We have vinyl in both the bathroom and the kitchen that looks like someone attempted to spread it out like a rug. It isn't fitted correctly, leaving areas with too much leftover or too little. It's terrible and I do my best to decorate more to camo it rather than actually decorate.

Jessica

Someone built a cabinet to hold a front-loading washer and dryer (stacked). Seems like a good idea, but it's made out of particle-board and not quite straight.

There is the wall in my living room that I tried to paint so it would subtly mimic the clouds in an adjacent painting. Instead, the wall looks like an unfortunate victim of a party where some one drank too much Blue Curacao and threw up all over.

Someone poorly painted the ceiling sky blue. Don't ask me why. But in a house with yellow walls and dark hardwood timber floors it was awful. Our house has only just recovered. Lol.

we once installed a dimmer switch-which worked great until about a month before we moved out, when we learned that there are different dimmers for multi switch set ups. the occasional crackling noise clued us in and the loss of part of our security deposit cured us of DIY projects done without thorough investigation.

I once lived in a house where the previous owners had built the kitchen cabinets out of scrap wood etc. We ripped up a shelf, flipped it over, to see the word "YIELD" in huge letters.

I won't even go into the kitchen floor done in "abstract" designs with scrap vinyl tile. I should really scan in a photo and send it in. It beggars belief with the ugliness.

Our bathroom has some sort of plastic or vinyl marble-print paneling that the previous owner sealed to the walls with dark yellow caulk and white plastic strips that I think are made to fill in thresholds. It covers the room, and I'm scared of what I'll find when I rip it off!!!

The previous owners of our condo painted everything in flat, which isn't bad until you get to the kitchen that has no backsplash! After spending multiple days and different cleaning products on the kitchen walls we gave up and just painted it over in semi-gloss thus ensuring our ability to clean the walls should they get splattered.

After moving into our home we discovered our gray kitchen counter tops were actually painted with faux stone spray paint! We are a bit worried about prepping food on them, hopefully we will be able to replace them soon.

Where to begin? I am currently without a bathroom because my brother-in-law tore it out before realizing that he doesn't know how to put in the new plumbing. There's a toilet, but all of the walls and ceiling are torn down to the studs. I love hearing my neighbors use the their bathroom.

The kitchen and other bathroom were painted with flat paint- in the bathroom, a single thin coat so that we can still see the drywall and in the kitchen, directly over peeling wallpaper. The carpeting was taken out of our bedroom and replaced with (crookedly placed) linoleum tiles. Too bad that our room is partially below ground and freezing. It feels more like a basement now.

The previoius owner of my house painted everything - walls, ceilings, closets, woodwork, even inside the bathroom medicine cabinet - a putrid mixture of somewhere between orangy-tan and pepto-bismol pink. It is the most dismal color I've ever seen.

The worst part of it was, when I was painting over it, I chipped some of the paint on the baseboards and window frames and found out that underneath was beautiful wood that matched the house's original hardwood floors! Someday, I hope to strip it all, but there is so much, and so many layers of paint, that it's not likely soon.

I still have one area of that old paint left, mostly because I can't figure out how to get rid of it. The basement stairwell can't be painted without one of those funky ladder that bends in several places to stand on the steps (which is what I'm guessing the previous painter must have used), so... I see puke pink every time I go down the basement steps!

"marching happily along wreaking havoc with their hammer and nails" is precisely why I won't allow my tenants to make their own changes, however minor, to the property I'm renting them.

To mellon: this is the perfect opportunity to buy some foam pipe-wrap (the denser the better) and wrap all pipes you see, both the copper and the big drain pipes. You'll have a quieter bathroom when you are done.

anything with sponged paint is a bad idea. we once rented a basement suite with a bright yellow sponge-painted kitchen, ostensibly to "brighten the place up." it also had badly painted floors, in a dark, institutional green. (it also reeked of sewage every time the furnace kicked in. that was awesome.) many years later, we have a large, mostly lovely home...with a bright yellow sponge-painted basement room, courtesy of the previous owners. i will be painting that soon.

To mfarling...

The more layers the better when it comes to stripping paint. If it chips downs to the original wood and finish it will almost certainly come off smoothly with a heat gun and a 2 inch putty knife. Do a couple of moldings a week. it adds up fast.

My bathroom is a victim of a bad DIY tile job. It features white 4" x 4" tile with vertical grout lines that almost line up and a grey faux rope between two rows. I'd love to remove it, but I'm afraid of making holes in the drywall or ruining the panel that covers the whirlpool tub electronics.

