Share your botched bathroom finds stories....

[Startingagainandagain]

I have started renovating my bathroom (1930 house) and the amount of botched jobs from previous owners my plumbers are finding is quite unbelievable.

Today they fixed the shower plumbing. Some bright spark had managed to remove the original bath and then install a shower with a set up that meant the water did not have enough 'fall' to run into the drain pipe and in fact was even going backwards into the shower drain as the pipe was higher than the shower...

The toilet is equally badly plumbed (I had a leak from the cistern that dripped into the ceiling below) and the basin is too big for this small bathroom which means you can't even open the door properly and on it goes. So everything will have to come out.

Would love to hear other people's bathroom horror stories so I can at least tell myself that I am not the only one with these issues...

Well, my house is fairly new build compared to yours. We bought it from new. When we moved in the toilet was lopsided. A few years later we changed the side panel on the bath to find a load of empty beer cans underneath. Probably explains the lopsided toilet....

Not necessarily botched but a very unwise choice. When I moved in, the house had the best the 70s and 80s could buy. In a bathroom there was what I can only describe as an edifice built all around, including over, the bath, with panelling, etc. There was a kind of false ceiling within the edifice constructed of what I thought were smoked plastic panels with lighting above.

When that was dismantled I discovered they weren't plastic panels. They were glass. It is fair to say a good knock would have dislodged a panel - I presume they were designed to be removed so the lights could be replaced.

Loose glass panels. Over a bath. Where a person would lie down.

We had a leak under our bath so my Dad came up and cut the bath panel off. Always thought we had a weirdly shallow bath for how deep the bath panel was and it never felt that solid... yep, the shallow bath was rested on some stacked up planks of wood and not at all fixed to anything....

The previous owner ran a property maintainence company and had done his own renovation project. He'd also plastered a radiator to a wall in the lounge and fitted a way too large radiator in the hall way... to the extent that it goes on throughout the doorway into the kitchen and onto the kitchen wall, preventing us from closing the kitchen door!!! My Dad, a qualified electrician had the bathroom floor up to help us with the new bathroom, being fitted as an urgent fix to the bodge one and described the wiring as "a daisy chain" and recommended we remove the kitchen ceiling to check for more issues... we found wiring that was routed out of the building via holes they would have had to drill specially, routed around the building and back in a hole in another room.... I mean maybe it was better than him playing with the joists?!

I'm also a landlady in the local area and the first thing I did was call our letting agent and get his firm blacklisted! They regularly used him previously and were shocked!

@user1471548941

Funnily enough one of the previous owners was a builder and I think he might be the one who did a lot of these botched renovation jobs throughout the house...

Pulled up the bathroom carpet (yuck) in my first house and discovered whoever put it in had laid it over a big pair of pliers. I hadn’t noticed before as it wasn’t where you would step on them, but I have no idea how they didn’t!

Previous owner had lived here about 20 years, 2nd owner and house 23 years old. Bathroom replaced at least once.

We found 2 layers of tiles on the walls and the first layer wasn’t put on the wall with tile adhesive. My builder wasn’t sure what it was but the whole wall collapsed when trying to get them off. So a new wall was needed.
Pipework behind toilet was boxed in and when it was taken off the waste pipe was barely inside the toilet. One giant poo or violent flush and it would have dislodged. 🤢
So new waste pipe needed.

The whole house has been bodged DIY or cowboy installers. Has taken us over 10 years to sort it all !

the previous owner of our house had wallpapered over tiles! Round the bath! The bath was also leaking..to the extent that the floor was rotten through and our builder almost fell through the ceiling in to the kitchen

@8misskitty8 mine had done the 2 layers of tiles too, fortunately only on the bath panel! They also used grout to stick polystyrene tiles up on the ceiling of one of the bedrooms to hide a crack from where the roof had leaked, so that was fun…

It was an ex-council house, which may possibly explain a lot of the issues we found!

There are too many cowboy bathroom fitters about. On mine the shower waste teed into the bath waste but the fall was wrong so when you drained the bath the water came bubbling up from the shower drain.

Not to mention leaks on toilet cisterns etc.

We had a tenement flat with a very tiny raised shower room off the hall. When my dad was doing some work he found that to fit the plumbing in, a whole section of the joist had been removed... glad it didn't collapse through to our downstairs neighbour while i was on the loo!

Not our current house but years ago we moved into a newly renovated rental. The toilet was plumbed into the hot water (my first ever hot flush!) and the bath wasn't properly supported so it collapsed when filled with water.

Our current house has a hinged shower door that can't open fully because the wash basin is too close. The bathroom was fitted by the previous owner who was an enthusiastic but hopeless DIYer.

