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Ill start off with a few of mine I have ran into while renting my current house.
1) Previous owners here cut 12"x6" rectangle in the floor to install an air vent he never installed, a literal rectangle hole strait to the basement. then covered the hole with carpet and nothing else. Care to guess how I found this little gem?
2) as an end cap to a 5" Cast Iron drainpipe for the bathroom, they used Concrete to seal the none used side of a T-pipe
3) At my washer/dryer hookups, it vents directly into the attached shed next to the house. I cant keep anything in there clean. I have to clean the shed once a week because I am paranoid that all the lint buildup can catch fire from a small spark.
4) They Installed the Sump pump for the basement 2 inches higher than the rest of the concrete floor. So it never drains without using a huge squeegee to push it all closer when it rains.

I found air ducting disconnected and hanging when I first moved in to my current house. The basement got toasty in the winter. After repairing all that slop and patching leaks my house heats a lot faster and cheaper.

I found lots of gaps to the outside uncaulked or otherwise open. Filling all of these further reduced drafts. I recently did a lot of caulking around the windows the prior owner replaced. I think the guy just loved giving his paycheck to the energy company.

He also didn't caulk the tub in the main bathroom.

The closet in the main bed room had a clothing rack. Not a single stud was hit with a screw, nor were wall anchors used to hold the rack up.

After we hung our gak up, the rack ripped all of the screws out of the wall.

fethers. I marked the studs and put a brand new (much better) rack up in its place.

Edit: The siding on the back of the house has stain slopped all over it from when they stained the deck. Fortunately, a hail storm took out the siding and I got that gak replaced at the end of last year.

Our house is nice now, but when we first moved in, some rooms didn't have light fixtures (we had to install them ourselves), the wiring was messed up (to the point where we can't make a map of how everything is wired), and the carpet was AWFUL (it was full of stains and smelled bad). We tried to clean it multiple times (with carpet cleaning machines from the local hardware store) to no avail, so we just ripped the carpet off the floor and put it in the garbage.

And there's more to the carpet story. A company called Niemann's took up some tile in front of the front door and laid down some vinyl flooring that looks like wood. Our house is fine now, but we'll never forget the work we had to do to make it what it is now.

Can I do cars?
Cause I had a guy who sold me a car, and put a used timing belt in. One with squar teeth. The gear had rounded holes. Just gave out one day on the road. Left me with a 2000$ brick. My cousin tried so say it was me getting into an accident a few weeks earlier. Saying I must have nocked the timing belt loose. He refuses to admit he bought me a bad car.

My first home was designed by some retired lady. Unfortunately for her, she couldn't sell her previous home and had to back out. So I got all of the upgrades for free. It was the last house this builder had in the neighborhood, and they wanted to move on.

1. Anyway, the lady only had cable installed in the tiny dining room, which was to be her living room. The living room was going to be a giant dining room.

2. The attic had no stairs as she had no intention of ever climbing into the attic (old or handi-capable lady, I guess).

So I promptly told the builder to run cable in every room and put in an damn set of attic stairs or feth off.

To be fair, to an old lady, that all makes sense. In my family, grand parents host thanksgiving/Christmas. So she might have the family over.

Sure, it makes sense for an old lady. But for me, it didn't. Which is why I had to argue with the builder to make my modern home fething modern!

What's up with the PT belts on a patrol? So glad I ets in 04 things where getting really stupid over the years.

I've never owned a house myself--and ever day it gets increasingly unlikely that I ever will--but the main family home I was in had quirks, like how both porches weren't so much 'built' as 'hastily constructed in an hour', and my dad quickly discovered that whoever had fitted the front door had done it backwards, so the weatherproofed side was facing in.

Eventually we got the front porch more or less re-done around the time we got proper double-glazing and a proper door, but the back was just beyond help. A well-placed kick could've knocked the thing down. I'm genuinely surprised that the previous owners were happy with it in any way at all, seeing as they were the ones that had the porches built.

I'm a contractor and go into people's houses daily...this is going to be fun!

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
I'm a contractor and go into people's houses daily...this is going to be fun!

How often does fecal matter being in places where fecal matter shouldn't be appear in your tales?