My old house had numerous DIY disasters from the previous owner. He installed a wall of built-in cabinets - all crooked; put peel & stick vinyl on the basement floor that became unstuck when I had a small pipe break; fixed a toilet with a hair rubber band, installed carpet over old pad and carried it over the entry tile (no pad uneven); carpeted the main bathroom and kitchen, and installed a wood-burning stove with a crooked chimney pipe and bathroom tile hearth (I later learned they had a chimney fire, and my insurance company threatened to cancel my policy if I didn't replace the whole thing). Every time I had work done, I got a call from my contractor to ask about a new problem he found. Ironically, he was the construction manager at the local nuclear power plant.

We were planning on pulling up the nasty (really nasty) carpet in our finished basement when we moved in. The basement is great- but the indoor/outdoor carpet really took a beating with the owner's 3 small kids (plus, they had 18 family members stay in their basement after Katrina!!).

They did SUCH a good job renovating the house, but then we find out- they GLUED the carpet down. Apparently, they were just going to put new carpet on top of it some day (ick!). Not cool. Getting it up would be a huge pain now, so we just live with it and covered it up with rugs... lots of rugs...

All of our electrical outlets have reversed polarities. The outlet in the bathroom? If you plug in a hair dryer, then turn it on, the bathroom lights turn on, dimly, and the dryer runs weakly.

But the construction-type work was well done.

Oh, boy -

Well, the last place I lived in was advertised as a three-bedroom. Third bedroom was an attic, which we viewed during the winter. Summer hit and I found out that the attic? NO. INSULATION. AT. ALL. You could see the seams of the plywood they used for the walls...

Also, the water heater broke like, three times because the landlord was convinced he could DIY that. :S

Now I've got only three very minor 'issues' in what is generally an AMAZING home which I <3 to pieces.

Weirdness 1: The closet in the master bedroom is kind of like a box built up against the wall. Which is fine. Except there's this weird space above it - not quite small enough to be unobtrusive, not quite big enough to make for proper storage.

Weirdness 2: There is NO storage in the bathroom. None. So someone cut a hole into the wall and extended a sort of cubbyhole through the bathroom wall and into the hallway closet. Except they took the shelving with them when they left. So it's kind of just like a ridiculously deep and long cavern in the bathroom wall. Easily fixed with a plank of wood, brackets, and a curtain - but it's weird...

Weirdness 3: You know that awful popcorn ceiling texture? Well, when they built the office add-on, they apparently got sick of the lovely wainscotting three-fourths of the way in and went batshit with the texture. A whole wall of it. Floor to ceiling. My solution was to paint it a dark, matte color, put floor-to-ceiling bookcases and cover up the rest with a big canvas.

everything.

Um, yeah.

My entire bathroom is a DIY. My shower is sad. The worst part is that the shower was redone by a "professional" to cover up the first DIY and its still just as bad. Water pools in one corner because the floor isnt slanted to the drain properly.

Now that I think about it, I think my entire place is a DIY. I rent a back house from an elderly lady and I think my place was her son-in-laws DIY project.

The whole thing is a disaster really but its in a nice neighborhood and the rent is cheap so I do my best to throw some decent looking furniture in it and deal.

To Mfarling:

Upon moving into this place, my eyes were assaulted with that same color of paint. Putrid indeed.

In the early 70's the previous owner decided they were tired of doing laundry in the garage then hanging the laundry to dry in the attic, so they proceeded to make the back bedroom into the kitchen, complete with washer, dryer, a bathroom only a very slim person could love, and a back door to the yard. This back door is perfectly positioned to catch every rain drop that falls, so they built a roof to protect it (haha). All the roof does is redirect some of the rain onto a hefty set of concrete steps which pools the water up by the house and is probably why this part of the house is sinking. But they built a "deck" to cover that up. Sigh.

The wiring in this new kitchen is the kind that makes the electrician not want to come out.

The old overhead kitchen cabinets were nailed up for life over each toilet without first bothering to fill in the cup hook/can opener holes; by throwing a piece of plywood over the opening the sink cabinet was used to hold up the hot water heater in what used to be a small, squarish patio off the garage but now became an enclosed space in the garage proper. That brought the water heater up to code and gave the dog a place to come in out of the cold -- as long as you left the door wide open.

At some point they acquired a HUGE microwave/convection oven so of course the only sensible thing to do was cut a HUGE hole in the former outside wall of the house and build an unventilated enclosure for it, which meant moving the frig into its own enclosure that juts out into the garage and is (sort of) supported by a few concrete blocks.

