[Closed] Wowzers , worst diy found in your new (old) house

Where to start?

Here's two to be going on with:

1) large unsupported doorway knocked through a supporting wall. I had wondered why the floor upstairs seemed to slope a little.

2) mid height purlins in attic just cut out because they were in the way of a velux window. Miraculously as the roof is a hipped 30s one it hasn't actually done any damage.

That's just the tip of the iceberg though.

Best street / worst house. Lucky I have a sense of humour and no inclination to move for a decade.

30 amp live wire sticking out the kitchen wall.
The previous inhabitants had taken out the original cooker and just cut the wire off. Then filled the hole with expanding foam and painted over it.
Wasn't entirely happy about that one.
Been a couple of others but nothing as bad as that.

yeah all my sockets are on one circuit as is all the lighting. need a bigger CU to change this so until we can afford a sparky, it's gonna stay that way, though we have replaced all the wylex wired fused with the MCB types.

Moved in and the bedroom was baby pink with a crappy MDF wardrobe built into one wall... On pinging this with a finger it collapses and on the top was a small box, about A3 size, 35mm thick. Opened it up and inside was a brand new immaculate corset...

Transpires that the reason for the previous couple selling was she had taken to drinking from the furry cup and he pursued an evening occupation as a transvestite in the bars of Leith.... hope the two kids are ok...

Here's one for you: How about a first floor joist hanger put in upside down?

Spotlights in the floor around the master bed
+
turned on to see how they look
+
curtains that were long enough to touch floor and reach spotlights
=
nearly set fire to the house within an hour of getting the keys

Had i known half this i doubt id have slept easy at night in the house. The previous owner told me he was a plumber to trade ( although in his 70s ) but judging by the boiler install i removed i dont think he was ever a plumber, it wasnt even badly fitted it was dangerous.

Its amazing how a tradesman will do really, really shit work on his own house.

My mate bought a new 4 bed detached house a couple of years ago. Decided to stick a circuit tester in one of the sockets, no light up, tries another, same result, so he popped off the socket faces, and there was no earth. The whole house had not a single earth lead in it.

Stewart Milne homes not for the win.

My brother's place was a death-trap.

Had been 'renovated' by the previous owner. Re-wiring consisted of, for example; filling in the sunken wall socket boxes, changing for skirting board mounted ones and running the cabling over the floor - obviously an underlay and carpet was thought to be sufficient protection and saved the hassle of having to chase new cables in. The new down-lighters in the kitchen were flouro strip lights on the bottom of the cabinets with wiring run on top of the wall but behind the cabinets themselves.

Personally the shoddiest worksmanship I've seen was from a 'tradesman' - Moben kitchen fitter. I won't list the complete balls-up they made of our new kitchen but it started with an electrical fire...

The central heating boiler flue pipe went through the plasterboard and I assumed up a liner in the chimney. Nope, it just went though the plasterboard and stopped. Then some of the gases went up the unlined chimney, the rest came back into the house.

Edit: it wasn't DIY though, the previous owner gave me the bill for the professional job and there were yearly service/inspection stickers on the boiler for every year from the install.

Ah nobeer the builder who famously imposed a maximum capacity of people for a kitchen in his flats after the floor dropped mid party 🙂

Stripping off plaster board in my brothers place, wires on the ring main had been joined by twisting bare ends together then sinking them into a dod of wet plaster on the back of the board.

When I was a student a friend of mine had a light in his kitchen that couldn't be switched off - there wasn't a switch.

Not my house but here's a few from when I was a builders labourer. All on same house.

Took a bathtub out to find 3 double electric sockets behind (all live)

Toilet wasn't fitted correctly, dripped poo, wee and whatever else into playroom below.

Sorry no DIY but plenty of "industry" ones....

This is why I do everything myself, most 'professionals' just seem to be Cowboys with a Van, although I've met a few decent tradespeople recently. My 2nd brickie, Alan Raven, was the hardest working person I've ever met, and did a really excellent job.