Contractor put the valve for my shower in backwards. so now the cold is hot and the hot is cold.

on the bright side i dont have to wait for the water to heat up in my shower

The previous owner of my parents house was a mill electrician, so he did all his own wiring. While everything was perfectly safe and up to code, it was not intended for other people to work on. For the first couple years, most of the time on any electrical project was spent with my dad looking for where the wires were.

House I bought half a year ago, oh boy.

First thing we figured out, when we were redoing the bathroom, was that the people did their own bathroom. As it turned out they did everything, and I mean everything, themselves and it almost killed me. But the bathroom, they did the tiles so bad that moisture had leaked through the floor ever since they did it. Needless to say, all the floor boards and support beams were rotting away by the time we got to it. The icing on the cake was that this was on the 2nd floor. So a few months more and the ceiling might have collapsed. That cost me at least 15.000 euro's to repair.

The wiring makes no sense, its all randomly assigned to fuses, making it impossible to shut down properly to fix a certain part.

When I took the cheap Ikea kitchen apart, covered in caked up dirt (its like they never cleaned, ever), it was yellow, while it used to be white. The stove, which is gas with an electric igniter, was wired wrongly. I got electrocuted just because the metal plate conducted it from the wrongly placed wires. How these people survived is beyond me. Furthermore, the wall to the outside used to have an exit for a coal stove. I found out that they covered that hole up with compressed cardboard and then put a thin layer of cement over it. I found out because the damp in the cardboard made mould come out of the cement. I had to tear it all out and properly fix the wall.

Last but not least, we kept the old carpet while we were fixing up the place (if it gets spilled on or ripped) to replace it later. A month after most of it was done, we found out that their cat had peed on it (which of course, they had not told us). The carpet had dried up fine, but again, the floorboards were soaked in cat urine which had to be replaced.

There were a lot of smaller, but equally annoying issues. These are just the highlights.

The first house we bought was built in 1959, and in 1960 a large expansion was put on (permitted), much of which became the master bedroom. During inspection, our general inspector noticed some odd variation in floor level back there, so we called in a foundation inspector. Long story short, the expansion had been done on patio slab: just 4" thick concrete, no footers, no rebar. The sellers ponied up the $30k necessary to repair it, and we spent the first two months of living in our new house without a master bedroom.

ALWAYS do inspections, folks. Always.

Of course, during that process, once the walls were open, we saw things like doorways made out of 3 rows of 2x4 tailings jig-sawed together and window frames that weren't level to begin with.... Sometimes, permits are all about who you know.

For the second house, we knew going into it that we were going to gut it completely, redo the electrical, HVAC, and plumbing from the beginning, and build up from there. So aside from some sneaky termite damage (most of which was caught during inspection as well, and paid for by the seller), we had no real surprises this time around.

 Avatar 720 wrote:

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
I'm a contractor and go into people's houses daily...this is going to be fun!

How often does fecal matter being in places where fecal matter shouldn't be appear in your tales?

I did the interior on a reno where the house was sitting on a two foot crawlspace. The sewer pipe had cracked at the ground seal, and for two weeks the old guy, his wife and special needs adult son used the toilet while wondering if a raccoon had died in the crawlspace. It was fething awful. We had two labourers working overnight to clean that out. The boss gave them each a $50 gift card to a steakhouse when it was all done.

Yep, my flat has the previous occupants doing their own lighting wiring. I'm pretty sure, "up to code" is what it is not. Or at least, wasn't. It's marginally better now. - I think it's because they decided to give half the lights in the place dimmer switches. Even the hallway. Seriously, why would you want to put a dimmer switch on a 3m by 1.5m hallway?

There's also an electric fireplace, with no wires connected to it at all.

Ditto for the cooker hood.

 Compel wrote:
Yep, my flat has the previous occupants doing their own lighting wiring. I'm pretty sure, "up to code" is what it is not. Or at least, wasn't. It's marginally better now. - I think it's because they decided to give half the lights in the place dimmer switches. Even the hallway. Seriously, why would you want to put a dimmer switch on a 3m by 1.5m hallway?
.

They wanted to get busy in the hallway obviously.

Both houses I've bought were brand new...

In the house in TN, the one real "What were they thinking" moment that there's really no way for me to repair, is they have this lip inside the garage (so the floor of the garage is about 1/2" higher than the driveway, but about 1-2" inside the garage, so you can sweep the garage floor onto the driveway without the garage door open, or something... Anyhow, the rails and garage door itself have about a 1/2, to 3/4 inch gap between the framing of the garage, and the door itself for the first couple inches off the floor (as in, right at the bottom corners of the garage door, there's a slight vertical gap that once you get a bit above the beveled garage floor thing, the garage door itself is flush with the framing and there's no visible gaps.

