Tell me about your house's imperfections please

[Pintof]

I have serious MH issues and I'm six months pregnant so I have a habit of blowing things out of proportion.

Basically, I want a perfect house. I want every detail done to perfection. I know that's not possible but I get so stressed about it.

The other day I had a carpenter in who put up some shelves but didn't conceal the brackets as I wanted so it doesn't look perfect. And he cut a hole in a bit of beading which the decorator is now going to fill 'as best he can' [his words]. Again, not perfect.

I know I'm being OTT. I know these things happen and every house ends up with small imperfections but I'm stressed out of my box about it.

Please tell me all about the tiny imperfections in your house which seemed like end of the world stuff at the time but now you don't even notice. Please, I need this

My house is a parrolellogram. The front and back walls are parrollel, the side walls are built at approx 40° to them. It's fine, mostly, but you can't have any corner furniture and purchase of carpets is tricky and wasteful.

We're having the roof replaced at the moment, according to the roofer everything is weirdly built and aligned strangely up there, not at all what you might expect from a house this age (about 1900)

Apart from the weird building techniques, we have recently replaced an antique fuse box complete with bakelite fuses, had the artex skimmed (thank fuck for that) and replaced a 1980s ash grey bathroom suite.

We live in a Victorian semi; nothing is quite straight or square. We have red quarry tiles in the hall, with a border made up of alternating cream and black narrow tiles. One of the border tiles has been laid upside down - I like it, as it proves a human being tiled the floor and probably just wanted to go home at the end of a long day. The kitchen only has 6ft 1ins headroom, as it was originally a storeroom. The room over it was built for a frame knitting machine; we had the roof replaced a few years ago and the roofers scratched their heads over the way it was constructed.

I like not perfect; just as well really....

Our house has LOADS op! It depends utterly on what frame of mind I'm in how much it bothers me but when I'm stressed, busy, worried etc it all seems a hundred times worse and makes me feel like a pressure cooker is about to explode in my head!
If I'm having a fairly chilled, happy, relaxed kind of week it doesn't bother me at all.
The skirting in our kitchen is a mess - the previous owners painted it in matte emulsion and every single speck of dust/dog hair sticks to it. I literally have to scrub it twice a week.
There is a small gap between the radiator pipe and the kitchen floor, drives me mad.
Their is a small gap in the plaster by the back door in the kitchen, most people probably don't notice it but my eyes are drawn to it instantly. In fact we need a new kitchen really but the thought of having all that work done with 3 kids and a dog makes me feel a bit ill.
My DH is a surgeon but he is hopeless at DIY, I mean hopeless. Which is obviously a long running family joke. Except he will not accept it and insists every time on fixing things himself and I kid you not every single time it ends in disaster. He flooded one of the bathroom floors once when trying to fix a toilet because he forget to turn off the water supply (!)
Anyway, you are not alone. Ours is a 1930's house and there are lots of little things that niggle away at me.

When buying our house we found out the woodburner wasn't installed by a proper engineer and so wasn't signed off as regards building control. Our vendors had stalled on this and drip-fed random bits of unrelated paper to our solicitor until was the last thing holding up the sale and we gave in and bought it as it was. The second we moved in, I had a HETAS sweep inspect it and he said it was perfectly safe and we really didn't need to worry about building control until such time as we wanted to sell the house.

Despite his excellent advice i then completely obsessed over it for 8 months, until DH gave in and we paid a proper installer last month to remove the whole installation and reinstall it, so he could sign it off legitimately. Several hundred pounds to fix something that truly wasn't broken. But I couldn't stop worrying about it.

So now I obsess that our back fence isn't perfect (actually in decent nick but one concrete post is wobbly and one panel is a bit warped) but the 'character' living in the house we back onto has built her extension roof overhanging the fence and almost touching the top of it so we physically can't fix it. The fence probably has another 10 years life in it and heaven knows we could be dead or moved before it truly needs replacing but I sit and worry about it every time I go out to the shed....

Phoebe I’ve considered it, but with those grout pens the colour just shines through eventually. The best thing is hg grout cleaner, but eventually it looks dirty again. Previous owner bred puppies who were allowed to roam free on the tiled floors (the whole downstairs) so I think they are beyond help.

This is turning into a grout advice thread! Sorry to derail, but @thenewaveragebear1983 try the OXO Good Grips Deep Clean Brushes. It's a set of two and one comes with a sort of rubber point on which has been amazing on our 10-years-worth-of filth stained grout.

I live in a 1740s house. There is not a square room. The floors are so tilted its like living in a carnival fun house. WHen putting up curtains, we had to chose whether to put them level with the window, level with the ceiling or square using a spirit level.

DOwnstairs, the bathroom was imperfectly painted by me in a rush after the kids trashed it. We have cracked tiles and mouldy grout.