When I was a student a friend of mine had a light in his kitchen that couldn't be switched off - there wasn't a switch.

There is something strangely pleasing about that.

My brother just payed for survay to be done on the house he bought, but then payed extra for an in depth one,they checked all this stuff, and so far hasn't had any surprises.

Hear no evil see no evil

Plug in testers showed no faults. - if he thinks his surveyor did much more hes dreamng might have caught the no earths fault above though

I could have continued blissfully unawares. - tbh id budgeted for a rewire and a new heating system on viewing the house as i could see with my eyes the faceplates were old as hills and the boiler also way so no surprises for me either.

In the last house we rented the kitchen lights stayed on even when the electricity was turned off at the consumer unit. Luckily we discovered this when something tripped and the kitchen lights remained on rather than when we were changing the light fitting

B & Q fitted a kitchen in my house a year before I bought it ( have the receipt from the previous owner) 10 yrs later, I strip it out. Found something really wrong with the ring main and eventually sussed, that they had split the ring main in a socket, hid the wires outside the socket back box, used choccy blocks untaped and then ran a cable ' thrown over' the cabinets and into the wall to feed the washing machine !! Found that the cables run into the wall, they had smacked out the plasterboard and then made a jigsaw of off cuts of tiles to fill the hole and then splodged tiles over the top. All ripped out and redone making the ring main back up.
Previous owner left a lightbulb hanging out the bathroom wall with all wires showing , paint burning off the wall and that was it.
Mother in laws ex husband( the wifes dad) put a socket in upside down just behind the sink at the height of the splashback.Also he used to put sockets in wherever he wanted and there are some sitting on skirting boards and others littered at all differening heights. Mother in Law wanted some new bedroom furniture, so we ripped out the old stuff. Found he had run the pipes under the wardrobes and left them just lying on the carpets nowhere near the walls and snaked across the room to the radiator.

Wot Nobeer said. Never buy a house from someone 'in the trade'.

First house I bought was previously owned by a builder - when he put up a stud wall he simply built it over the carpet and when I put some shelves on said wall they touched at both ends with a 1" gap in the middle.

Prior to this I rented an upstairs flat from a plumber. You couldn't fully close the living room door or the second bedroom door as they collided with the pipes he'd dropped down from the loft for the radiators.

Sorry mr C im going to defend trademen here , my reletives and friends are trademen and they are no a chunts , i do know a couple who are tough. Some have morels im afraid but are few and far between

Those two are gold though 🙂

My house is a polished turd that is slowly being sorted. Owned by an electrician before us and the wiring is awful. Typical scenario is an underpowered transformer to a set of down lights. A bit of timber hiding a hole in the felt underlay. Removing it exposed expanding foam!!

Our last house was only a couple of years old when we bought it.

Changing a single socket to a double. So plugged in a light and switched off fuses to find the right one. Eventually on switching off the shower one it went out.

Garage light was spurred off the 3rd bedroom light, garage sockets were spurred off the 3rd bedroom socket. Apparently don't need a separate consumer unit for an attached garage 🙄 Many other things too.

And plumbing. Couldn't understand why I struggled to install an extra sluice for the dishwasher - at the local supplier I walked in with the pipe. Ah says the guy, you live on <insert development>. How'd you know, says I?

'cos they installed some non-standard stuff there...

Hearth made of wall plaster.

I looked round a place once that had Lino fitted straight on top of carpet in the kitchen.

I have to plug in two extension cables, 'coming out' (not a socket or any kind of spur, just cables appearing out of the wall) of different walls in the spare room to get the light on in the loft, no idea what they were playing at, might look at it @ some point... This was part of the previous owners extension work, they also walled up a built in cupboard by nailing plaster boards to the doors & paper over it. Intrigued & looking for more wardrobe space in the main bedroom (cupboards are back to back), I had a friend remove the middle partition, to find 70's clothing still hung up inside! (they removed the nailed up doors & put in some supports)

On the electric box under the stairs where it said off they actually meant on.

