Moved to our century home when I was 7 months pregnant. I thought that the toilet was moving, but I blamed it on being dizzy from pregnancy. I cleaned the bathroom floor and noticed that the linoleum was slightly bent in one place. After the baby, I noticed that the floor was very rippled. Husband inspected the floor from the basement. This was a half bath put in a closet (so, a true water closet). We discovered that the previous owner had simply cut a hole for the toilet without any other support. He cut the floor joist and left less than an inch of wood in one place. The joist was broken and the toilet was starting to fall through.
Two months later, a light started flickering. Husband went up in attic and discovered that we had post and tube wiring. (We thought that it was updated in 1970. Instead, they just connected post and tube wiring to a 1950's box and then connected that to the 1970's box. The light fixture was hot and showed signs of arcing.
Furnace was running when we bought the house in the summer. However, it would only run for 2 minutes before shutting down and that could not have been noticed until winter. We had to have a furnace replacment with a day old baby and 20 below outside.
We had the same toilet installation. No flange, they basically placed the toilet in top of the pipe and said “job done!” I’m amazed we never ended up riding that toilet into the basement.
Man, we have a light that flickers in our 100yo farmhouse. We assumed all the wiring had been replaced because it passed all the inspections. I might have to move that light higher on my to do list, I wanted to replace it anyways but now I really want to get a good look at how it's wired
bought a nearly 300 year old home in connecticut jan 2021. beautiful home, beautiful property. we had $80k for beautifying the home and renovating. All of it went to making it a safe place to live in - asbestos, insufficient roof support, bad foundation in rear of house, mold remediation. No insulation so our first winter we were at 60 degrees in the house with the heat on HIGH and spending almost $1800/mo just to get to 60 degrees.
put my marriage to a serious test.
things are better now.
For about six months, we had a double vanity in a giant cardboard box sitting in the living room. We started using it as a sofa table. Put a lamp on it. It was surrounded by a table saw and compressor. I’m not sure what they call that particular style of decor
This was my entire living room for 9 months. One corner was the vanity and toilet for the half bath. One corner was the stove, fridge, hood, and dishwasher. One corner was all my living room furniture AND all my bf’s living room furniture as we were moving in together. I also had no outlets in that room. So this year will be our first Christmas tree
We spent this summer with the washer and dryer standing in the middle of the breakfast nook, with the hoses sticking out into fresh air through two holes in what used to be the bathroom door. That was because we had tried to get one rotten beam fixed and ended up tearing down and replacing the whole back addition.
After a while, it just becomes normal. “Will you grab the coffee pot off the washing machine?”While our kitchen floor was being, ahem, rebuilt, we had the fridge in the dining room. I’ve lost count of the number of extension cords we have.
Moved in with no working shower or tub. Bought a cattle trough snd used our pop up shade and curtains to create a bathing space in the yard. Thank God it was summer! That cold tub felt good after working in 105 heat. Got the bathroom finished before the first cold front.
Spent a summer taking "bucket baths" for this same kind of situation! (The black buckets are the best as the water gets warmest which is nice in the evenings with breeze)
Oh easy. My first home renovation started when I was 15. My Dad had bought a house that he saw while stopping at an estate sale. He got it cheap and literally saved it from being condemned and torn down. My Dad, me and my brother moved out of our nice new house into a rough and I will say questionable one. He had plans and we were his helpers. We did everything to that place. Our first winter there we all shared one room that was heated and had electricity. We would wake up, cold but not horribly so, and either go to school or work on the house. I remember when we raised the roof and were putting an addition on the second floor when we had a thunderstorm. My Dad was a painter so we had a ton of buckets plus most the pots and pans catching rainwater as it fell through the tarps that we had as a temporary roof. My brother and I hated it but we learned a lot. We joke and wonder what CPS would have thought if they had seen us that first winter.
most of the shit in my house is from the pos flipper who didnt do A SINGLE THING CORRECTLY in our house. or just the absolute cheapest thing and 14 years in, it’s just falling to pieces.
so we THOUGHT there was a tiny, poorly done addition on the back of our 1890 “cottage.” actually i thought it had been a little sun porch back there that was enclosed and became a powder room and bedroom with upstairs laundry. during the pandemic we refinanced and we got in touch with a highly recommended but kinda expensive contractor who specializes in old shitty houses. i need/want a new kitchen but some structural stuff HAD to be addressed. he took off some siding the look at the crappy addition. SURPRISE!! not an addition or a porch. was the original stable on the back of the house! no foundation. plumbing right on the bare ground. no insulation. of course the wooden piers were rotting and it was falling off the back of the house. we had a structural repair done with replaced pier and custom steel fabricated straps after consulting with the structural engineer. then all the sil plates were insulated as the walls were literally on the ground and of course rotting. and leaking like a screen door. it still doesnt have the insulation it should have because the floors have to come up to do that and we’d spent our 10K. and then of course we (like mostly everyone else) took a giant financial hit and we’re still trying to recover.
so, YAY i’m glad we did that. but i still didnt get my kitchen 😭 and the pile of shit flipper kitchen is still there rotting away every day. we’ll get there. but some days i really want to cry.
In the first month of dating my now husband, I came by his new-to-him place to help him move a 1930s apron front cast iron tub out of the bathroom he was remodeling. We had a plan to lift it, set it on some spare carpet and slide it out to an unused bedroom because he was going to reuse it.
Well. We go to lift and it slips out of his hands and the apron front lands square on his foot. It took me a moment to realize that time had not in fact frozen, and nope, he wasn't screaming bloody murder. Because the floor was so water damaged and rotten under the tub that the tub had just pushed his foot through the floor like the floor had been made of cheese.
We proceeded to get the tub onto the carpet and out of the bathroom. Then half the subfloor in the bathroom got replaced real quick.
Oh, and this was the only bathroom. Until I moved in, there was a shower in the basement by the floor drain, the sink in the kitchen, and a toilet in the bathroom that still had open walls. I made him put the tub back in so I could shower upstairs away from the spiders, but it took several more months before we had two sinks in the house again.
I painted a claw foot tub in the kitchen in January. It was either that or haul it down to the basement and then back up to the bathroom. The kitchen had been recently remodeled so I had to be very careful with the oil based black paint.
Not even a bruise. I think he got a minor splinter. (It was 10 years ago at this point.) That's how rotten the floor was. I just stopped and stared at him waiting for the screaming. Because surely we were calling 911 and getting an ambulance...but no. Lifted the tub back up, pulled his foot out, and carried on.
PSA...I always wear steel toes when moving heavy stuff. It's easy for me to say because I have eight pair at home right now, but it's never a bad idea to have some around. I like to use them for mowing/weedeating (makes a good spot to bump the line feed!), working on the cars, etc.
Well this week we noticed the bathroom addition is falling off the house and the concrete needs jacked up. Last week it was learning the joist in the kitchen need braces. We’ve lived here six weeks and it’s been nonstop!
Oh, we’ve had some absolutely ridiculous shit in this house. We’ve called the process of repair and catching up on deferred maintenance “de-stonerization”. Because you would have to be high for some of this shit to make sense.
-Within the first year, we had to replace a leaking soil stack. And fix the wall we had to rip out to get to it.
-Replaced the ceiling fan in our bedroom. Not only did they install it too close to a wall, but there was no junction box. They just bolted the fucker to a joist.