Meanwhile, the old kitchen area was presumably turned into a dining area except for the fact that all these "improvements" really turned it into a passageway from the living room to the new kitchen as the best place for the dining table is shoved up against the corner so you can eat facing a wall. Lovely.

If I had enough money I'd restore this mess to its original state of being.

The worst part--the WORST PART--is that my landlord actually took the time to tell me how long his terrible, awful wall "texturing" took to do, and how proud of it he was. It's currently crumbling off the walls in some parts, but I can't do anything about it but vacuum it, for fear of insulting him.

I wanted to switch out some ugly flourescents in the kitchen of my recently purchased older home. The previous owner had thought himself quite the handyman.

When my electrician broke into the ceiling and started pulling the old light out, he burst out laughing and asked me (jokingly) if I thought the house had been built to code. Sadly he was making some black humour regarding the wiring. It seems the previous owner had done much of the wiring himself and done it poorly.

I used to live in this huge old house that had been turned into 4 apartments. They made the back stairwell into this wonderful huge deep closet (a rare find in historic buildings). Except my landlord installed these huge drawers in the back of it. They were all about a foot deep and at least 2 ft. long. Storing or hanging anything in the closet means that you block the drawers and can't open them. And they went almost up to the ceiling. I'm 5'6". The top 2 drawers were above my head. What the heck was I supposed to put in those two? Whatever it was I would never be able to get it out again. Even standing on a chair with a mirror and a flashlight I couldn't see into the back of that top drawer. Crazy.

One of my previous roommates insisted that there was something wrong with the tiles on our bathroom floor. I thought it looked fine. He insisted that the landlord come fix it. The landlord hired this guy to come and re-tile the floor, but it was obvious this guy was no professional. Now we have nice white tiles on our floor that look like they are permanently dirty! I think he was supposed to clean up some kind of substance before it dried, and he didn't, so now it is impossible to get off, and it looks like we haven't cleaned the bathroom in 10 years. That's the kind of thing you have to explain to guests! haha.

Our previous house was extended by the owner who, I think, was a builder but it meant that every single thing was not quite as expected and any job we tried to do took longer than predicted and threw up problems. We learnt not to take any assumption for granted!

In our current house (rented), they repainted before we moved in but very, very badly so there are splodges of paint an inch wide on all the trim and edges of the ceilings. Very annoying!

Someone laid vinyl flooring over vinyl flooring in the kitchen - but it's haphazard and there are 1/2" gaps between some of the squares, and they didn't bother to move the appliances out before doing it, so everything is a bit wonky and the gaps are perfect for trapping all sorts of debris. I think a preschooler with safety scissors and Elmer's Glue could have done a better job.

Someone also thought it was a good idea to repaint the guest bath with some heavily textured matte painting technique (in a putrid orange color over a matte mustard) - meaning that the walls are near impossible to clean. But it goes great with the horrific faux antique hardware that they installed in there, as well as the two off-centered and crooked lamps with crystals hanging from them.

And I'm not sure how anyone ever thought it was a good idea to play electrician for a day and mess up all of the light switches/outlets and then cover up the hard wiring in the ceiling, rendering the switches useless and the ceiling "outlets" (not sure what they're called, the spot where you'd hang a light or ceiling fan) completely concealed. And there are dimmer switches in the closets - my clothing and shoes really enjoy the mood lighting.

I try not to mind too much, as we're just renting - and it's "quirky"! It drives my husband nuts, but I just try to embrace the quirks.

We just bought a house and are suffering with the previous owners' DIY projects, which they did to put the house on the market. We're finding that on first glance they might look nice, but if you start looking closer, you find that it was all for show and the projects were either sloppily done or unfinished.

Like,

1) Pulling out the old washer and dryer (to make room for our newer ones) we found the drywall behind them not installed and the outline of the washer in old paint, where they hadn't bothered to finish painting.

2) Baseboard trim in the kitchen unfinished behind appliances

3) Overspray from the white paint job on the black refrigerator

4) The kitchen countertops (a very thin piece of faux-granite not cut well, or joined well together, with an extra 3 inches on one side tacked on like they forgot to measure correctly

5) The kitchen doorway and window trim painted a flat black. How the heck do you clean that up?

6) Bad wiring in many places in the house

7) Bathroom tile that was grouted, but not sealed

8) Patchwork tile around the faucets, instead of precise cuts

9) Nightmare caulking - they caulked everywhere, and then didn't come back and smooth it out.

10) Wonky tile setting, so that the bathroom shower wall looks like it could be a skate park

11) Messy, messy painting EVERYWHERE in the house. This causes my in-a-previous-life interior painter husband to swear a lot.