Every room in the house as had some DIY disaster in it but the kitchen was the worst

Half the cupboard doors had no cupboard behind them.
The electric cooker 6mm cable was connected to 2.5mm cable in a metal backbox with no grommets. The metal box had cut through the insulation on one wire and nearly the other. The 2.5mm wires were pushed into a plug socket with the plug pushed in afterwards.
The gas pipe that wasn't required for the electric cooker was just bent over with a jubilee clip around it.
Various parts of the ring circuit were made from electric iron type flex cable.
The stop cock had been moved and resulted in what can only be described as not of pipe work that came in and out the floorboards numerous times for no reason. It was such a mess that I dare not touch it. The plumber who was fitting the boiler tried to make sense of it and couldn't so we took the floor boards up only to realise that it was nothing more than a pointless knot of pipe work that served no purpose.

We had lived with this lot hidden for 6 months. Every room was then treated as if it hid the same nightmares and most them ad their fare share of dangerous bodgers

My last house was built and owned by the builder , who then built another house up the lane and moved to there. One bedroom floor was so badly levelled, we had to put self closing hinges on the new door I put in or it wouldnt open. If I shaved the door like the previous panel doors I was replacing, to clear the floor, you had a 3 inch gap under it !
Also he only put a one way light for the stairs, so you had to climb the stairs in darkness to then switch the light on, which was then pointless as you had reached your destination. He also ran the lighting in with rubber black flex, which when I bought the house was perishing and really needed a complete and proper rewire.
That was a tradesman, abeit a dodgy one.

Bare live wire covered up with plaster 😯

Some funny stories above!

The worst I encountered was in my last house:

Several of the kitchen units appeared to have draws in them, but try as I might, I couldn't get these bloody draws to open.

I had a draw for cutlery, but I wanted another for tea towels! So I got a long screw driver and leavered them open and found there wasnt even a draw in there!

Ended up getting myself a second hand chester draws off freecycle so I was happy enough.

our current house as previously owned by a builder.

He'd made quite a few modifications. The bits he did are generally goo. Nice yorkstone patio and fireplace etc.

The problems are the bit his mates obviously helped with. Floor board nailed down through central heating pipes. It didn't leak (until we lifted the floor).

And the wiring has taken years to finally sort out.

The word is DRAWER, not DRAW, but DRAWER - got that? Good. 😉

No under bridges they fit draws - false ones apparently - not for storing tea towels

Ugh, we bought our house off a carpenter. He laid a beautiful solid oak floor directly onto the ground floor joists. It's not beautiful anymore.

Solid wall house, built 1910. Double glazing fitted in 1990's, before I owned the property. Renovating the house, one room at a time has revealed various miss-haps. Worst/ best to date has been in bathroom where I found various voids packed with sodden glass wool insulation due to poorly installed windows and sanitary ware.

Electrics have been good though, touch wood.

Found some 4-core telephone cable in the attic of our flat - not connected to the phone line, so tested it and it was live. Traced the cable, and ironically it was powering the smoke detectors 😉

Had a door frame into the garage that wasn't screwed to any framing but was held in place with about 15lbs of expanding foam.
Drain vent disappearing into the ceiling but not out through the roof.
Breakfast bar held onto the wall mainly by paint (there were four screws but the heads were almost the exact same o.d as the i.d of the brackets.
Dining room light wired to be always on.
Gas heater exhaust and bathroom extractor both fed into the attic space...
Really dodgy wiring all round...

It's our first house, and has been a hell of a learning experience!

Prob best that you touch wood, not bare metal!
Moved into my first flat I bought... Everything needed done- 2 fuseboxes were cast iron, wiring still had canvas insulation round it, took the coal bunker out the kitchen, replastering and found most of the pipes for gas lighting were still in place, led water pipes everywhere, original sash windows with rippled glass (I liked those- sorted as best as we could).. Had a single kitchen unit with a sink in it and an antique gas cooker- that was the kitchen!
The list goes on.
Took me a year of living and sleeping in one room cos the floors were up and the ceilings were down whilst I did most of the repairs myself..