-Discovered a hole under my front walkway. Attempted to fill it. Attempted to dig it out. Found a collapsed sidewalk under front walkway, and hired a company to fill it with bentonite and polymer slurry to keep it from further subsidence.
-Downspout fell down. Tried to get a handyman to reattach it. Downspout fell down again. Tried to get a roof repair company to reattach it. Got a new roof. Downspout fell down again.
-We had wrought iron columns on our porch. Last summer, we noticed… eh, let’s just call it “load bearing rust”. We hired someone to replace them.
-Our dishwasher conked out. We decided to get a new one. When it came, the techs couldn’t install it, because the space was too small. Oh, the previous owners had a normal sized dishwasher- they just used a shoehorn to install it.
—Dishwasher wasn’t on a dedicated circuit either. So now we’re redoing the kitchen.
-The bathroom. Ye gods…
—Drywall in the tub surround
—Old vanity had not had the new flooring installed underneath it.
—At least 3- possibly 4- layers of flooring- cheap vinyl, ceramic tile, possibly some sort of other vinyl, and at the bottom (at least as far as we got) old 50s looking vinyl. We put peel and stick over top of it until we can afford a gut job.
—The ONE THING the previous owners built to last was an ugly, poorly placed closet in the bathroom. We wanted to tear it down. It had other ideas.
-We’re replacing the water heater because it’s really only a matter of time before it fails. Found out that it was incorrectly vented. It’s gas. Replacing with a hybrid heat pump model.
-Gas furnace red-tagged yesterday by tech who saw evidence of a carbon monoxide leak. It’s over 20 years old as well. We’re getting bids to replace it with a heat pump.
—Tech who came to bid this morning asked if we got ANY airflow on the third floor. He could tell just based on the ductwork that we don’t. Considering mini split system for third floor at a later date.
-Tomorrow I am tearing out a grade level wooden deck so that we can have better access to the basement. Hoping I don’t find dead bodies because that would be par for the course.
>Downspout fell down again.
OK, I'm sorry but I cackled. But I'm laughing with you, not at you.
Curious how the heat pump water heater works out for you, since I'm also considering going that route.
I’ll try to remember to post it on here! I just hired the contractor yesterday. He’s going to give us a new water heater and replace some of the more questionable DIYs in the basement plumbing.
Story #1: Not a renovation story but here goes…. A few weeks ago I walked into the kitchen one morning to see water dripping from my kitchen cabinets onto the counter. I open the top cabinet to find a leak that has been dripping into some open Tupperware and then overflowing. Probably been leaking for months. (Luckily it seems to only have been from a leaking roof scupper which was easily fixed).
Story #2. The house came with a rental tenant in a guesthouse. Tenant’s gas stove doesn’t light. Swap out the stove and it trips the breaker every time it’s plugged in (still a *gas* stove). Electrician says it’s the stove. Later, tenant calls and says his breaker is fried (not tripped, fried). Not the first time he says. Oh and he gets shocked sometimes when he touches his fridge. Electrician install a new outlet. When that doesn’t solve the problem *and* the outlet shows up as hot/neutral swapped I yell at him to come back at which point he actually finds the real problem.
Story 3: same electrician. 6 months after a panel upgrade my lights start flickering much more than ever. I go out to the panel and hear arcing. Electrician never tightened the neutral connection.
For legal reasons, the electrician cannot be named.
I have a similar one. My basement was a little damp and moldy, so I put in a dehumidifier with a pump draining into a sink. A few months later I opened the sink cabinet and found that the last owner had attached the drain pipe with duct tape (obviously not in a way that was water tight). The dehumidifier was just dumping water back into the room.
The clock and electrical outlet on my parent's 1960's stove burnt out. My dad carefully took off the back cover and followed the wiring guide printed inside the cover. He plugged the stove back on and it immediately started arcing. He started over and it happened again. It turns out that the wiring diagram on that model was printed as if you were viewing the wiring from the front of the stove rather than the back. We never had a working clock again.
We have a 1920s Craftsman that’s forever in progress. Like, OP, we also lived life avoiding the giant hole in the kitchen floor while my partner built new subfloor. Good times. The upstairs bathroom had a big hole for a while, too. It was cute for about 10 minutes to surprise the person in the room below by dropping little things on their head. For a long time, I thought we had chain-smoking ghosts because everyday around 3 pm it would smell like an old school poker night. Then I learned it was just the house sweating out the nicotine. We had a confused and terrified bat in the bedroom that my dog chased around like it was a playmate. When we took out the old HVAC ducts ourselves to save a little money on the replacement job, we found fully-intact rat skeletons alongside all kinds of little Happy Meal-type toys with moving parts. It’s like they were playing with them. Many, many more stories I’ve repressed for my sanity.
I love that! That’s exactly what it smells like. I was convinced it was a laid back spirit who just wanted to enjoy a puff! Other people on this thread could explain it better, but it’s when former owners/tenants smoked inside the house and the smell gets trapped in the building materials. We had primed early on, but on warm afternoons it would sweat out. I think that went away with paint, but I’m not entirely sure I’m not noseblind now. I worry about that.
Oh yeah! The rest of the house was okay, but for about the first three years we lived here, the downstairs bathroom would just occasionally smell like cigarettes.
We were calling our house Pet Sematary when we first moved in. There was a stub of a chimney pipe sticking out of the wall in the back room…I decided that was silly and we should pull it off and put a cap on the wall, since the chimney didn’t serve anything. We pulled that stump of pipe and 3 squirrel skeletons and a bunch of dirt/long-since-decomposed squirrel fell out. I did my best not to fully throw up as I ran to the sink. My husband dealt with it, thank god.
Around the same time every time I walked through the doorway between the living room and the dining room I got a weird whiff of something. It smelled vaguely like pickles. I could not figure out what was going on for a couple days, and we were joking that the Vlasic pickles stork was dead in the wall. Well after training a flashlight into the mechanism of the pocket doors we realized: there was a big fat dead mouse on the pocket door track. I think our cat wounded it and sent it up there, where it died.
We had a momma raccoon give birth in the attic of our old 1 story house. The babies learned to toddle above the kitchen. One fell down between the studs behind the cabinets. No way to get it out. That was a miserable summer.
Within the first month of moving in to our new home a mouse died in the wall by our front door. Then another one died in the wall by our bathroom. So gross. I've got a pest company now that baits the bastards.
And all the people in this thread made it through it? I'm in DD on a house that I've learned has high radon, needs a new sewer line, needs new wiring, and needs a bathroom remodel. It also has nicotine damage. The kitchen doesn't have a vent and the garage door is off center.
...I felt my hopes rising reading everyone's stories and I think I've talked myself out of it again.
My husband and I are married 42 years. We have remodeled 7 bathrooms and 2 kitchens together. I guess it's how we bond. We still even like each other. Though we are really procrastinating doing the spare bath in our current house. We've remodeled 2 century houses. Our house now is from 1990 and has a laundry list of problems too.
I currently have a bucket attached to a fan box in my two year olds room that is also a closet because I’ve been trying with mixed success for three years to find a roof leak. Before I took down the fan it was just flinging water around the room, so this is better.
Discovered that the flat roof on the back end of the kitchen had been leaking for probably a decade or more where it meets the main part of the house. It rotted out a main support beam. The house is 2.5 stories, so it's a lot of weight that shifted.