The funny thing is, the previous owner is actually a house inspector! The cobbler's children have no shoes...

We've taken to using their name as an oath whenever we come across a new offense. And we're tucking away money to eventually restore our gorgeous 1916 semi-Craftsman beauty to it's full glory.

I did my own poor DIY job, not on my apartment though, but on a coffee table. I decided to do a mosaic art piece out of an old worn out and ugly coffee table, and honestly the project was going pretty well and looked really nice.
That is, until I ran out of tiles and realized that the store I got them from doesn't carry that type any more. So now I have a half finished mosaic table in my living room, mostly because I am too stubborn to let it go, always hoping to find more of those stupid tiles.
Not the worst DIY mistake, but it stares me in the eye every day all the same :(

The vinyl in my apartment was painted white...to match the walls. I think even the faux wood vinyl tiles underneath would have been better than constantly and obsessively cleaning the floors. Thankfully the circular area rug covers up most of it, but it is definitely my biggest pet peeve. I also hate the screws sticking out of the kitchen cupboard door because the previous tenants just HAD to screw their garbage can to the door. I contemplated painting the floors a different colour but it wasn't a project I wanted to tackle before moving in! The joys of renting!

1) Large hole in the kitchen wall that we found when we replaced the over-the-range microwave with a standard vent hood.

2) Every surface of the kitchen covered with cheap white tile -- walls, counters, floor. I daydream about taking a sledgehammer to the whole room.

3) Congealed paint drips on nearly every piece of trim. Apparently they really globbed on the paint, and then neglected to go back over it to smooth the drips.

I could go on and on, but it only raises my blood pressure.

Our house is full of poorly-done DIY projects from the previous owners.

The worst is our bathtub. Apparently it had hard water stains or something, so they decided to paint it with some kind of gloss enamel. It began chipping off with the first shower after we bought the house. I dream of the day we can afford to renovate the bathroom!

all of these comments make me laugh since i am wrapping up a gut reno on a home i bought this summer. it is only funny looking back, not so funny when you have to resolve the issues. here are some issues i ran into:

1. basement bathroom fan vented into floor grate of the room upstairs! just disgusting.
2. basement window broken in order to vent dryer in the basement! so much for keeping rain or winter air out of the basement.
3. electrical held together with tape in some places, and spliced together every which way. major fire hazard.
4. bedroom closet made out of 3 layers of wood paneling! a closet where you can't hang anything, perfect! ;)

Even though it's more expensive, I rather pay a professional to do the job correctly. I have no patience for lines that are not straight or paint that is sloppy. My DIY projects tend to be on furniture or less permanent things.

I was going to tile my bathroom floor and am happy I didn't. The house is old and everything is uneven and it took the experienced tile person, a long time to level the floor and each individual tile.

Dear HGTV-Obsessed, Sponge Roller Happy former occupant of my condo, while I appreciate your creative impulse, the bedroom's purple and lavender harlequin diamonds half way up to the lofted ceiling lost its pizzazz due to their single wall presence while the remaining walls were purple sponged except behind (what I am assuming were) the TV and curtains.

Your reasons for painting the rest of the condo walls in gold sponge must have transpired the obvious fact that gold sponge in an oddly shaped/ oddly lit condo causes the walls to look dirty.

The construction-orange walls and the laminate wood counters covered in wall paint (due to a giant singe) in a kitchen is smaller than an average walk in closet were cruel to the corneas and fingertips of guests/ future condo owners.

Even though we never met because the HOA got the Constable to remove you from the premise, I will forever think of you. Ultimately because you left three cans of unused bubble gum pink paint and two 80 pound bags of plaster in the storage closet, and since the condo is 738 sq. feet, what in the world were you planning to do with them?

PS - You also left the purple tinged sponge roller kit.

Our house is full of previous owner DIY's gone wrong!! Beginning with the entire inside of the house (including the trim, doors and their hinges) being painted the same high gloss slightly grayish, blue, off-white color. Many of the windows are "sealed" with something that is NOT caulk (that's going to take awhile to re-do). Near one of the outlets in our living room, the wall is patched with bathroom caulk instead of spackle (so it's kind of rubbery!). Also, the master bath has a horrible vinyl floor that is peeling in some areas and barely makes it to the other side of the room. Also, the numerous layers of paint in the guest bath...there's one spot where I found wallpaper sandwiched in between many layers of paint! There is a lot of work to be done :)

OMD. My previous house had a list of idiot redneck single guy (the previous owner) DIY's a mile long, but my favorite was that he decided to spray the inside of all of the closets with popcorn ceiling texture crap. Because he loved it so much that re-doing the ceilings with it wasn't enough?
What a PITA, constantly having that chunky stuff and dust get all over anything in there.
There were days when I seriously considered calling the guy up and telling him exactly what I thought of his "ideas".