This meant that during the year we lived there, I caught/killed around 24 mice (which isn't uncommon in brand new construction, my current house I killed 2 or 3, but this was among the last to be occupied), and one snake... based on the picture I sent my dad, it was probably only a Corn Snake, but still not something I want to simply discover chillin in my garage (I found the snake caught in one of my sticky mouse traps).


My current house, the thing that kind of bugs me is that ALL of the recessed/ "canned" lights are CFLs, but that the recessed lights use this GU-24 or whatever special connector so we can't simply go and buy new bulbs (and some of them are already burning out and I've barely been here 2 years). Because we're replacing all of the installed lights with LED, we have to buy adapters from China or someplace on Amazon. But my gripe is still why the feth would you use those stupid, non-standard plug style fething lights?!

 Jihadin wrote:

Can you explain for a ponti. What am I looking for here?

 Orlanth wrote:


Can you explain for a ponti. What am I looking for here?

They have all had reflective belts photoshopped onto them... Somewhat long running joke in the army that a PT Belt (as they are colloquially known) will save you from anything.

Previous owner put in a partition wall, but didn't remove the skirting board (I don't know what you call it over there, a length of wood between the floor and walls) first. So it ran *though* the wall and had to be cut out.

Back of the garage was turned into an office, with a raised chipboard floor. Walls were sat on the floor rather than the ground, so when the floor got damp and needed replaced, again, needed to be cut out.

The rest of the house was a total WTF as well, but I can't think of any other examples. Mostly a lack of shielding and newspaper filler.

House I was living in in Y2k, quite small, upstairs is 2 bedrooms, front downstairs room is my bedroom, tiny tiny bathroom is on the other side of the kitchen.

Didn't notice until we'd moved in but the bathroom sink , whilst it had water, in fact drained -- via an angled pipe, directly into the shower tray.

Good times.

Ours is just disappointing in that when the original owners bought it, they kitted it out as a rental property - so all the fixtures and fittings are the cheapest possible, and are all now starting to fail or need replacing. Bit of a downer when you've spent over half a million quid on a place...

My house was the top floor of a 2 storey house.

It got relocated to its current location (from where we don't know) in 1963 when the block was subdivided (it used to be an orchard - it became 2 housing blocks).

The house STILL has partial ceiling and lighting battens on the underfloor. No electrics for them, just the hardware. We've had the electrics completely replaced, though.

It's up on piers, so there's basically a nice 3' crawlspace under it - and because the property used to be an orchard, the soil is nice and free draining.

So when we get the periodic flooding from the local creek breaking its banks, our yard doesn't flood. We just can't get anywhere because the flooding causes a moat around us, though (the houses all around us are all on concrete slabs and they ALL flood).

Mine had its share of doozies. There was a sunken spot on the bathroom floor. So ripped the floor up to find a perfectly circle hole sawed down to the crawl space. No idea what the was for, was about the size of your stretched out hand. While looking at that we realized that one of the support beams under the floor was chopped off and not supported what so ever. That is still a mystery to me, so we repaired that as well.

The dryer duct was ran up into the Attic. Followed it and discovered it was just blowing up into the Attic with no vents. That wrecked the entire roof and we needed to replace the whole shebang from that one.

One day I was in the crawl space and noticed water dripping from somewhere. After an hour I figured out it was a sweat valve run of from the old water heater. Rather than run that to the drain that was about 6 feet away they just drilled a hole in the floor and let it drip under the house. Because why not.

If it's any comfort to people, when I bought my house in Japan, it was built from scratch to plans agreed between the architect and my wife, mainly. Thus everything should have been perfect.

They still managed to feth up and make the window in my study about half the size it wants to be, causing me to need artificial light half the time. It's a real shame because that window is north facing and would have great light for modelling. Also from the outside, the window is clearly too small for the area of wall it's in.

Their reasoning? The opposite neighbours would be able to see through a large window.

What about curtains, eh?

 Kilkrazy wrote:

Their reasoning? The opposite neighbours would be able to see through a large window.

But how else do you advertise that you're into swinging?