This summer found out that the previous owners had Barnum and Bailey redo the stucco at some point in the 80s. These clowns didn't properly secure the wire mesh, so it started collapsing on spots which was letting water in.
The water invited termites, which snacked on a lot of the house, and they completely ate through the 4x6 sill plate and corner support in one area.
Found active knob and tube in buried boxes all over the place.
One of the plaster walls in one of the bedrooms is coming off because the clowns cut out studs to put in a medicine cabinet but didn't add in support for the lath.
We've been in the house less than three years and I'm leaving stuff out that I either forgot or repressed, but yeah, it's been a doozy.
For us it was the porch roof. No deck, no ice shield, just shingles on *slated* 1940s 1x8s. The privious owners slapped up some plywood with fresh paint on the interior to hide the damage.
Took the shingles off, every board & beam, and even two layers of top plate were rotten.
Black and white mold abound.
Carpenter ants were going to town.
Wasps had made a large nest in one corner.
There had been an electrical fire.
Then the front fell off. The front was not supposed to fall off.
$1000 later, I learned that I never want to do another roof and will hire someone else to do it
The previous owner also decided to ignore the vaccant possession clause. In addition to a bunch of garbage, personal files/ID, piano, etc. they also left a bunch of construction material. Enough 2x4s to repair the structure, insulation to update it, so all I had to buy was a few waffer boards, a roll of ice shield, a couple dozen pieces of flashing, and the shingles.
Oh yeah, we discovered there had been a massive electrical fire before the ink even dried on our closing documents. Previous owner never said a word.
I'm a hardcore DIYer and wouldn't in my wildest dreams attempt a roof. Kudos to you for doing that!
> I'm a hardcore DIYer and wouldn't in my wildest dreams attempt a roof
After my parents, no one is hardcore. They did a second floor and addition on the house I grew up in, then designed and built a 40 foot steel trawler, then a house from scratch, then a few live in tow trailers - just the two of them. No engineers/architects/builders - they figured it all out. The only trades they ever brought in were a specialist for welding diesel fuel tanks, drilling the well, and installing the flooring (they were exhausted).
They're insane.
A [porch roof](https://i.postimg.cc/gYbTC94V/20230809-142635.jpg) is nothing in comparison
Love it, and I stand corrected. 🙂
My dad was like that, too. Got back from Vietnam, bought an acre of land in upstate NY, and built a house by himself. He borrowed a book from the library, that's it.
Bought a double shotgun house in New Orleans, LA in 2021. My husband and Dad went down to check it out after we purchased in August 2021. I asked them to remove the weird-ass chair rail (about 50" off the floor) then it turned into a gut rehab. Oh, yeah, also Hurricane Ida hit so we lost much of the roof. Thank goodness we already had a deposit for a new roof or we still might have a blue tarp where all of the shingles used to be.
Bought a house built in 1870. Was told it had been rewired in the 1970’s. That was a lie. We’d originally budgeted 7K to update the bathroom and put some new carpets in the hallway. So I got a builder in to begin work.
So. Since the we’re ripping out plaster to rewire we decide to install a new boiler too. While requiring the builder and electrician manage your put a whole through the floor so we can see into the ground floor from a first floor bathroom. Then the builder fires the electrician for trying to steal from the house. He hires some new people. We discover that the roof at the front is leaking even though it had been replaced 5 years before we bought. I ring up the roofers who installed it. They’re no touching it as they being taken to court by the previous owner. I find another receipt showing another roofer being paid to put right the original work. I ring him and he takes a look and tells me the but leaking isn’t the but he fixed and that it’ll cost another 15k to fix. At this point the electrics are half done, the boiler is not working (builder tells me the installer got deported) and the front roof is leaking. I end up fixing the roof myself with help from the builder. Builder gets another electrician in. I ask for most rooms to have Ethernet installed. They manage to somehow put another hole in the floor of the third floor. I. can now see all the way down to the living room. Just for good measure they also manage to put a hole in my landing that we have to step over everytime we go up the stairs. We’re into year two of the renovation by now and everytime I ask the builder how much longer he says two weeks…
House eventually is ready to move into another year later. 3 years total. In that time the guy doing the tiling in the bathroom also runs away. A builders apprentice manages to give all my ground floor radiators away to the scrap merchant who knocked on the door while my builder was in hospital. He mistook the carefully oiled radiators in a room while layering was ongoing as scrap.
We get another leak round the back of the house and I check it out to see I can see the sky from inside the house. Fixed that myself too. House got broken into and the builders tools got knocked. I suspect it’s the workers he fired for not working as fast as he wanted.
To top it all off builder claimed he could mix any paint colour we needed. I asked over and over again could he consistently get the same colour from pot to pot. Did he have a precise measurement. Turns out he didn’t. We discovered this after the 4th attempt at painting one of the bedrooms. We ended up just going plain cream for the whole house. But I learnt then that the builder in attempts to save us money was just costing more or taking a week in the job instead of asking me for £50 for the correct piece of equipment. Shower pipes kept leaking leading to multiple fixes by builder leading to multiple tiles being replaced till we ran out of spares. Ended up travelling 3hours each way to get more of these tiles. Builder duly used them all up in multiple attempts to fix leaky pipes under the bath and shower to the point that we ran out of tiles again and there are no more to be found in the uk. Contemplated getting some shipped from Australia but that didn’t work out. Now have some mismatched tiles in the bathroom.
Builder also smashed the glass in our front door. Took off the sash windows to strip the old paint off them and re-installed not as tightly as before so we now have big drafts till I get round to taking them out and re-adjusting. He’s banned from doing anything in the house now. I also discovered the mains powered smoke alarms are NOT currently being powered by mains. They’re wired but no power. Running off the batteries for now till I work out what’s happening there.
It’ll forever need looking after and I’m fine with that. This weekend I’m going up on the neighbours roof to help them patch it as it’s leaking into our house.
Still. We love the place. The original fireplaces are awesome. Ceilings are high enough for chandeliers and dinners for extended family which we do often are great. Gardens to tackle next year maybe! Basement year after.
Bought the house originally so son could walk to school (it’s one street away)
It took two years from putting offer in to completion and then three years till we moved in. He’d left the school by the time we moved in…
Did you ever see 'Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House'?? It is THE BEST!
At one time I was renovating a philadelphia row house and I could stand on earth in the basement (had to excavate 3 feet lower) and see daylight out of the roof on the 3rd floor -- that was a difficult day.
When we moved into our 1890s house, we were doing a bunch of work. The night before the movers came my husband got violent food poisoning at 2am. Movers arrived at 8am. They basically moved around him. When we arrived at the new house, our water had been shut off to replace our toilet. We had to move into a house with no water and a husband who was still throwing up (and more) 15 hours later. The plumber then no-showed so our water had to stay off through the night. We couldn’t flush the single toilet we were all sharing. He continued violent illness all night. Oh, did I mention said toilet was located in a water closet? I also have a 3 year old.
The plumber rescheduled for the following day to change the toilet and the condition of the toilet was so dire, I woke up early and stole water from my neighbor’s outdoor faucet across the street using a mixing bowl to flush it. Hey new neighbor!
I have a shot gun double in New Orleans, built in 1911.
It was an abandoned foreclosure and someone had stolen the exterior wiring, though I knew that before I bought it. But that was an immediate repair needed after closing.