Downstairs Shower/loo/basin: -
Soap dish, with drain holes, positioned directly above the bog roll holder, which has no lid or cover.
Loo cistern overflow at wrong height so cistern just deposits any overflow water right on the floor.
To avoid having to sink the shower drain into a concrete floor for a few inches, false wall built that cuts about 9" off the already very tiny room. (We only found this out when measuring other walls for a different reason, it was like finding a Priest's Hole.)
Pedestal basin of size and siting that means door crashes into it (we have fitted door stop). All this will change when we rip it out but first we have to deal with
Upstairs: -
Fully tiled bathroom in brown and green tiles. Ceramics in fawn and hammered brown. Kitch gold taps. Pink carpet. 😳Pale green woodwork. (carpet is now gone and tiles painted cream until we refit). Basin so enormous front to back that I rick my back reaching the taps & sited so close to entry space that you have to shimmy past it to get into the room, and I'm small. A more substantial person would find getting in quite a squeeze.

When we moved into this house we had a bath taken out and replaced with a shower. The head of the bath was recessed into an alcove and had a shower over it. So we squared off that corner.
20 years later we renovated that shower room right back to bare brick. The plumber came to find me to say he had found a shower behind the false wall and it was still live! The taps still worked.
That corner had never been dry! Now we know why.

We had that too! Except it was the previous owners FIL that was the builder 😆

Ours had the soil pipe to the loft conversion installed level so toilet waste wasn't actually falling down the pipe but swimming back into the toilet bowl....

We had non-bathroom safe lights (and, as it turns out, not electrical earthing to the whole house either)!

We had the shower tray installed by being glued down with concrete blobs, and a tray that was 10cm too small for the space it was fitted...

And a number of other things that I have forgotten, too traumatic probably 😆😆

@Startingagainandagain i bought a rental flat and after a couple of years needed to replace the bathroom suite. the bath which the previous owners had put in was far too long so they gouged out an inch at either end so they could slide the bath in. then they plastered over both ends. the taps were right on the wall and the other end had no visible rim on the bath!

Not even a historic find, this is happening right now! Our entire property is currently being refit after major storm damage, all managed by apartment building management company and the insurers.

Granted they did briefly pass a proposal drawing by us for the bathroom layout but we had a 2 week old at the time so weren't firing on all cylinders.

Now the bathroom is close to finished and having gone on site for a progress check we see they've replaced the old pedestal sink (that was already too big for the room) with this...

I'm so annoyed that someone looked at that giant vanity unit in that room and didn't double check it was ok with us before they drilled it into the new tiles

We’d been living in our house a few months and had a bit of a leak coming through the kitchen ceiling from the bath.

When we took the panel off the pipe work had been held together with gaffer tape 😩🤷‍♀️

It had been slow leaking into the joists and ceiling for god knows how long, luckily after we’d let to dry out we didn’t need to replace the entire floor - had we not caught it when we did the whole bath could’ve come through the ceiling 😩

All the plumbing in my house was done like an electric circuit 'loop'. So where you need 1 pipe to a tap, it's actually a right angle, up through floor, another right angle across top, then a 'T' to the tap, before right angle back down, another right angle under floor and on it goes. Even better they created full 'loops' from boiler for hot water.

The upstairs shower despite being about 1.5m directly above the boiler had a hot pipe which went up into the loft, over the top of the insulation, then back down to the shower. An uninsulated run of pipe of about 12m. Which meant they had tepid showers....I changed out the pipe and routing in under an hour and now have toasty showers....

And don't get me started on why neither of the toilets were actual screwed to the floor.

Moved into a Victorian house that had been refurbed about two years previously, including moving the family bathroom into an area that had once been a small bedroom.

Tiles started to come off the wall in the shower. When we investigated, we found an electric socket behind the tiles. It had no plastic casing on it, but had all the normal wires sticking out. They were live. Behind one layer of thin tile and grout in a shower. That was leaking and getting water behind it.

We've spent 3yrs renovating what had been a derelict house, originally built in the 1930's. Various additions and 'bits' added in the past 90yrs though.

• An upstairs bathroom included a bidet, but no toilet! The toilet was along the corridor on the opposite side of the house! So after using the loo, I guess they'd shimmy along the hall with trousers down, along to the bathroom to use the bidet! 😆
• The same bathroom had 4 layers of tiles, all cemented on top of each other!
• The original house was connected to a septic tank. When mains came along, instead of having the pipe go directly out to the road, it instead still continued 80m into the back garden to the old tank. It then did a 180' turn and came back on itself, eventually connecting to the road mains!
• Old Y fronts and newspapers stuffed in edging and window frames
• Old porn magazines in a secret cupboard above the toilet!
• The dark oak shelving around the walls, turned out to be made from polystyrene!