My friend bought a house that had fir floorboards under the dirty 70s carpet, so of course she ripped the carpet up...
to find that someone had carved 1 inch wide grooves into the actual floorboards to accommodate the TV cabling!!! The grooves are cut right across the MIDDLE of the living/dining room, then make a L turn towards the front door.

Every time I think 'what type of person would do that?', my head boggles - there is a basement directly below those rooms, so they could have just drilled one small hole to feed the cables through, then another at the front of the house.

The effort involved in making what appear to be hand-chiseled grooves for some 20 feet through beautiful fir floorboards would have been considerably harder than just drilling a few holes.

My house was built in 1880. Awesome, right? Unfortunately, it was completely re-done in the 70's to include wood paneling (with no insulation behind it and which has been painted multiple shades of beige), an indoor bathroom was added that is NOT up to code and is being supported by a 2'x4' on a sideways broken cinderblock, crappy cardboard-type ceiling tiles were added to hide the exposed beams, beige wall-to-wall-carpet was installed to cover the wood floors and absorb every cigarette smoked and urine expelled from a pet, and every ounce of charm was either removed or covered. We've removed the ceilings and carpets but all the other stuff is heartbreaking. Not to mention the deck is unsafe for even a cooler, our basement floods, and the whole house is slanted. The stairs consist of 3 normal steps followed by 8 pie-shaped wooden steps that have contributed to broken ribs and a bruised butt but we put some gorgeous sandpaper tape on the edges of each step. Also, the smallest bedroom has four electrical outlets while our bedroom (which was originally two rooms back in the day) has one outlet...in my husband's closet.

Still, despite its faults, I love the crazy house.

I painted my bathroom tiles - big mistake. Despite doing all the relevant prep work and priming, the paint has peeled in certain areas. If I could do it over, I would rather just retile properly.

When my roommate and I moved back into the house he owned and had been renting to a family for a couple of years, we discovered a number of horrid things they had done to it. The master bedroom was painted a Wizard-of-Oz Emerald City green, the kitchen what I can only describe as baby diarrhea brown, and my room (formerly the little girl's) was dark charcoal gray with the most awful white sponge job on one wall. When we were repainting, we discovered that the sponge accent had been done in latex paint, and we had to sand it all down lest it leave spongy shaped bumps on the wall.
Their little dog had also chewed up the corners of the adorable 50's white vinyl dinette booth that had been custom upholstered. Sad :(

Our well-shaded apartment has two bedrooms. When we moved in, one room was had forest green walls. The other had one cobalt blue wall and a cobalt blue CEILING. Both of these paint jobs were done poorly, and all of the walls - especially those that were still white - were scuffed up. I have no idea who thought this was a good idea, but we immediately painted over it.

A previous apartment had a very badly tiled bathroom - we were told that it was a collaborative effort, and one person started at one end and the other at the other end, and I'm sure you can see where this ended up.

Yet another apartment had a square but kidney shaped tub that previous tenants had PAINTED pink. About every other year, our landlord had to sand down the tub and repaint and reseal it. It was effing gross. Same apartment had the most hideous carpet (in the kitchen!) that I'd ever seen. The previous owner was also really into tiling. REALLY. As in, every surface imaginable had small tiles: walls, windowsills, backsplash, all faces of the pantry shelves (top, edge, underneath), backs of doors, etc. MAYBE the most ridiculous place I've ever rented, which is really saying something.

My current house is quite lovely but my starter home had been previously owned by a barber, who had rented it to his ex-wife along with her un-housebroken dog & cat. At least the carpet had been removed from most of the rooms before I saw it, but the stench of animal urine was so overpoweringly bad that it took 5 gallons of white vinegar poured directly over the floors, combined with a week's worth of ventilation before I got rid of the odors permanently.

The barber's idea of adding a light fixture consisted of stapling an extension cord from the kitchen outlet, up the wall and across the ceiling into the next room. He attached one of those plugs to the end of said extension cord to add one of those light bulb with a pull chain attachments above the basement stairs. There were other extension cords stapled to other walls, but this basement light was truly the most dangerously awful DIY I've ever seen. Sad.

There was also ugly yellowish linoleum that had been carelessly glued over original hardwood floors without sweeping first so that there were little lumps everywhere underneath the kitchen and bathroom floors from dirt.