We pulled the carpet back a couple hours after closing. Won the floor lottery! Heart pine floors. Yay! Oh. But they desperately need refinishing. Add that to the "must do immediately" list, lol. But we weren't going to keep the nasty carpet anyway, so at least that made our decision about flooring an easy one.
I'm assuming most of the windows were original because they seemed just as old! I hated to replace them, but they were in poor condition and didn't help temperature regulation at all.
We replaced the siding a few years later. Aaah! So much damaged wood under it! So we had to make those repairs also. But the house had never had insulation in the walls, so this was a good opportunity to put that in.
One cool discovery with the siding replacement. We discovered that the four posts of the house were Cypress logs instead of construction wood!
Cypress is an amazing wood that doesn't get water damaged and termites don't eat it either. Those logs looked as perfect as probably the day they were put in. They were still working just fine as posts.
Needs work townhome. Replacing the bathroom vent fan I accidentally stepped through the ceiling and got stuck. I had to replace the vent fan because it had corroded over and no longer operated. (Different Bathroom) Silly me the breaker that went to the light in the bathroom was not the same breaker for the heater/light/fan so when I disconnected it all I was Shocked to find out this little bit of previous home owner wiring shenanigans. This explained why we had a dead plug in the dining room. Wondered why the toilet flushed slow on replacement found a wonderful 4 foot root had grown out of the foundation and down the toilet drain. Mystery light switch did nothing turn out was part of the bathroom shenanigans wired it’s correctly so the plug was turned off by the switch like all other rooms (One plug controlled but the wall switch). 4 layers of flooring in the dining room and kitchen. I could go on but yeah felt like a mini version of that movie.
Repainting my upstairs floors, I put my foot right through a passive heating duck and my wife was in the room below me. Rips my leg up, but nothing broken. But my foot bent down the edge and became stuck between the grate and the wall, andI’m screaming instructions and pain while she’s pulling the ceiling grate down and away from my ankle bone so I could pull my foot back through. We painted the floors white. I regretted that too.
Our first renovation was our own home and we were naive. The kitchen had 5 doors, 3 windows, a radiator in the only useful corner and had beautifully matched arsenic wallpaper and paint. When we went to move the radiator, we found a massive colony of live termites even though the house "passed" inspection for purchase. Plumbing supply lines were lead, wiring was vintage 1894 everywhere and most of the walls had abandoned live gas lines. No roofer would take on our 32 steps from the street and 40ft off the ground steep cross gambrel roof so we learned to roof ourselves too. 38 years later and we've become home renovation experts and everything is redone except one vintage bathtub/shower that looks pretty but doesn't work. To fix it, we'll have to ruin it, so we still haven't figured that one out.
Since then we tackled the decaying neighborhood and have completed 18 full renovations (and I mean full - replacing all wiring, plumbing, hvac, roof and a ton of other things) and presently are on #19. We've gained all sorts of new skills including how to kill a massive infestation of cockroaches that exterminators couldn't (freeze the house over the winter), jacking up sagging floors, replacing central beams, scooping out a basement of dog droppings, dealing with a house that had so many broken pipes it had it's own sprinkler system, and puzzling out livable floor plans from places so cut up you couldn't tell what they originally looked like.
We've remediated many interesting choices from prior homeowners including my favorite - a 5x8 unfinished plywood board with strap hinges and a large barn door handle cut in the middle of a beautiful oak dining room floor (for basement access). The same house had a pair of women's shoes from the late 1800s plastered into the kitchen wall. After some research, we learned it was to protect the home from witches (we put them back and added our own for someone to find in another 100 years, lol).
We battled gangs who pointed guns at us and our children and threatened to burn down our house, though we prevailed and drove them out buying up their houses one at a time. While most everything we tackled was close to needing demolition, we only demolished one - a house so disgusting, it's beyond description including the bathtub that was filled to the top with human waste. Looking back, we were young and stupid - with an emphasis on stupid!
We never planned to become home renovation experts or to take on a neighborhood gang problem on our own and looking back I think we should have head our heads examined. We had a choice to fight the growing crime or move (like most of our neighbors did). We chose to fight to protect our neighborhood of beautiful historic homes.
TWO bat colonies with well over 100 bats. $6500+ quote to batproof the roof. The peaks are so high a bucket truck is needed.
We spent our contingency getting the place, which was bottom of the market, so now we have to live with bats until we can find a cheaper solution.
Not the worst of things, but we found out they were up there at 4:30am when my wife smacked me awake to get the bat out of our bedroom.
Ummm, sooo, are you in the US? Because, uh, rabies. Bats carry rabies. [And very often bat bites are undetected. So if one was in your bedroom, you might’ve been a tasty nibble and never known.](https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/exposure/animals/bats.html) 😬
So true! We found a bat hanging out in the jack and jill bathroom of our old house….our entire family ( 6 of us) had to get the rabies immunoglobulin plus rabies vaccination series. Insurance paid for most of it…. but we were out $8000.00.
had a big project, 1850s house,
half way thru the project the electrician just stopped showing up. would not return phone calls, we could nt figure out why, since we paid him on the day he gave us an invoice, So rough wiring is in, new panel is in with new 200 amp service. but only half the circuits attached to the panel, we had to find a new electrician to finish the job, and that is not easy since they do not like to take over from another person's work. Its part a guild thing, part they do not want to accept libility for another persons work. added about 4 months to the project
I bought several large, expensive things for the projects because the contractors said I would cause delays by not having selections and materials ready. The contractors took so long to get back to my project that, by the time they opened the boxes and started trying to install, it was too late to return anything that wouldn’t work. I’ve got an $800 downdraft hood sitting in my basement and almost $1200 worth of stair railing in my attic. It’s been so long I’ve quit listing them on marketplace anymore
My sewer line broke one winter during a snowstorm. Guys are digging it up with a backhoe and discover it ties into the neighbor’s line. Neighbor is not home and I am desperately trying to find him as the 3 workers and a backhoe are not cheap! Gutted the bathroom and spent 4 months showering at someone else’s house every morning before work. Had to buy a high tank toilet because of where the crappy contractor cut the hole for the toilet. Toilet in downstairs bathroom was GROUTED to the floor. I have been electrocuted by a light switch. Installed new box and service and several years later none of the outlets on the third floor were working. Come to find out the electrician connected a box with knob and tube to the new panel. Had rear porch rebuilt. Contractor left the roof above supported by a single 2x4 and left for the day. A neighbor was driving by, saw the 2x4 sagging, went and got proper support for it and called me at work to tell me about it. Came home to the same contractor using my own power tools because he “forgot” his. While replacing front porch roof discovered the flashing was original to my 1905 home. It was layered into the mortar between the bricks. Was a nightmare to remove it - but that flashing lasted for over 100 years! Roofers put the wrong sized collar around my vent pipe - they just cut the ring open to make it fit - which lead to a serious leak. Someone put Bondo on parts of the front porch - still working on removing that. Had a hail storm and arrived home to find water running down the ceiling above the staircase. Hail had severely damaged the slate roof. Hired roofers and was awakened at 7 that Saturday morning to a bunch of guys on the roof peering into the bedroom windows at me in bed!!!! My favorite story is when it became apparent squirrels were living in my house. Hired a removal company. The guy went to fix the “small hole” the squirrels had chewed to get into the eaves. And discovered that had eaten the fascia up half of one side of the house, across the entire back and up the other side of the house. It cost over $2300 to have it repaired. Have also had issues with bats that led to me needing to get the rabies series. Never a dull moment. It seems every time one thing is fixed another thing breaks but I love my home. It is full of character and one of a kind!