Previous house...

When you turned on the kitchen extractor fan the outside security light in the garden would trigger..

This house.. Previous owner tried to fit an oven but not quite enough space.. So it is about half an inch above the counter top and has about 10degrees of tilt which means oil etc always collects in one corner of a pan.

After having the shower screen replaced, I noticed a tile was lifting next to the door. pulled it off to reveal a rotting hole in the timber.
Turns out the shower was lined with plaster instead of cement sheeting.
Luckily the insurance came to the party.
House was originally owned by the builder.

floorboards grooved out for the centralheating pipes in a veryposh house in skipton

how didI find them , with gripper nails when fitting the carpets.

Sent to strip up old flooring in a pub in keighley. 14 layers of vynil each with its own subfloor of hardboard later we came to the rotten floorboards and joists
what was a two day job turned into a four week refurb for the pub. brewery not happy and tried to blame us for not going over the top of what was down .

There were quite a few. This was funny though.
They decided to make the toilet en suite. So they knocked out a hole for the door. The hole was too big for any door! so they bought saloon style swing doors, well at least they filled the gap... sort of. As the didn't go floor ceiling height. Nice if you wanted a sit down. And the hinges were some massive hydraulic industrial jobs that wouldn't look out of place on a hanger.
The old existing door? They took the handles and architrave off and just wall papered over it.

Wiring in my house is pretty scatty, think it was a Friday afternoon job. We've got one downstairs light joined to all the upstairs lights, same with some of the plug sockets. Also found a cut down screw in one of the fuse sockets in the kitchen. Satisfying to be slowly sorting things out though, at least the next owner will have fewer surprises (hopefully none!).

This was my ring main after I dug it out of the debris under the bedroom floor. It was the only ring, supplying the whole house including the kitchen.

The previous owner had lived here donkeys years, and his son was a qualified sparky.

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The cooker feed was run upstairs via a chimney void, under the floors, then into the kitchen from the top corner and diagonally down behind the plaster to a cooker switch. The cooker switch controlled two more double sockets and another cooker switch on the other side of the kitchen. The house had a gas cooker...

Oh, and we had two wall lamps, the flex was chased into the walls, then the ends came out the bottom to 3 pin plugs.

No earth on any of the electrics.

We knew our place had a few "small jobs" needing when we moved in, but found so many horrors it was untrue.

A blind lady had lived in it for 30 plus years until a young couple moved in before us, they stayed there 6 months and ripped out the extra electrics the blind lady had for her shower and door bell/ light etc, they simply cut the wire at the wall and put a piece of electrical tape over the hole and tiled or painted over it, so we found 16 instances of a live wire sticking from wall.

The tiles in the kitchen had been stuck on with No More Nails, so when they were being removed great chunks of the wall came with them.

The kitchen units were ones that had been reclaimed from another house, they had just attacked them to the wall with shelving brackets and i pulled two of the units off the walls with just my fingers.

My personal favourite was where the bath was about 4 inches shy of reaching the wall, they had plugged the gap with newspapers and somehow managed to tile over that.

Big double garage with it's own little switch and fuse box I'd been using for years, turns out it was only connected to a rose on the downstairs lights circuit.

I have a battery powered doorbell, so why was a 1950s transformer in the cellar still live, with 1980s PVC wiring to it? No idea, but it isn't any more since it spontaneously combusted a couple of months ago when the insulation finally broke down, luckily we were in to catch it otherwise the whole house would have gone up, 999 job and teams of firefighters in full BA heading down the cellar. Very distinctive smell, burning bakelite.

Haha i had the wall lamps plastered in and 3 pin plugs on end . They didnt even survive round 1

Ding ding round 2

Surface mount boxes off - 1950s round back boxes still present no gromets - yay

Some of the back boxes he has caved in pulled wires across sharp edges , put new boxes in next tooand plastered over the lot since he was plastering it would have actually been easier to do it right and take all the crap out. Orange flex used in places as well . Wires wrapped round pipes - pipe doing nowt. Will get another load to scrappys yet

Im ripping it all out and replastering again .... Good job am getting better at it got almost every room to do now !