The utility has damp patches and need to be repainted. It also needs a new worksurface.

The living room needs to be skimmed.

The hallway needs redecorating

Its a lovely quirky space that needs a lot of TLC.

The biggest annoyance in mine is that the previous owner silicone sealed everything really sloppily so when you try and paint up to ot its not at all straight. Black tiles in the kitchen with black slap-dash silicone edging really shows up when trying to paint the wall leading to tge tiles white

Also go the standard wonly plugs

My DH is a bit like you OP - constantly zoning in on minor imperfections that would have to be pointed out to the casual observer. If a room looks great overall that's what people will notice - personally I find his habit of of leaving his trainers in the middle of the bedroom floor and piles of papers all over the dining table much more stressful. Once your baby is born is born you'll be so busy keeping of all the baby paraphernalia you won't notice the minor imperfections yourself.

We installed fitted wardrobes in our bedroom. We re-positioned the cornice to make the wardrobes become the new end wall of the room. We completely redecorated the room. The ceiling light was hung in the centre of the original ceiling, and I had planned to have it moved so that it would be in the new centre of the ceiling. I forgot.

The ceiling light is now a foot off-centre. Because it is exactly in line with me when I'm in bed, it is glaringly obvious to me every time I lie down. Because dh is lying down a foot or two to my left, it is not in line with him and he cannot see the wrongness.

Moving the lamp would mean replastering the whole ceiling. It's not going to happen.

I used every so often to lie on dh's side, just so I could get a bit of visual relief from the lamp's off-centredness.

Reading this thread reminded me that I haven't done this in years. I've got used to it. It would probably really jar if the lamp was in the centre of the room tomorrow. After all, the lamp is centred on me when I look at it, and it's my opinion that matters!

nothing in a true line in our old flat. Doors stick, front door has a gap under it which lets the cold in. Ancient heating system which doesn't warm the house. Really wonky floor in kitchen which needs to be entirely replaced - can't afford it. Worst problem of all is leaking roof which we also can't afford to fix.
We also have cracks in some of the walls and almost no internal storage space.

I took scissors to the lounge carpet the other day in a futile attempt to get rid of the stink of cat wee from our 9mo cat who did not take kindly to 2 recent cattery trips. I now have a bare patch of cat-wee-soaked floorboards and am not replacing said floorboards until next year when we are having an extension built. There's also many roughly filled in channels hacked out of our walls in various places from when we recently rewired the house - we're essentially going to be living in a building site for the next year or so and god knows when everything will be sorted properly (I'm betting never...)

I’d forgotten the curtain dilemma; do you want them to be straight, or to look straight because you can’t have both...

I’d forgotten the curtain dilemma; do you want them to be straight, or to look straight because you can’t have both...

You can have both, but only if the curtains are bespoke and run on a curtain-track (rather than rings on a pole). It is an expensive solution that depends on a talented curtain-maker.

The ensuite sink cold tap continually drips. I've bought a 3 litre jug to stand under it so at least the water isn't wasted - its used for flushing the ensuite toilet which leaks all over the floor if there is water in the cistern. Hence the jug flushing method.

Same room - skirting board is covered in water stains due to leaking taps/cistern etc. Oh, and the metal strip across the door was taken up by DH 8 years ago as it wasn't quite straight. However, he failed to replace it so you have to step over the jagged edges, which look far worse than the strip ever did.

Skirting boards have huge gaps under them, so the biggest spiders known to man live safely under there.

The wooden struts on the banisters were put in and stained but never saw sandpaper so you can strip skin off if you brush against them - a nightmare to dust.

This is a new build. I could go on.

Artex on walls by previous owners.

Tiles off in bathroom behind towel rail.

Blinds falling to bits desperately need replacing in two rooms.

Garage roof so bad cant store anything in it.

Carpet in lounge and biggest bedroom desperately need replacing.

A window needs replacing as moisture is getting trapped.

Damp in one room. Wallpaper coming off a bit in this room.

Fascias need upgrading

Wood chip needs going altogether.

Not possible to do any of this at the moment.

My house has so many imperfections that frankly the minor ones aren’t worth thinking about.

Tore a hole in the kitchen vinyl. It’s now stuck down with sticky tape (which has worked surprisingly well tbh).

The two panels for the bath are not and will not join together.

Random bits of missing skirting board. The mysterious damp patch that is in the middle wall of a terrace but doesn’t affect the neighbour’s wall. The cracked render.

The bits of carpet that aren’t ACTUALLY attached to the floor. The fact that the whole of the downstairs only has plug sockets on one side.

I could go on...

we bought a lovely new door to our living room, then drilled a hole in it for the handle in slightly the wrong place. So it has two little holes in it. We saved the sandings and mixed them with glue and filled it but they are still visible.

The house is full of imperfections but that one bugs me most