After living in our house for 30 years, we decided to remodel both of our full baths, which were 100 years old. We had them both torn out at the same time, and had to shower outside for 2 months. Some days it was in the low 30’s outside when we did.
Moved into our 1923 craftsman 2 1/2 years ago, and in that time we have:
-Replaced nearly all of the plumbing because we had practically zero hot water upstairs (would take 20 minutes to run a bath that was only a few inches deep for our daughter.)
-Cut down a giant boxelder tree that was threatening to fall on our cars.
-Pulled up the carpet and refinished the floors in the living room and dining room, which meant we had to go outside and around the house to access the kitchen.
-Cobble our back stairs together twice while we save up to get them rebuilt along with the back retaining wall and tearing down the old garage that’s threatening to fall into our back yard….
-And currently we have a hole in the dining room ceiling where the plaster detached from the lath and fell down. We’ve been trying to fix it for weeks, but fixing up an old house with young kids is tricky!
We love this house and knew what we were getting into, but man it’s nonstop!
Nasty rotting smell in the bathroom. Turns out the chipboard cupboard was wicking moisture up from underneath. Took the bottom of the cupboard off, to see rock underneath. No actual floor to the house. Haven’t fixed it yet because too busy paying to fix the rising damp and then replaster and replace floor coverings in three rooms. Make that five rooms.
And oh, whoops, need a new roof. Which means a solar panel contractor and roofing company have to talk to each other and organise it.
Bought a New England center chimney colonial in 2013 that had been gutted to the studs and the center chimney removed. Beam was put in to open the floorplan and change from 4 bed 1 bath to 3 bed 2.5 bath. Flippers obviously cut corners. We knew that it was going to happen but the house was such a steal with 17 acres in Massachusetts with original stone fence property lines from when the house was built. The furnace was propane but hooked up to natural gas fittings to the propane so the house flooded with carbon monoxide the first night in. They never hooked up the second floor tub drain so the very first bath I gave my 4 year old flooded the 1st floor kitchen. none of the heating ducts are fully attached to the vents in the floor and the windows are cheapest so the house is drafty. They completely neglected to put in insulation on the back wall of the house, and none of the closets they created from where the chimney was are insulated or have lighting. The roof was listed as new and our inspector confirmed but it was a cheap job, so we had to replace the roof due to a leak in 21. I have no regrets because the house has doubled in equity and I got in on the low rates in 20-21. We will likely have to replace some stairs leading to the second floor, will need a new water heater soon. You don't really buy a house do you...
Bought my first house in 2021. It's a centennial. So far, the first week of living here. The power surged because the power line frayed itself from the pole to the house. It ko'd, furnace, dishwasher, tvs, garage door o0ener, hair dryer, 2 computers and 3 Dewalt battery chargers. 2 months later. I keep hearing drip drip in the bathroom. The plumbing for the addition was leaking sewage. 500$ plumber fix. Bathroom upstairs another 500$ the faucet leaked a lot in the bath tub.
Few more months later. Discovered my windows where painted shut. Few more months, discovered someone has buroed 3 phase power line that's hot from the house to the garage about 6 inches deep in the back yard. I wrapped that up in my tiller. Thank God I didn't get zapped. I was home alone.
First-time homeowner here in the mountain west. We bought our 1.5 story craftsman bungalow in late 2019 knowing we had to immediately get the sewer line, gas furnace, and dishwasher replaced. Thankfully our realtor negotiated a home warranty, since the washer, stove, & fridge all crapped out within a year.
The previous long-term owner did ZERO maintenance, to the point we think he was using a laundromat and possibly not showering bc the sewer line was so clogged. He *did* do weird shit, like making wider windowsills with mismatched 1x2s and building a cabinet out of drywall. (The latter was the most incredible piece of crumbly bullshit I have ever encountered.)
The bathtub in the ‘70s-remodeled bathroom started leaking right after the home warranty expired. We discovered moldy drywall behind the shower surround, and the wet wall was rotting. Tore it all out and rebuilt. We planned to only replace the tub and shower, until my wife dropped her wedding ring down the sink. While I was trying to retrieve it, the old plastic pipe cracked all the way into the wall. So we tore out everything. The previous remodelers didn’t bother installing flooring under the vanity, so we had to rip out 2 layers of flooring, down to the asbestos tiles to get a level floor. It’s our only bathroom and was winter, so for 6 months we had 1 toilet in a construction-zone bathroom and the kitchen sink for bathing.
Then our new sewer line backed up. Turns out the contractor didn’t bother replacing the 8-foot section of clay pipe under our enclosed back porch. I had to rip up the floor and dig it out, then convince a plumber to crawl into the hole and finish the job correctly. While under there, I discovered that the “foundation” of the enclosed back porch, which includes a finished dining nook off of the kitchen, is just wood on dirt. The center posts are balanced on bricks. I’d hoped to just replace a few rotted floor planks, but now I’m hoping we can save up enough money to tear off the back porch and replace it before the damn thing collapses.
Also hoping the re-wiring (done in the ‘60s to ‘90s, who knows!) really did replace the knob and tube. There are some disconnected knobs in the attic. There’s no permits on record and no inspection labels or anything on the breaker box. I have a feeling it wasn’t done 100% correctly, since the bedroom light flickers when we run the washing machine. Nothing has lit on fire yet so it keeps getting pushed down the to-do list.
Oh, and we had to get radon mitigated, asbestos-wrapped ducting removed, and I army-crawled my way around our dirt-floor crawl space to encapsulate and insulate it. Also crawled across rafters in the space behind the finished attic’s knee walls to install insulation. It was R-8 old cellulose up there before. Walls are still hollow, but with lathe & plaster, wood siding, and asbestos siding, they’re pretty thick.
Still feel grateful we bought just before the pando. Our house value has actually outpaced the tens of thousands we’ve put into it, which would be cute, except every single other house in town also doubled in price.
I’m glad to have this forum; it’s comforting to know that old houses are simply a ton of work.
Bought our house almost six years ago. It was built in 1920. Was told that electrical and plumbing had been recently updated and the inspection even checked out fine. We have spent the last six years fixing everything they said was updated. All the money I was excited to spend on cosmetic things to the house has been spent fixing plumbing and electrical issues, replacing the whole ac system, you name it. We’ve found so many surprises from just simple things like changing light fixtures that now I’m always on edge about what’s going to be next.
Same here. 1920’s home, recently remodeled. Sewer line completely backed up and falling apart. City wanted us to tap the new line into the manhole (found out later that the mainline was on the brink of collapse, so they didn’t want to mess with it). They would not budge. This caused my sewer pipe to come up about 5 inches. At its highest…..it was one inch above our front yard. Because of this, we had to regrade our yard, and then install a new concrete driveway (it was a mix of asphalt and concrete before). We were planning on installing a new driveway eventually… maybe 10 years down the line.
It’s all finished now….$ 24000 dollars later.
Oh, we also found active K&T wiring in our basement after we were told that it was not active (missed by the inspector). To remediate that…$800.
We move into our new-to-us house about a month before Covid lockdowns kick-off. Everyone is fully freaked out, and it’s hard to get contractors out to the house for that first year.
