Problems with pre-owned houses

[Nourishinghandcream]

Prompted by yet another thread which is developing into a place to bash new builds.
Thought it would be a bit of fun to hear your tails of problems in older houses.

Having owned four houses (1930's, 1950's, 1970's and now a NB), we have come across many things but in almost every case it was down to poor maintenance, unwillingness to spend money (to have it done properly) or moreso, a case of more enthusiasm than skill (i.e. the DIYer😲).

Unsafe stair handrail.
Unable to drill the wall (didn't own a drill?) the previous owner built up mounds of filler on the wall, inserted 1-inch wall plugs and screwed the handrail brackets to these. Needless to say it came off the moment you put any weight on it.

Dodgy electrics
Why oh why do people "have a go" at electrics when they have no idea what they are doing? Cables going diagonally across the wall or clipped to the skirting & door frame, lighting circuits spurred off the back of plug sockets, driveway light fed from the cooker supply, socket next to the bath to serve the spin dryer(😲!).

Folding kitchen door.
The kitchen/living room door was a horrible concertina/vinyl affair. When I asked the owner why, they said it was because when they redid the kitchen, the door now opened onto a cupboard so they removed it. When I moved in, it took my Ddad just a couple of hours to fit a new door but reconfigure it so it opened the other way.

More to follow but let's hear yours ........,.

Two of these are twenty minutes jobs to fix though? The electrics are more of a pain admittedly, but I'd still prefer that than a cardboard new build with dodgy drainage and a huge snagging list.

Terrifying electrics.
New roof needed
No insulation
Window frames rotting (obviously no windows last forever, so I guess any house more than 20 years old will have dodgy seals or whatever).
Cold water tank in loft left uncovered. Long dead mouse, spiders, various unpleasantness best not thought about too deeply.
Very elderly hot water tank for a low pressure system, with power showers with strong pumps connected to it.

I don't think it's so much new builds that are getting a bashing, more the ones that are "fleecehold" and give extra costs that just can't be escaped from unless you move - and selling them seems to becoming an issue as a result. Unless your prepared to sell for a lot less than you paid :/

A money saving one which has done anything but.
A friend had a living room extension but to save money, decided to go for a flat roof instead of a pitched/tiled one which would have looked far better at only a moderate increase in cost.
Every summer, the room now overheats so they have invested in portable AC units.
15yrs on, they are now moaning about the cost of having the felt roof replaced due to leaks.

Everyone knows flat roofs are a consumable and need replacing if using felt roughly every 10 to 15 years. I went for rubber this time on one of my outbuildings which is supposed to good for 30 years. We will see if that's actually right but it certainly seems to be lasting well so far but only 8 years in..

I can absolutely see the advantages of buying a new build. But for me, I like space around me and no neighbours. Hard to find in a new build so we’ve usually bought older houses and yes, fixed some very dodgy things. Illegal electrics, leaky roofs, unsafe floors, kitchen cabinets that fall off the wall, crappy boilers, draughty windows. I can totally understand why people prefer new builds!

Please don’t assume that all new builds are the same. It’s really depressing to read the level of dismissive opinion, particularly when you also regularly read about issues with damp, unsafe electrics, shoddy workmanship from builders used for renovation and the despair that posters have, that their project will never be finished.

My house is not cardboard, it’s traditionally built, it’s not cheek by jowl with next door, it has a big garden, it has massive amounts of insulation, spacious rooms.

The 50s house we had, had a multitude of ‘stuff’ under the floorboards, an unsafe extension, bare live wires because lights were removed and just left, a shocking oil tank in the garden and a shower and toilet that broke almost immediately we moved in.

Can we just accept that we like different things. It’s not a question of what is better or worse, but what someone prefers.

BIL bought a house with an integral "garage conversion".
We were invited over to see the new house and were struck on how the conversion was split over three levels (in such a small space?) and even in the late summer felt chilly (not really a surprise as there was no heating).
After the first winter they decided to investigate and found just the bare garage shell behind the plasterboard with no insulation whatsoever and where the door had been removed, just a layer of UPVC cladding. The difference in floor levels was because if the garage floor had been raised to the level of the house floor, the ceiling would have been too low to stand upright.,😖
Had to pay for it all to be ripped out and done again (properly), still looked like a poor afterthought.

Are you my OH????😲
Well said, could not agree more.👍
When I read all the NB bashing threads I wonder if ours is the only decent development in existence?!?

