blank plate where the light switch ought to have been.

No lights in the sitting room, not even a flex and a bulb, just a blank ceiling rose.

Blocked toilets. Mr Drainjetter and I became quite chatty over the four times he had to visit.

No heating. Just didn't work.

I could have cried.

We learnt to get a builder to check over a property as surveyors just don't seem to see / check anything (had a full survey on a house where they missed a leaking drain (it smelled terrible), cracked outside wall, collapsed roof onto ceiling and so on - only my Dad saved us from buying, as he came and checked prior to exchange and found so many faults it would have cost us a fortune!). We've dealt with concreted in toilet cisterns, tiles put up with so little adhesive that a window closing caused them to drop, seven different types of kitchen unit in one kitchen, hot water plumbed into the toilet (kept it lovely and clean), hiding the water stopcock, filling the chimney with expanding foam, previous owner replacing the main electricity fuse with wire to stop the estate agent from using too much power (this we found on day one and sent the electric company off to deal with the muppet that thought that was safe) and, my personal favourite, leaving a live wire from a shower installation under a metal bath, which very luckily was discovered before it killed someone, although the plumber installing the new bathroom did get a shock! Treat a house as needing as much work as something from Homes under the Hammer and you won't go wrong, with anything that does not need fixing to be treated as a bonus.

I call the previous owner - a DIY enthusiast - Mr Bodge-it...for lots of reasons (the list is truly endless, examples all over the house). And like a PP it has driven me to tears more than once ...we bought this house because it needed little doing to it and we knew we wouldn't have much time - how wrong could you be...
The bathroom illustrates his work well...
Originally a small one he extended it into the eaves (funny house layout) made a nice big room - it was a selling point - separate power shower, fitted cupboards, sunken sink in a work top, concealed toilet cistern, lots of spot lights...apart from carpet (yuk) it looked lovely, a luxury bathroom.

BUT
There was NO heating in there. No radiator, no electric - nothing. And there was no insulation at all - there is a sloped ceiling bit - it is a single plasterboard sheet with a 4 inch gap then the roof tiles. The whole length of one wall and the roof were a single plasterboard sheet then the eaves/attic - If you have been in an attic in winter you might get some idea of how cold it was - we may as well have had the bathroom in the shed.

Then the drains - the drain from the shower to the internal soil stack/main drain is about 15 m long - a U shape - it actually runs out above the stairs for a foot or so (can't believe we didn't notice it) - then goes back through a plasterboard wall, along under the back of the length of the bath and then back on itself along the length of the eaves space.
Worse it didn't have enough 'fall' on it, so didn't drain properly.
I realised this when the bath blocked up completely (had been dodgy for a while - I'd been using drain unblocker). Latish I thought I'd sort it out the next day. Then at 1am noticed the wall on the stairs was soaking wet. paper hanging off - there was a slow leak in the pipe - hidden under the bath....
The bath had a lovely home made panelled panel - actually glued and nailed onto a frame around the bath - you couldn't get underneath the bath without destroying the panel...(and of course later I discovered even then it was almost impossible to get to because it ran along the back of the bath ...)

Didn't want to wreck the panel so had to drain the bath/ unblock the drains. Crouched in the eaves cupboard at 1.30am I had to slowly drain the 15m pipe into a few cm deep container - I worked out it was about 2000 litres. It took hours and it stank ...eventually could get into the pipes without causing a flood and found it blocked solid with mainly rotting dog hair for a length of over a meter...
The only way to get enough fall on the pipe was to go into the soil stack lower - which involved breaking in from the room below - so removing bricks from the top of the wall...
(And I found out he hadn't even capped the original waste hole into the stack - explained why the bathroom was a bit stinky - it was basically open to the sewer...)
Oh and he'd put electric lighting in the eaves space - two bare bulbs at head height and worse a metal switch and they weren't earthed

The concealed toilet cistern was actually just the original one pushed back into the eaves cupboard. It had an external overflow - he didn't move it. I found it was overflowing when I walked into the room downstairs to find the ceiling on the point of collapse. Oh and what about the original overflow? I found that when I was investigating why we had a constant damp patch on the wall - he'd cut it off flush inside and out and covered it inside with a thin layer of plaster (if he had left long outside the rain wouldn't have been coming in quite so badly...)

The plastic water feed pipes ran in the eaves space - not insulated and not fixed anywhere - when I had a combi boiler put in they all started flying off with the pressure - think of a cartoon hose pipe flying around. He hadn't joined them properly - I had to have them replaced in copper (and insulated).

Minor - the taps are set too far back from the sink - so water goes everywhere but the sink (we put an attachment thing on the tap to improve it) and the sink is enamel and someone has stripped the top layer off - so it stains as soon as you look at it ...DCs washing paint covered hands means it needs to be bleached.
Some of the spotlights are completely boxed in - when one of the fittings needed replacing we had to make a hole in the plaster board to get to the wiring - oh and they are mains voltage and should really be low voltage as you can easily touch them from the sink...
Finally he used all kinds of old wood to make the wall frames - including one piece that was full of woodworm ...immediate area has been treated - only time will tell if it has spread or not ...

Previous owners had to fix some dodgy wiring to the overhead lights in the lounge. To access it, their mate cut up and pulled up the floorboards upstairs. Then put them back without securing them to a joist. I couldn't work out why you felt like you were sinking every time you walked over one spot until my uncle pulled the carpet back and leapt backwards out of danger - my whole body weight had been stood on the unsupported end of a single plank. I was lucky I didn't fall through the ceiling into the lounge. Oh, and they required the plug in the hall so it was back-to-front wired, and would kill anyone who used it. Luckily by then I'd got some specialists in to check gas and electric after the floor debacle and they found it before I plugged the Hoover in. Also none of the skirting boards were attached to the walls, just propped. As soon as you touched one, they went like dominoes all round the house

In our old house the previous owner was a builder who did the front extension himself. This consisted of one new ground floor room and a double length front hall and garage. He failed to make the floor of the extension the same level as the rest of the house. The house wasn't even built on a slope.

He also used next door's old wooden bay window for the new room, but didn't put any supports under it & packed out the gaps between the wooden frame and the brickwork with newspaper. When we had UPVC windows put in, they couldn't believe it hadn't fallen out.

We bought an 18th century listed cottage from a lovely family, not realising how much of a DIY bodger the father was and quite how eccentric they were in general.

A few of the little gems we have encountered are:

• Door frames damaged by the family parrot
• Wood burning stove installed incorrectly in an uncapped chimney, resulting in several feet of solidified soot inside the chimney and a huge risk of a fire and/or carbon monoxide poisoning
• Wiring so old that the sockets didn't even have on/off switches
• Huge cracks in the bathroom door where the younger son had tried to rescue his sister when the door had jammed by breaking the door down with an axe
• Great Crested Newts living in the sandstone wall of the living room