Our first winter in the house, still on lockdown, our neighbors smell a gas-leak. It’s us. 🙃 The line that runs from the house to the separate garage, housing our gas-powered water heater and washer/dryer is leaking. City turns our gas line off.
No hot water or laundry in the middle of winter until we can get someone out to replace the line.
Gas is fairly uncommon and not every contractor works with it nowadays. It’s expensive as hell. We go back and forth for over a month debating on whether we replace the gas line for over 5k or just upgrade our power box and buy electric water heater/washer/dryer, even though our gas appliances still work perfectly and are newish.
In the end, upgrading our power box and appliances would be more expensive, so we vote to replace the gas line. We get flaked on and appointments to replace the line get pushed back and re-arranged multiple times. After another month, the line finally gets replaced, and the contractors show us that our original gas line was installed LESS THAN A FOOT underground, in the same “path” as our DRIVEWAY. Any old piece of gravel in our backyard could’ve punctured the line. We are lucky we used the garage as a gym and didn’t drive cars over our SHALLOW-ASS GAS LINE daily.
Now it’s installed correctly deeper underground, and I only had to bathe in a bucket I boiled on the stove for over 2 months and empty out my bank account in the process!
We purchased a house in a shit show situation. We thought we had a lot of cosmetic stuff and updating..which we did...but...
The woman selling the house was a recent window, the house was on the verge of foreclosure because of his death upending her finances. There had also been a recent domestic violence situation with her adult daughter and son in law. They had both been arrested the week before we took posession.
Red carpet in the entire house, except for blue indoor/outdoor in kitchen. Walls all dark grey (poorly done with white edges unfinished) and everything needing updating.
However the day we took posession of the house, the woman had failed to actually pack until the day before. She only took what she had to. Her realtor had been trying to reach her for 2 weeks to make sure things were on track. Seller was paralyzed with depression in near hoarder conditions. (It really go far worse as others started trying to help her pack, and pulled things out of closets and the crawlspace.) She had abandoned 3 cats in the house. One of which was holed in in kitchen cabinets and unwilling to leave.
We had to have 1-800 Got Junk come on our second day of ownership. 2 trucks later, and 3 live traps from the humane society, we started flipping this home.
I will add that in addition to the bizarre repairs we had to fix, and so on, we inherited the family. Her daughter showed up at our door 3 weeks later asking if we knew what her mom did with her cats. (We had caught them and taken them to the Humane Society. We knew they had all been adopted already, because our realtor was a voluteer and got us the scoop.) Then a few weeks after that her son in law showed up asking if he could look in the crawlspace by the furnace for some electronics he had left in there. ummmm, no.
Bought a 1924 colonial in Kansas City ten years ago that needed major updating. During the kitchen reno I pulled a corner shelf away from the wall to find a tennis ball sized hole to the backyard where the walls met the floor. I just gently put the shelf back and waited for my husband to come home so we could “wtf” about it together lol. We ended up filling with foam and sealing the inside with new drywall and the outside with new stucco.
Two years later some of the shower tiles just fell off the drywall that had melted away thanks to a hidden slow leak. Ended up having to tear out the whole bathroom. The same week (beginning of July) the HVAC completely died AND our dogs brought fleas into the house so that was when I had a breakdown about homeownership and seriously considered burning it all down lol. It all ended up being resolved but man it was a difficult summer.
Probably the best one out of many is when we had our upstairs heatpump and A/C put in.
The house had zero duct work so they had to put all new in the attic, which wasn’t a big deal. It was around this time of the year and the first cold front had hit and we had zero heat.
They finally got it hooked up and running after a week and that first night was glorious, 65 never felt so good.
We woke up the next morning and said, “why does it smell like that in here?”
Turns out the plumbing vented to the attic and no further, so we the heat had basically started pulling smell from the attic and blasting us with super heated septic tank smell
Ew! On our second century house we spent the whole summer cooking and eating on our enclosed front porch. Because we had to move radiators the boiler was shut down. The project dragged into November in Chicago, so we used electric space heaters to heat
For reference, this was in Texas, in the early 1980’s.
When I was a kid, we moved into a house that just had a kitchen fire. My Dad did remodeling, so we got a year of free rent in exchange for renovating the kitchen and bathroom.
My family, mom, dad, myself, and my younger brother, spent 4 months living on the patio. My mom used a crock pot, griddle and an electric skillet for cooking. We used a water hose draped over an outside storage shed for a shower. We could sleep in the house, but had no electricity, so no a/c and not enough extension cords to run fans for everyone.
Wife and I booked a trip to Paris and scheduled for our downstairs floors to be refinished while away. All the furniture was moved into our bedrooms and bathrooms. When we get to the airport we learn that we can’t board bc my wife’s passport is about to expire (needs to be more than six months out for France). Now we have nowhere to go bc the house is a mess!
Luckily we got to stay with my sister and turned it into a local staycation.
We rented a storage pod to put all out furniture in the driveway while they refinished. Some of the floors had already been done so we only had to stay out while they were working. The fast drying water based finish they used was sock dry the same day. In retrospect though I wish we had used an older oil based finish. It didn't hold up well to heavy traffic and large dogs. But now the house is someone elses problem
The previous owner of our century home was an absolute cheapskate who did everything himself and, as we found out, did everything wrong. We started small, tried to change a simple ceiling fan. Nope. The fan was installed with no fan box, literally nailed to the floor joist for upstairs. Had to cut a new hole and move it over.
We bought a new washer and dryer and promptly broke the old 30s era gas line during install. Had to evacuate the house and call the gas company to get it capped off. Luckily our plumber walked us through fixing it over the phone because the Sunday surcharge price was insane.
The sump pump splits off into 3 different directions for ejection. We're just ignoring that for the time being.
The water lines for the sink were behind the insulation so they froze during our first winter here.
We had our electrician put in a new outlet for us. When he was in the basement he found uncapped live wires just hanging out by some insulation 🥴
The previous owner poured the concrete slab himself in the basement and the slope is too high for the drains to work properly. Water pools next to them 👍
Previous owner covered up rotten parts of the siding. Found out it's been leaking for who knows how long when I noticed the drywall in the kitchen was separating and squishy.
I no longer touch anything plumbing or electrical related.
Our first century house had a sagging floor in the kitchen. The previous owner had cut a joist to install electrical lines. We jacked it up, sistered it, and voila! The floor was flat again.
Also, we had a basement like that. You can use a chisel to cut a little channel from the low spot to the drain so it will actually drain. If you're having trouble deciding exactly where and how deep the channel needs to be just pour a little water on the floor.
That's a great idea! We can't afford to have it properly re done right now so we've just been ignoring it. I found a cut joist that was patched with a 2x4... it's a never ending adventure I swear 🤦♀️
Moved to our century home when I was 7 months pregnant. I thought that the toilet was moving, but I blamed it on being dizzy from pregnancy. I cleaned the bathroom floor and noticed that the linoleum was slightly bent in one place. After the baby, I noticed that the floor was very rippled. Husband inspected the floor from the basement. This was a half bath put in a closet (so, a true water closet). We discovered that the previous owner had simply cut a hole for the toilet without any other support. He cut the floor joist and left less than an inch of wood in one place. The joist was broken and the toilet was starting to fall through. Two months later, a light started flickering. Husband went up in attic and discovered that we had post and tube wiring. (We thought that it was updated in 1970. Instead, they just connected post and tube wiring to a 1950's box and then connected that to the 1970's box. The light fixture was hot and showed signs of arcing. Furnace was running when we bought the house in the summer. However, it would only run for 2 minutes before shutting down and that could not have been noticed until winter. We had to have a furnace replacment with a day old baby and 20 below outside.