The spare bedroom had been made over ( I can't bring myself to say remodelled) into a barbershop, and had truly awful wallpaper, the kind with the old fashioned, 1900's type of advertisements on the walls. Too bad the installer either hadn't learned how to line up the wallpaper or was in a big hurry because it was both crooked and peeling.

The final DIY project I tore out was the patio "room" made from plywood nailed directly to loose 4 x 4's - apparently whoever designed it had never heard of post holes, post mix or anchors of any kind. The two sheets of plywood were topped by roofing tiles which added quite a bit weight and I was afraid the whole thing might topple over and kill someone.

When I sold the house it was 1000% safer with fully restored hardwood flooring, new electrical wiring, a new roof, new plumbing, new windows, the works. This was long before the trend of "flipping" houses and was a labor of love.

I love our house to bits, but the previous owners pretty much eradicated all of its 100-year history. Everything that wasn't painted mint green - :-( - was clad in corn-yellow plastic panelling. Except the bathroom, which is GREY plastic panelling. Oh, and except the downstairs loo, which is BLUE plastic panelling. With flowers. Any visible wood had turned a cheap orange.
We knew it was going to be a huge chore, but three years later no end is in sight.

Let's just say the electrician's expression was of the "I get to tell them that my estimate is now doubled" happy type when he had finally figured out that the previous owners, in redoing the kitchen themselves, had put the refrigerator, disposal, stove, dishwasher, microwave, and three wall outlets all on the same 15 amp circuit.

Extend the same sensibilities -- not just electrical but also caulk-, tile-, and paint-wise -- to every other room.

Yipppeeeeee.

But it's a great house, and all the neighbors let us know how happy they are about the work we are doing on it, using professionals in those places where we (believe we) know our limits.

This is one seriously depressing thread!

I'm uber-picky and back when I had to rent, if the place felt wrong, I just couldn't live there -- so I have had pretty good luck. One weirdness though was an apartment where the beige carpeting had two spots where it looked like someone had cut out squares of the carpeting at about the distance apart that a person might place speakers. Maybe to have contact with the concrete sub-floor?? I don't know. But the holes were patched with BROWN carpet. (I covered the whole zone with furniture.)

I feel sad for everyone above -- what horrors! (I support landlords who keep their properties up and who are pretty strict about what tenents can and cannot do. My former landlords and I agreed that I could paint within certain limitations, install improvements if I left them (and they often even reimbursed me for my investments) and so on, but I ALWAYS checked with them before messing with their property.)

Confession:

In the bathroom of my rental unit in a 100 year old house, previous DIYs had left several big gaps between walls forming an indented closet thing. I imagined giant creepy spiders living in there and coming out at night to invade us.

The proper thing to do would be to get drywall tape and plaster etc. and mud up the gaps. But I was in a hurry.

So I taped off all the seams with plastic packing tape, and then painted over top! It looks fine! It's in the corner and you'd never even know. Just don't touch it, okay?

We rent the upper floor of a beautiful but decrepit 100-year-old house.

1) Our downstairs neighbour bought wood laminate flooring to replace her hideous vinyl tile in the kitchen. The landlord's brother (landlord lives in a different province) came over to install it and got frustrated fitting the tongue-and-groove edges together so he sawed them all off and used a combination of glue and nails to affix the planks to the floor.

2) Someone decided to partially upgrade the knob-and-tube wiring some time ago... with very rudimentary knowledge of wiring. It's a hazardous mess that we have been campaigning to have fixed because we have repeatedly gotten shocks from places that would not normally carry any current like the bathroom faucet, the handle of our electric tea kettle, the fume hood on our stove, etc.

3) A backsplash painted in eggshell finish Electric Peach.

4) Tiny nails hammered into the hardwood floors EVERYWHERE to stop the floor from creaking. Many of them have worked their way out of the wood and sit there waiting to rip holes in our socks or trip us. We'd personally rather live with creaking than have to wear shoes in the house 24-7.

5) A new wall erected between our living room and bedroom to create space for a closet and bathroom off the bedroom... but the wall was put up so it bisects a window, leaving half in the living room and half at the back of a closet.

6) Kitchen floor is so dramatically not level that if you drop anything, it rolls out the door. Understandable in an old house, except that the kitchen floor was re-done sometime in the last decade. The vinyl tile is so flimsy that it rips every time we scrape a chair leg against it... and that reveals the lovely plywood sub-floor.

7) Someone ran out of beige tiles while tiling the bathtub enclosure and switched to marbled white-and-bronze ones 3/4 of the way through.