I started this thread to highlight (in a cheerful way) some of the dodgy DIY and/or cheapskate things found in older properties. Shame the NB bashers followed.☹️

I'm really not bashing new builds. I would definitely buy one, and maybe will in future, as we get older. Its the awful fleecehold developments I'm bashing.

I love my NB! Nothing cardboard about it!

Ours is effectively the newbuild of the Edwardians - cheaply thrown up, fairly basic but looks nice from the outside. It just has 100+ years of grime and insane wiring/plumbing/wallpapering jobs throughout.

It’s similar to the threads bashing boomers - a horrid term in my view. If you haven’t lived it, you can’t know it. If you’ve never lived in a new build, you can’t know what it’s like. Ours isn’t perfect and there has been snagging and we’ve changed things- upgraded the hob, added more cupboards in the utility room, changed the en suite basin and the worktop, but those were aesthetics that we wanted and the original stuff was fine.

My first house - tiny cottage built 1680, structural sound but wierd layout. Sold because location was awful and tiny garden.
Next house - built 1790's, bungalow, v tiny with later small extension, had had consistent maintenance by previous owners and was warm. Just too small (2 bedrooms, teenagers, nowhere to extend & wouldn'thave got planning anyway). Sold it regretfully after 18 years.
Current house - built about 1800, fucking nightmare money pit.

So - totally depends on whether things have been maintained, replaced, etc. New builds will always be warmer, but unlikely to still be standing in 200 years time. I think even current house will still be here in 100 years unless a fire/disaster strikes. Not true that all new builds have crap gardens compared to older houses.

Misses the point entirely.☹️
Two light-hearted examples (from two of my houses) which as you say, were easily fixed but used as examples of the shear ineptitude of some people when given a screwdriver!

The same people (house No1) painted the hall, landing & stairs in red oxide primer.... walls AND ceiling (he worked for the gas board and got the stuff free)!
It stuck like the proverbial blit to a shanket and took WEEKS to scrape off, a few MM at a time.😭

As a single FTB I was lucky to buy ANY house so had to accept a certain amount of compromises and/or poor workmanship which needed to be put right as I could just not afford anything better.
Luckily my Ddad was skilled (manager in charge of building construction & maintenance for a major utility) and later on, OH (who I had not met yet) was a "trade" who could tackle most things but should his skills fail him, call on "people" who could!

Yes I can’t face the NB threads. For many years I had the nice old Victorian or Edwardian houses with ‘character’ except some of the character cost thousands to rectify 😆. Now in a NB and we looked at probably 10-15 different developers from the well known to those just doing a handful of properties and they varied wildly in quality and size (just like old buildings in fact). When you drive around old villages no one thinks of pointing out the cottages with a yard as a garden or the odd layouts or the damp etc.

Plumbing under upstairs shower room floor held together with silver foil and plastic carrier bags. I could not believe my eyes. Luckily (so luckily) as soon as we moved in we decided to renovate the room so didn’t actually use it and lifted the boards pretty soon, would have caused catastrophic flood.

Our first house was a 70s ex council house, the house itself was really sturdy but the “improvements” were shocking. The wiring was literally shocking! The conservatory built out of all the single glazed windows when they had double glazing installed was interesting. Almost every single part of it could open although I never dared. The fake beams that were hand made and glued AND nailed to every wall and ceiling, approx every foot in a criss cross pattern……in all rooms downstairs!!

We have a 1950s house and I’m convinced that it was the architect’s first job and the builders constructed it by standing on the other side of the street and throwing the bricks into place. It has quirks, but I’m fond of it. We didn’t alight on anything too terrible our predecessors had done with it, but they were fond of plastering and painting around large item of furniture rather than moving them and treated wire wool like a useful stuffing for cracks, which all made redecorating interesting.

I think when people say that a lot of new builds won’t last they probably forget that a lot of older houses haven’t, either: the desirable eighteenth and nineteenth century houses we have remaining are largely the good quality and well-constructed ones which were mostly built for the wealthier and the burgeoning middle classes - not the shoddier ones built for working class people which were torn down as part of mid-twentieth century slum clearance, or which still exist in a lot of former industrial areas and are often damp and difficult to heat. Not all new builds are equal and some will last and some will be torn down in a few decades when we have superior and more efficient building materials, like so many of their predecessors.