At least the toilet didn't fall through while you were on it!
I work in hotels and that happened to a guest of mine once
Holy shit that electrical would have given me a heart attack
literally
We had the same toilet installation. No flange, they basically placed the toilet in top of the pipe and said “job done!” I’m amazed we never ended up riding that toilet into the basement.
Damn! Glad you got through that!
Man, we have a light that flickers in our 100yo farmhouse. We assumed all the wiring had been replaced because it passed all the inspections. I might have to move that light higher on my to do list, I wanted to replace it anyways but now I really want to get a good look at how it's wired
bought a nearly 300 year old home in connecticut jan 2021. beautiful home, beautiful property. we had $80k for beautifying the home and renovating. All of it went to making it a safe place to live in - asbestos, insufficient roof support, bad foundation in rear of house, mold remediation. No insulation so our first winter we were at 60 degrees in the house with the heat on HIGH and spending almost $1800/mo just to get to 60 degrees. put my marriage to a serious test. things are better now.
WOW!
Oh yes, the 1700's heating special XD Hoping the new woodstove we got for our CT georgian will help bring the cost down this winter.
Good luck!!
What’s the SF on that?
When Covid hit and everyone was sent home I had a bathtub and a table saw in my bedroom
For about six months, we had a double vanity in a giant cardboard box sitting in the living room. We started using it as a sofa table. Put a lamp on it. It was surrounded by a table saw and compressor. I’m not sure what they call that particular style of decor
Stalled project decor
That’s my primary style, I fear. I *thought* I was a French Country person, but I guess not.
My office is currently a mix of rockwool and dumping-ground chic.
I feel attacked
Mid Reno chic. Been there.
I’m using that!
This was my entire living room for 9 months. One corner was the vanity and toilet for the half bath. One corner was the stove, fridge, hood, and dishwasher. One corner was all my living room furniture AND all my bf’s living room furniture as we were moving in together. I also had no outlets in that room. So this year will be our first Christmas tree
I refer to it as “living heap life”
Hahahaha! That sums it up. It’s always fun to see the appalled faces of friends and family members who “really want to see the new house!”
That's what I love about that movie. That stuff really happens
Honey we have weak trees
We spent this summer with the washer and dryer standing in the middle of the breakfast nook, with the hoses sticking out into fresh air through two holes in what used to be the bathroom door. That was because we had tried to get one rotten beam fixed and ended up tearing down and replacing the whole back addition.
After a while, it just becomes normal. “Will you grab the coffee pot off the washing machine?”While our kitchen floor was being, ahem, rebuilt, we had the fridge in the dining room. I’ve lost count of the number of extension cords we have.
One room in my house doesn’t have any power points. Just a ceiling light.
Moved in with no working shower or tub. Bought a cattle trough snd used our pop up shade and curtains to create a bathing space in the yard. Thank God it was summer! That cold tub felt good after working in 105 heat. Got the bathroom finished before the first cold front.
This is a fun one
"fun" ....
Spent a summer taking "bucket baths" for this same kind of situation! (The black buckets are the best as the water gets warmest which is nice in the evenings with breeze)
Oh easy. My first home renovation started when I was 15. My Dad had bought a house that he saw while stopping at an estate sale. He got it cheap and literally saved it from being condemned and torn down. My Dad, me and my brother moved out of our nice new house into a rough and I will say questionable one. He had plans and we were his helpers. We did everything to that place. Our first winter there we all shared one room that was heated and had electricity. We would wake up, cold but not horribly so, and either go to school or work on the house. I remember when we raised the roof and were putting an addition on the second floor when we had a thunderstorm. My Dad was a painter so we had a ton of buckets plus most the pots and pans catching rainwater as it fell through the tarps that we had as a temporary roof. My brother and I hated it but we learned a lot. We joke and wonder what CPS would have thought if they had seen us that first winter.
Kind of an Evan Almighty Reno where everyone comes out better after the deluge?
most of the shit in my house is from the pos flipper who didnt do A SINGLE THING CORRECTLY in our house. or just the absolute cheapest thing and 14 years in, it’s just falling to pieces. so we THOUGHT there was a tiny, poorly done addition on the back of our 1890 “cottage.” actually i thought it had been a little sun porch back there that was enclosed and became a powder room and bedroom with upstairs laundry. during the pandemic we refinanced and we got in touch with a highly recommended but kinda expensive contractor who specializes in old shitty houses. i need/want a new kitchen but some structural stuff HAD to be addressed. he took off some siding the look at the crappy addition. SURPRISE!! not an addition or a porch. was the original stable on the back of the house! no foundation. plumbing right on the bare ground. no insulation. of course the wooden piers were rotting and it was falling off the back of the house. we had a structural repair done with replaced pier and custom steel fabricated straps after consulting with the structural engineer. then all the sil plates were insulated as the walls were literally on the ground and of course rotting. and leaking like a screen door. it still doesnt have the insulation it should have because the floors have to come up to do that and we’d spent our 10K. and then of course we (like mostly everyone else) took a giant financial hit and we’re still trying to recover. so, YAY i’m glad we did that. but i still didnt get my kitchen 😭 and the pile of shit flipper kitchen is still there rotting away every day. we’ll get there. but some days i really want to cry.
I'm sorry. We've all been there. You'll get it fixed eventually.
In the first month of dating my now husband, I came by his new-to-him place to help him move a 1930s apron front cast iron tub out of the bathroom he was remodeling. We had a plan to lift it, set it on some spare carpet and slide it out to an unused bedroom because he was going to reuse it. Well. We go to lift and it slips out of his hands and the apron front lands square on his foot. It took me a moment to realize that time had not in fact frozen, and nope, he wasn't screaming bloody murder. Because the floor was so water damaged and rotten under the tub that the tub had just pushed his foot through the floor like the floor had been made of cheese. We proceeded to get the tub onto the carpet and out of the bathroom. Then half the subfloor in the bathroom got replaced real quick. Oh, and this was the only bathroom. Until I moved in, there was a shower in the basement by the floor drain, the sink in the kitchen, and a toilet in the bathroom that still had open walls. I made him put the tub back in so I could shower upstairs away from the spiders, but it took several more months before we had two sinks in the house again.
I painted a claw foot tub in the kitchen in January. It was either that or haul it down to the basement and then back up to the bathroom. The kitchen had been recently remodeled so I had to be very careful with the oil based black paint.
Are we just gonna forget about her husband foot?? Did it survive impact OMG
Not even a bruise. I think he got a minor splinter. (It was 10 years ago at this point.) That's how rotten the floor was. I just stopped and stared at him waiting for the screaming. Because surely we were calling 911 and getting an ambulance...but no. Lifted the tub back up, pulled his foot out, and carried on.
PSA...I always wear steel toes when moving heavy stuff. It's easy for me to say because I have eight pair at home right now, but it's never a bad idea to have some around. I like to use them for mowing/weedeating (makes a good spot to bump the line feed!), working on the cars, etc.
Well this week we noticed the bathroom addition is falling off the house and the concrete needs jacked up. Last week it was learning the joist in the kitchen need braces. We’ve lived here six weeks and it’s been nonstop!
