Fuck This House!!

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Quick job to combat our gloomy hallway with new lighting, should have only cost a few hundreds has turned into thousands 😭

Dodgy plasterwork fell on the electricians head, cue full re-plaster. Decorator comes today after months of it looking awful and for some reason the paint absolutely stinks like WET DOG. It's nauseating and when you Google it comes back with results about people having to totally re-paint.

FFS, why?! It's not even an old house. It was built in the 80s and has ZERO character which would make this more forgiving.

Please join me with your house woes, it feels never ending!

Oh I've been there! Start one job and it turns into a massive job!

I remodelled my favourite house and whilst the bathroom was being ripped out the plaster had blown and where the previous owner had taken the fireplace out he just left the rubble. So that was another £1k. Then the ceiling in the kitchen was dipping because a previous workman hadn't done it properly. Another £1k.

Even here most things are not done to the standard I would have done it and really it needs ripping apart.

’t was on the Monday morning the gas man came to call ….

Made me laugh...but so true!

My hallway smells of wet dog too but that’s because there is literally a wet dog lying there. The whole downstairs smells of wet dog today.

I’ve been there too … start one job & it escalates!

We had a man come and split a large bedroom into two.

Long story short, he did the shittest job imaginable - walls aren't straight, hung the doors upside down, measured incorrectly so the radiator is almost buried in the plaster. He also fucked up the electrics so badly we needed a partial rewire.

Anyway - gets to two years later and we've finally got enough money to start redecorating. I do one kid's room, and then get our electrician out to put in some hard-wired ceiling lamps. I ask him to just check the sockets in the room as well as they've been poorly fitted.

Well...not only were they poorly fitted, but they aren't earthed. Pretty sure we don't have enough money to get everything sorted as likely to have to go into the walls, but of course we have to as dangerous!!

Add this to getting conned out of £10k by the woman we bought from, then having to spend £7k on a leaking roof as well as all the other shit. Genuinely love this house but it's a damn money pit!

Thanks for the messages of support guys! Money pit feels about right. It was the same in our last house, so much money spent on the most boring / depressing things like removing chipboard wallpaper and rodent infestations. I'd love to just be able to spend money on a nice kitchen or a fancy bathroom for a change! aware this is first world problem

Thankfully the wet dog smell has partially subsided. Lots of fresh air and scented candles today. ✨

Another money pit here so you have all my sympathy! Dodgy builder disturbed some asbestos, which was soon to be revealed was in ceiling tiles of half the house. Had to get in specialists to do the whole vacuum seal/ end of ET type set up for most of a week.

We now have no ceiling in a big chunk of the place, the house reeks of old exposed timber and when I think of how much it cost I want to cry!

We fortunately had some money put to one side for other renovations which now are even further on the back burner now. Cry.

I could cry over my house. I often do. I fix one tiny thing (costing millions in soul money!) and then fucking… an ongoing game of whack a mole commences. I hold my house together with tears, rage, and gorilla glue.

Solidarity!

Ah the grand plans we had, even spent £kkk's on architectural drawings before the price of everything went nuts and actually getting anyone to even quote became almost impossible.

Trying to be grateful for the fact it's warm and the boiler hasn't packed in (yet) 🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼

Is the paint valspar? Any colour darker than beige stinks and needs four million coats to semi decent

i've just found some active woodworm 😦

My extension is flooding because of the rain but they can't get the roof on... because of the rain. Waiting for a dry spell. Cos that'll happen in a uk winter!

Ours is same! We knew it was a doer-upper. But every tiny job unveils a bazillion issues, each costing gazillion £££ to repair. Even the builders, electrician and plumbers say things like "well, that's surprising!" And "I've never seen one like that before!" And "its amazing its been working all that time" and similar.

2005 new build.

I am messing around re doing the stairs at the moment.

On the first step they used a nail gun to nail in the carpet. With about 30 nails on one step.

The second riser looks like it has been kicked in. I thought it might be someone using the stairs to bring something heavy up, but looks like it was finished that way as the screws on the inside holding it to the lower tread are bent completely out of shape (if it had been kicked in they would just have been forced out).

Looking at the stud wall under the stairs, about 50% of the screws put in holding the plasterboard to the studs have missed and gone in at an angle.

Newbuild quality for you.If it is out of site it really is out of mind. And this is just the stairs.

Oh, I thought this was going to be announcing a new series of that Sid James 70's sit-com - but more cutting edge. 😕

Oh god. I despair. The number of times builders/plumbers/electricians have come into my house, the Prototype House of Horrors, the Novel Virus of houses. My house IS the Wuhan wet market because apparently no tradesman has EVER seen shit like the shit that lurks inside the walls of my house of mass destruction. I'm getting palpitations just writing about it. They come in acting like your average Willy Wonka-Tradesman crossbreed. Then they morph into Sherlock Holmes, charging me hundreds and thousands and millions for the pleasure of hearing them say, "Your history is a mystery" to walls that crumble in response. I basically just live with my head in my hands and a drained bank account. Literally, it.is.always.something. Always something collapsing in my house. It's like a really dysfunctional game of Bingo. Who knows what will be called out today: Boiler! Rewiring! Valves... because there's always a 'valve' doing its 'valve shit' somewhere in this house full of valves! GAHHHHH!