Oh, I could go on and on, but you get the idea! Loved reading everyone else's too!

Well, I was going to complain about my kitchen, where somebody had painted over the hideous wallpaper with equally hideous peach paint, but after reading this thread - never mind! It gets SO much worse!

ngnerd: Construction manager at a nuclear power plant?! TERRIFYING

I once glued down astroturf to a covered balcony. Yuck, yuck, yuck!

Our current rental could be a lovely 1920's house if the owner and/or manager had taken the time to take care of it. Instead they:

- Painted over beautiful subway tile in the bathroom instead of replacing 3 tiles easily found at a hardware store.

- Painted over crystal doorknobs, plugs, hinges, WALLPAPER

- Painted over cabinets so many time that the doors won't close.

- Replaced a wood banister with a cheap outdoor wrought iron

- Put linoleum (that is peeling at the edges) over floor tile, put carpet over hardwood

- Started painting the stairway but stopped when they couldn't reach any higher

- Painted over brass pipes, vents, and outlet covers

And the list goes on. This is all in one house and I wish I could keep them from making anymore horrible choices.

In my garage we decided to put up an industrial ceiling fan to replace the bulb that was there. When you turned the fan on the garage door went up. We had to take the whole thing down.

I've been laughing out loud at these posts! Such a fun thread. I have been feeling a little better about our own "crazy" 70's-built house. Too many strange quirks to mention and my mother was right about house-ownership: you're never done. One thought- for years whenever we opened the front aluminum storm door we'd get a mild electric shock if our feet were bare (summers on the cement-floored porch). An electrician finally figured out the wires in the doorbell were messed up. I kind of miss that now (just kidding)! My guess is that that was "fixed" by the the DIY-er previous owner.

Confession: Many years ago as a renter of a house, I removed the heavy drapes the owner had up and put my own lighter curtains up. As we were moving out, I decided to do her a "favor" and clean those curtains; I threw them in the washer and dryer without consulting the cleaning instructions. They went back up significantly shorter in length than when I took them down! She was nice and didn't give us a hard time about it, but I have always cringed about doing that.

So I moved in 2 years ago into a small cape 2 yrs ago. Instantly we saw things sooo wrong, like gray wood panelling over two layers of wall paper and 2 bathrooms that have linoleum tiles that were put down like stickers over ceramic tiles. One the bathrooms still has a window in the shower. The funny thing is the view is the drywall for the all season porch on the otherside. No sunshine, No light of any kind. :(

The previous owners of my house painted over old wallpaper in the bedrooms -- which I discovered whilst re-painting when the walls began to pucker. They also installed white vinyl over rotting subfloor in the kitchen, and installed one of those hideous surround baths with mottled glass sliding doors in the upstairs full bath, and an equally dreadful stand-up shower in the downstairs full bath. You can only imagine the caulk job. My husband and I almost completely remodeled the kitchen (saved vintage cabinets) but can't deal with any more demolition and mixing/laying cement and destroying router bits on stone 'til summer. Thank God they were too lazy to do anything else -- they left beautiful multi-pane windows and little abused oak floors.

We left our own little gift for the next owner: some in-cabinet jerry-rigging to support the 200 lb. range top I bought after measuring improperly.

We've been in our house for about 10 years. The people before us "flipped" the house so there were all sorts of weird poorly done renovations.

My favorite, which we discovered the day we moved in, is that they had taken out a built in medicine cabinet from the downstairs bathroom -- and papered right over it. So, it's like a drum. I was able to hang a new mirror over it by nailing in a hook over where the hole was, but it was still weird...

The last basement I rented.

The ENTIRE basement suite must have been DIY. The WHOLE THING.

- The kitchen ceiling was actually the staircase that was awkwardly chopped off, the hole covered with plywood and not even patched up. I don't know how they hung a light there. It shook whenever someone walked around upstairs.

- The wiring in the entire suite was completely backwards and ungrounded. We probably should have burned to death.

- The fridge, microwave, oven and the entire "living room" was all on the same circuit.

- The plumbing was so connected and so clogged up (probably air bubbles) that whenever I drained the kitchen sink, greasy sludge would gurgle up into the bathtub. Took a while to figure out why the tub was always smelly, greasy and covered with bits of food.

- Fan in the bathroom, but no ducts.

- Front door was very broken.

- Nasty fake wood paneling that just hung off of the walls and was home to many creatures.

- Circuit box for the entire house wasn't even enclosed in metal. It was just sitting in the drywall over our bed.

We lived there for a year and somehow made it out alive. If the fire hazards and the gas fumes weren't enough, we slept with a machete nearby because of the crackhead neighbours.