Previous house, carrying out sprucing up on a first floor extention decided i wanted some new sockets moved, cut into a return from a wall (plasterboard) lifted board and run cable put hand in hole felt cold metal??? Opend up hole and hey presto an acro prop boxed in either side holding a steel the props had bin welded to the bottom of the steel and the props just placed onto floorboards, big repair bil house sold!!!!! Countless taps piped up incorrectly ie hot through cold etc

floorboards grooved out for the centralheating pipes in a veryposh house in skipton

Yep, I've seen this plenty of times! 😉

Belter loving the acro props phil , some people are just wired up different

Wonder what the hire co said

Also wtf pipes connected wrong - there is simply no excuse these people should be banned from thinking

A shower switch screwed in to the bathroom ceiling, only the screws were screwed in to the wire. No wonder it kept shorting 😯

And as another one i've seen already, the Mains on switch was reversed...

I thought mine was a comedy of bodged-up-ness but it can't compete with some of the ones you lot have had. 😛

Helping a mate do some rewiring. Paranoia kicks in so we turn off the fuse box and make sure that the fuses are removed/tripped (we'd had a few beers the night before and we're feeling hangover paranoid).

Back up stairs mate starts to undo a junction box and then flies across the room. Yep definitely still live wiring and fortunately still live him.

Back to fuseboxes, all off. tracing wiring shows that the plugs for the main bedroom were running off the neighbour's ring.

Funnily enough i found out who fitted the props as i used to work for the hire company he also hired a welder and nail gun, he was a builder apparently ;/

Mate moved into his very nice new house. 6 months later one of the bedroom walls was getting very damp and mouldy.

Turned out that the shower extract fan vented direct into the attic, condensed, ran down the roof interior to said bedroom wall.

Our 1st house, owned by you guessed it, a builder! The shower was always a bit weird, massive temperature swings. when I came to replace the bathroom the water wouldn't turn off to the shower despite turning off the stopcock, I discovered that the shower was plumbed into the central heating pipes. Perfect.

My mums fella decided to 'spruce' the kitchen up a few years ago

He painted over the cupboard doors with what looked like gloss paint, tiled the walls, and although he used tile spacers between the corners of each tile he then left in-situ and grouted over them, the majority still visible.

Kitchen and porch floors were tiled, both wonky and no spacers used - probably because they were now stuck in the kitchen wall.

He's also replaced internal doors that don't close properly, or at all. The said doors were also painted gloss white with a tin of paint that must have gone off or been faulty as the paint was off white/yellow.

Luckily the old dear got a whole new kitchen fitted by professionals in the summer, although I did suggest that before it was replastered one of the single sockets should be extended to a double. He then decided that yes this was a good idea - after the kitchen had been completed so then chiseled the socket out and patched up the wallpaper.

Oh dear lord weasel lol, its allways the case dads/step dads having a bash at diy and it ends in tears, i thought wiring and plumbing were safe as what diyer would wanna rip a mains board open or open the front of a boiler n have a fettle, but reading these posts wiring seems to be favoured muck ups!!! Iv sin a few minor botches (friday afternoon wanna get paid n go pub) but some above are horrendus!!!! If i hadent have wanted extra sockets id most probably still bin in deathtrap no1 now!!!!

Big phil

Think folk genuinely dont understand wiring - think its just like an extension lead to fit a new cable.

Long as it does trip they assume its fine- can work and be a mega. Fire hazzard on old fuses and breakers. Unlike water which like a baby makes its unhappyness known by leaking that said i found fitting me heating and boiler much less complicated.

I think my fella was just cutting costs using spurs , ive whipped out about 150m of wire and put about 300 back in creating propper loops instead o spurs. - uses half the wire i guess.