All the sympathy to you. I find myself regularly exclaiming fuck this house. My husband is done with it too.

200+ year old stone cottage. Exposed stone walls and floors downstairs. Open staircase. Brand new bathroom and kitchen, bag loads of character, a little hobbit hole of a house. Beautiful inside and out but the most impractical thing to raise a family in. I'm 30 weeks pregnant and we have a 1 year old who likes to try and kill himself by jumping off stuff at every opportunity and running up and down all the stone steps. None of our upstairs doors shut properly due to warped wood. Constantly hoovering up monster sized house spiders in every corner. Just finished dealing with a rat invasion. We can't afford to have any work done right now.

We've been trying to sell the place for 7 months, found a buyer a while ago but they pulled out and since then we've had no interest.

I'm trying to learn to love it but every time I find myself having to do anything at home I just sigh and groan.

Can you please tell us the paint make so I can avoid it 😂

We had lambswool insulation put in (apparently it's the best thing for old houses because its so breathable). The very next day there was a torrential downpour. For weeks the whole house stank like a wet sheep.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Yes initially we thought our doer upper needed redecoration, new kitchen, new bathrooms, plastering in some areas. This became: whole house replastered, new electrics, new gas boiler and radiators, new garden. Should have bought a different house tbh. 200k deep and it’s still not finished to my standards. DH is refusing to spend another penny unless critical. Fuck sake.

Thought we had a healthy budget to replace our 30 year old timber windows here.

Oh how we laughed as the quotes came in.. 😂😭

And again when we realised that we’d need to replace wooden cladding, have fascia painted, replace sills and lintels, repair and clean guttering, need scaffolding, planning for conservation area…

I've just died a little on your behalf. 😳
That's just... oh my god... you know what? How much snake oil do we get suckered into buying as homeowners? Vats of the stuff!
The amount of 'advisable shit' I've paid for only to see it very quickly worsen the preexisting problem is embarrassing.
It wouldn't at all surprise me if your house started baaa-ing. Like some gift with purchase!

I've found my people 😂 Who are those annoying people with money trees and perfect trades who knock up an extension in a few weeks creating not even a speck of dust?!

For this asking about the paint it's Johnstones Perfect Matt. Our painter says he's been using it for years and has never had a problem with it before (of course!).

Smell is still lingering like wet dog crossed with stinky feet 🤢

Tbh Johnstones paint is usually good, maybe a dodgy batch.
Do not use valspar it stinks and is shite quality, when we had our hall/stairs/landing done it took four times as much paint as the estimated square footage thingy ( how you work out how many tins to buy- the correct amount of valspar paint for any job is NONE)

Ahh I feel everyone's pain here. The house before our current one had basically everything wrong with it, as soon as you start poking it all fell apart.

First it was the boiler, packed in in November (a week of cold showers in winter 😭😭), previous owner didn't service it once in 14 years 🥴

So that got replaced... But a few months later the pressure kept dropping. Can't be the boiler again, it's brand new!! NOPE it was several minute leaks in the entire heating system because whoever put it in originally used the wrong kind of pipes that can't be laid under the floorboards. So they were slowly disintegrating. Right so floorboards up through the house to replace the pipes. This was a slow process too because the plumber had to try to find where the leak was (haha idiot us thinking it would only be in one location) so he was having to check room by room.

As this was being investigated... Turns out the floorboards under the bath were rotted. Because the leaks were small, slow and steady. Used this as an excuse to redo whole bathroom. Which was a project on the back burner anyway that just got prioritised (goodbye rest of savings). This did also reveal an external wall in the bathroom that was getting drenched every time it rained and it was perpetually damp and caused the plaster to crumble.

If we thought everything was fine now, we'd have been suckers.

One day the FRIDGE kept tripping the electrics. Got an electrician round who said half the sockets were on a second circuit that was a bodge job and unearthed 😭😭😭 everything that had been plugged into this shitty circuit got replugged in elsewhere via several extension leads because we didn't have enough to do a full rewire at the time.

THEN we got an infestation of big fat flies with no idea of the source. Looked in every single cupboard and behind every single piece of furniture that could possibly have rotted food hidden. We were baffled because there was no smell. It was a dead rat in the sewage system at the entrance to our wastewater 🤢

And thus began the rat hell... That became a hideous cycle because every pest control we tried insisted on chucking down poison... So they were dying under our floorboards where we couldn't remove their stupid little corpses... Which brought more flies...........

There was also an infestation of little flies at one point that we never found the root of, but after months of putting up the sticky yellow pads they eventually disappeared. Tried everything from flushing out drains to treating every single houseplant to sealing every loose food item to no avail.

Somehow managed to stay in that house for 8 years... Have never been so happy to get shot of a place.