Oh gosh, Melle, your number four point happened to us in our new-ish apartment! It's a renovated old house and the landlords were definitely eager to fix the problem but it was so gross to see old bits of food in the bathtub when you least expected it.

Our apartment has a lot of little DIY quirks but I'm not really bothered by them. The floors are uneven (I dropped a bottle of pop the first time we went grocery shopping... it just rolled toward the cabinets, haha) and the bathroom is a weird uneven disaster. BUT it's a place to call home and we love it, despite it's topsy-turnyness.

The previous owner of our condo was a "contractor" (using that term loosely here) who completely remodeled everything. The problem is that the floors aren't even and the laminate is pulling apart, he apparently didn't ever tape any woodwork when painting, patched holes in the wall leaving "lumps" under the paint, took out fixtures and instead of patching drywall, either installed cabinets in front, or used metal plates to cover the holes. And the cabinets aren't square. And I could go on, and on and on.

So even "professionals" do bad DIY projects.

Where do I begin? How about the bedroom that was papered in 3 walls of leopard print wallpaper? The 4th wall was covered floor-to-ceiling in mirrors.. the approx. 8x8 kind with the peel back adhesive. And the hand stuccoed ceiling, complete with a small track light smack in the middle of the ceiling. That contained one light! Oh, and the huge heavy hand made painted black waterbed frame. Yes, of course, a filthy low quality shag rug! Wish I'd taken "before"photos.

And that's only the beginning....

Oh my god. Where do I start.
I guess I'll start with the kitchen.
All the cabinets except for one have the handles on upside down. The cabinet under the sink has been fixed with Styrofoam, the trap door to the basement has a key-chain as the lift.
The basement. The walls leak badly when it rains, so badly that the small windows have become so water sodden that they won't even close. The solution my landlady had? Paint the walls a horrible neon seafoam green.

The living room is fairly decent. but the bedroom has an awful linolium floor with matching yellow walls. I assume that it used to be a dining room because it has an outside door. This baffles me because I don't understand where the bedroom used to be. That and there is a misplaced row of shelves along the wall above my bed.
The bathroom...oh yes the bathroom.
The ceiling leaks above the window so badly that its destroying the floor, and every so often it leads to a wonderful fairy tale forest of mushrooms. The shower is repaired with duct-tape. She offered to caulk it, decided against it and used West Virginia chrome.
The walls have this horrible tiling on it, that they painted this chalky powder blue. and for some reason the toilet is SIX INCHES FROM THE SHOWER STALL. FACING IT.....you have to sit sideways on the toilet lest you wipe your feces on your side.

Yeah, there are plenty of cases wherein the people are more inclined to have the marble flooring and they do call in for a contractor to provide the professional touch as this is indeed something that would be of a much more importance.

home renovations jobs

Ohhhhh, I have so many!

My parents decided to rip up the carpets in their 70's built house, only to find the carpet was laid on bare ground - no floor was ever thrown...Also, the chunks of plaster falling from the walls when my mom tried to remove the brown and beige polka dot wall paper...

Commune at varsity - when complaining about my leaking roof, the landlady replied "oh, I prayed so that it wouldn't rain", got her nephew to seal the inside of the ceiling with caulk, creating a dam on top of the ceiling. A week after I moved out, the whole ceiling collapsed with a dam of rotten water onto the next sucker's stuff.

Ohhhhh, I have so many!

My parents decided to rip up the carpets in their 70's built house, only to find the carpet was laid on bare ground - no floor was ever thrown...Also, the chunks of plaster falling from the walls when my mom tried to remove the brown and beige polka dot wall paper...

Commune at varsity - when complaining about my leaking roof, the landlady replied "oh, I prayed so that it wouldn't rain", got her nephew to seal the inside of the ceiling with caulk, creating a dam on top of the ceiling. A week after I moved out, the whole ceiling collapsed with a dam of rotten water onto the next sucker's stuff.

I recently bought my first 60 square meter apartment in Cape Town, with gorgeous Rhodesian Teak parquet floors, the works. Only problem: The bathroom and kitchen tiles had been handpainted badly. The previous owner had used prestik (blu-tac) instead of grout and filler. He proceeded to paint over it. Light fittings receding an inch from the ceiling - just use masking tape! We removed three generations of curtain fittings from the walls. The oldest was metal brackets screwed onto the walls. They just smoothed it out with plaster into a little hill and painted over it.

the occasional crackling noise clued us in and the loss of part of our security deposit cured us of DIY projects done without thorough investigation.
---by chimney pipe