Glad i was able to move the mrs out to the parents while we did this as its chaos with wires everywhere .

The plug for my washing machine is in the cupboard directly under the kitchen sink. 😆

Im on a rewire atm with the father in law hes bin a qualified spark and plumber for 30+ years i just chase and pull cable for him and make it look pretty after hes done (bin a dec for 10 years) i dont think im daft but when he starts banging on about phases and the size of the cores etc i switch off (no pun intended) just tell me where to make holes n lift boards and what cable goes to where n im happy, hes a perfectionist all cables must be flat and clipped correctly and evenly, as he keeps telling me your only as good as your last job, as in some cases above if some spark went to fit some new sockets/lights in a job wed done hed be happy that the work was correct and not slag us off, its beggars belief why some people think "oh its behind plaster or under boards whos gonna see it" its pathetic!!!

MrOvershoot off of here used to know a builder by the name of Fred West...

Rich_s - Member

MrOvershoot off of here used to know a builder by the name of Fred West...

OK so I lived in the same street as him from 1988-95 yep that was when they were digging up the bodies!

But Rich I didn't buy the House of Doom™

Back to fuseboxes, all off. tracing wiring shows that the plugs for the main bedroom were running off the neighbour's ring.

I've had a few wry smiles reading this thread, but that's absolutely brilliant. I don't know why I never thought of it myself.

Ooft shower wiring out today - was black charred along its length :s

Could have been a disaster

recently had our bathroom done

knew it was gonna be bad so plasterboard behind tiles being rotten was no surprise

the tiler thought the window was hilarious though, it wasnt actually attached to the wall just held in place by decaying silicone sealant and some pvc window trim directly onto the tiles
the wooden frame was just sitting there with a large gaps at the sides

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we are getting the kitchen done this year and i think the back door and window were done at the same time as the bathroom.....

The new down-lighters in the kitchen were flouro strip lights on the bottom of the cabinets with wiring run on top of the wall but behind the cabinets themselves.

This compared to a lot of the others seems pretty mild.. I was thinking of running a couple of the little ikea stip lights off the light circuit in the cooker extract hood not long back 😉

My sister pulled out of buying a house just before Christmas after the survey. The owner's dad built an extension and ignored the building regs, but best of all was they wanted more room so took out the chimney breasts in the lounger and master bedroom. Trouble was that is where they stopped. They left the chimney itself in place with no support 😯

....And it's a chest of drawers, OK?

Ah says the guy, you live on <insert development>. How'd you know, says I?

I went to the local hardware store to get a key cut for the back door of my mums house. Show the guy the key and he picks a new key off a hook behind the counter and hands it to me. All 400 or so back doors on the estate were keyed alike. This was 20 odd years after they'd been built and unless folk had got a key cut locally they were unaware.

I'm a sparky, i could probably write a book about some of the life threatening diy jobs i've seen. I could prob also go self employed and earn a steady trade just from the people on here!
Most recent but a minor one for me: My mate had a house built for him a couple of years ago. I visited recently and he asked me to replace the inline extract fan in the roof void for the upstairs toilet, the walls and ceiling were getting mouldy now matter how long the fan was on so he thought the fan had broken.
He gave me a new fan and i climbed into the void. Turned out the fan was fitted the wrong way round and was pumping damp cold air into the toilet from outside! The longer the fan was on, the worse he made the problem!

Our outhouse electricity was connected to the main house by way of interior grade 2.5mm twin and earth strung like a washing line running about 60 feet down the garden with no supporting steel cable. Every time something high load was run in the garage the cable sagged. When it got to neck height it had to be replaced (and routed correctly).

Artex 'removed' by wallpapering directly on top. That explained why the walls were lumpy but at least it was easy to strip!

The rest was general overkill - 9 120mm frame fixings holding 2x4 to the wall for a TV shelf!

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Shower works better too now 🙂

Whoooaaaa all those backdoors??!!

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Hora, 13 minutes ago.

That did pass my mind as I typed..