This is more like I was hoping the thread to go........Bring on some more.👍

A friend of mine was also a single FTB at the same time as me and was also suffering the same problems of finding an affordable house.☹️
She bought a Victorian terrace (ground floor bathroom behind the kitchen etc).
Walls & ceilings must have been really bad as the previous owner had artexed EVERY wall AND the ceilings (bathroom excepted) to cover the grotty plasterwork. She could not face the work (or cost) or replastering everywhere so as it was only going to be a short term house, just painted throughout and lived with it.

We lived in a 1930s semi which the previous owners had added a side lean to and front porch. No concerns were raised on our survey, we thought we would remove the lean to at some point as it was a bit of an eye sore but the front porch was actually rather useful. However fast forward 18 months and the botched job additions almost pulled the whole house down, huge cracks appeared both internally and externally, the walls had to be pinned under a subsidence insurance claim and it was a nightmare to sell.

We then moved to a 1970s semi, it hadn't been touched since new, it had the typical avocado bathroom suite anaglypta wallpaper on every surface etc etc. The previous owner who had lived there from new and fancied himself as an electrician, amongst other atrocities had wired wall lights in the bedrooms to the plug sockets in the living room. We didn't realise this until we wanted to remove the wall lights and had to trace where the wires were coming from. Everytime we started to renovate a room we unearthed a whole load of horrors. We spent 6 years renovating that house room by room at great expense, when it was finished and we could finally relax the neighbour's from hell moved in next door. The house went up for sale and we lost a lot of money.
Hence we now live in a detached new build.

Exactly

plus the tiny overlooked gardens, lack of overall design character ,plastic everywhere along with mastic in every crevice and paper thin walls

I passed some recently and it looks like the developer got a job lot of ridge tiles on the cheap. Wrong colour and out of scale
Don't start me on the American style entrance walls

Appreciate we need new build properties just such a shame they are so badly designed.

Just been reminded of a corker.😃

It was my brother's first house when he got married. Ex-council property in a good position, plenty of scope for improvement and was an ideal start for newly married FTB.

It has a long driveway which was strangely level compared to the neighbours (theirs dropped down as you came in off the road) plus it was rather high, being above the DPC. Clearly it needed taking up and as there was also a rather ugly pond in the garden, he decided to enlist the help of my younger brother and a group of friends to break it up (pneumatic tools hired in for the job).
Anyway, it just went on and on, the deeper they got, the more concrete they found in layers, each several inches thick.
Weeks later and multiple skips (which luckily were cheaper then) they finished so while on a role, decided to tackle the pond. It was built like a wartime bunker with (again), layer upon layer of concrete which although it looked like it was built just above ground level, actually went far deeper and was in fact several feet thick.

While this was going on they got friendly with the neighbour who explained what had happened.
The previous owner drove a concrete mixer and apparently, every time he felt like "improving" the garden he just brought home another load of premix!😲

Blimey, where do I start?

We bought our current house (much-extended 1930s) 17 years ago, and i think we have just about put right most of the things wrong with it. Previous owner was a builder, but heaven help anyone who actually paid for his services, because he certainly did a cowboy job on his own home. In no particular order:

• New larger windows added, but with no lintels, so brickwork above them starting to sag, as only the window frames were holding them up.

• Soffits and facias made of chipboard (which absorbs water.....)

• Added a first floor above a 1970s extension, but didn't bother with floor joists....floors just resting on ceiling joists so sagging massively.

• Garden electrics - just drilled a hole through the wall, to a regular 13A plug in the living room.

• Plaster boarding on ceilings not remotely flush, so just added an extra thick layer of swirly artex to disguise (it didn't).

• Power sockets in the bathroom.

• Didn't bother grouting the kitchen tiles.... and massive gaps around the edges filled with a thick layer of brown sealant.

• Power to the shower via the earth wire

• Not a single pipe boxed in.... all running around the skirting boards

• Didn't bother painting behind the large mirror on the dining room wall

Honestly, reading all this back I can't believe we actually bought the house! It's quite nice now, but still a bit "quirky", let's say.

Our first home was small & the 'patio' was screwed to the guttering & the posts not concreted in. It took a few minutes to knock it all down. It also wasn't insulated in the roof. It's hot here. Thankfully both didn't take much to fix.

My freind sold her house and refused any inspections on rainy days so buyers couldn't see the patio roof leaking. They also covered up a lot of issues and kept quiet.

We built our current house, which is now 18 years old & starting to have the usual maintenance issues anyway!!