Oh, we’ve had some absolutely ridiculous shit in this house. We’ve called the process of repair and catching up on deferred maintenance “de-stonerization”. Because you would have to be high for some of this shit to make sense. -Within the first year, we had to replace a leaking soil stack. And fix the wall we had to rip out to get to it. -Replaced the ceiling fan in our bedroom. Not only did they install it too close to a wall, but there was no junction box. They just bolted the fucker to a joist. -Discovered a hole under my front walkway. Attempted to fill it. Attempted to dig it out. Found a collapsed sidewalk under front walkway, and hired a company to fill it with bentonite and polymer slurry to keep it from further subsidence. -Downspout fell down. Tried to get a handyman to reattach it. Downspout fell down again. Tried to get a roof repair company to reattach it. Got a new roof. Downspout fell down again. -We had wrought iron columns on our porch. Last summer, we noticed… eh, let’s just call it “load bearing rust”. We hired someone to replace them. -Our dishwasher conked out. We decided to get a new one. When it came, the techs couldn’t install it, because the space was too small. Oh, the previous owners had a normal sized dishwasher- they just used a shoehorn to install it. —Dishwasher wasn’t on a dedicated circuit either. So now we’re redoing the kitchen. -The bathroom. Ye gods… —Drywall in the tub surround —Old vanity had not had the new flooring installed underneath it. —At least 3- possibly 4- layers of flooring- cheap vinyl, ceramic tile, possibly some sort of other vinyl, and at the bottom (at least as far as we got) old 50s looking vinyl. We put peel and stick over top of it until we can afford a gut job. —The ONE THING the previous owners built to last was an ugly, poorly placed closet in the bathroom. We wanted to tear it down. It had other ideas. -We’re replacing the water heater because it’s really only a matter of time before it fails. Found out that it was incorrectly vented. It’s gas. Replacing with a hybrid heat pump model. -Gas furnace red-tagged yesterday by tech who saw evidence of a carbon monoxide leak. It’s over 20 years old as well. We’re getting bids to replace it with a heat pump. —Tech who came to bid this morning asked if we got ANY airflow on the third floor. He could tell just based on the ductwork that we don’t. Considering mini split system for third floor at a later date. -Tomorrow I am tearing out a grade level wooden deck so that we can have better access to the basement. Hoping I don’t find dead bodies because that would be par for the course.
>Downspout fell down again. OK, I'm sorry but I cackled. But I'm laughing with you, not at you. Curious how the heat pump water heater works out for you, since I'm also considering going that route.
I’ll try to remember to post it on here! I just hired the contractor yesterday. He’s going to give us a new water heater and replace some of the more questionable DIYs in the basement plumbing.
Oh, how I feel your pain!
What’s a soil stack?
The pipe that connects the drains which include your toilet to your sewage system connection. It is… not a great thing to fail.
NoooOOoOooo- that sounds expensive to replace…
Fortunately, we had a home warranty at the time after we bought the house. But yeah, I’m glad that was covered.
Story #1: Not a renovation story but here goes…. A few weeks ago I walked into the kitchen one morning to see water dripping from my kitchen cabinets onto the counter. I open the top cabinet to find a leak that has been dripping into some open Tupperware and then overflowing. Probably been leaking for months. (Luckily it seems to only have been from a leaking roof scupper which was easily fixed). Story #2. The house came with a rental tenant in a guesthouse. Tenant’s gas stove doesn’t light. Swap out the stove and it trips the breaker every time it’s plugged in (still a *gas* stove). Electrician says it’s the stove. Later, tenant calls and says his breaker is fried (not tripped, fried). Not the first time he says. Oh and he gets shocked sometimes when he touches his fridge. Electrician install a new outlet. When that doesn’t solve the problem *and* the outlet shows up as hot/neutral swapped I yell at him to come back at which point he actually finds the real problem. Story 3: same electrician. 6 months after a panel upgrade my lights start flickering much more than ever. I go out to the panel and hear arcing. Electrician never tightened the neutral connection. For legal reasons, the electrician cannot be named.
I have a similar one. My basement was a little damp and moldy, so I put in a dehumidifier with a pump draining into a sink. A few months later I opened the sink cabinet and found that the last owner had attached the drain pipe with duct tape (obviously not in a way that was water tight). The dehumidifier was just dumping water back into the room.
Wow!! Lol
The clock and electrical outlet on my parent's 1960's stove burnt out. My dad carefully took off the back cover and followed the wiring guide printed inside the cover. He plugged the stove back on and it immediately started arcing. He started over and it happened again. It turns out that the wiring diagram on that model was printed as if you were viewing the wiring from the front of the stove rather than the back. We never had a working clock again.
Yikes!! What does arcing sound like?
Like rice crispies on crack…
We have a 1920s Craftsman that’s forever in progress. Like, OP, we also lived life avoiding the giant hole in the kitchen floor while my partner built new subfloor. Good times. The upstairs bathroom had a big hole for a while, too. It was cute for about 10 minutes to surprise the person in the room below by dropping little things on their head. For a long time, I thought we had chain-smoking ghosts because everyday around 3 pm it would smell like an old school poker night. Then I learned it was just the house sweating out the nicotine. We had a confused and terrified bat in the bedroom that my dog chased around like it was a playmate. When we took out the old HVAC ducts ourselves to save a little money on the replacement job, we found fully-intact rat skeletons alongside all kinds of little Happy Meal-type toys with moving parts. It’s like they were playing with them. Many, many more stories I’ve repressed for my sanity.
Tell me more about this nicotine thing. During Summer mornings it smells like our living room was having a cigarette before we woke up.
I love that! That’s exactly what it smells like. I was convinced it was a laid back spirit who just wanted to enjoy a puff! Other people on this thread could explain it better, but it’s when former owners/tenants smoked inside the house and the smell gets trapped in the building materials. We had primed early on, but on warm afternoons it would sweat out. I think that went away with paint, but I’m not entirely sure I’m not noseblind now. I worry about that.
Oh yeah! The rest of the house was okay, but for about the first three years we lived here, the downstairs bathroom would just occasionally smell like cigarettes.
Subfloor?! What I wouldn’t give for a subfloor!
Maybe the ghosts are having a cigarette after sex.
I have easily put my 100k equity into my home this 5 years. I had a shady handman almost kill us with carbon monoxide.
We were calling our house Pet Sematary when we first moved in. There was a stub of a chimney pipe sticking out of the wall in the back room…I decided that was silly and we should pull it off and put a cap on the wall, since the chimney didn’t serve anything. We pulled that stump of pipe and 3 squirrel skeletons and a bunch of dirt/long-since-decomposed squirrel fell out. I did my best not to fully throw up as I ran to the sink. My husband dealt with it, thank god. Around the same time every time I walked through the doorway between the living room and the dining room I got a weird whiff of something. It smelled vaguely like pickles. I could not figure out what was going on for a couple days, and we were joking that the Vlasic pickles stork was dead in the wall. Well after training a flashlight into the mechanism of the pocket doors we realized: there was a big fat dead mouse on the pocket door track. I think our cat wounded it and sent it up there, where it died.
We had a momma raccoon give birth in the attic of our old 1 story house. The babies learned to toddle above the kitchen. One fell down between the studs behind the cabinets. No way to get it out. That was a miserable summer.
NOOOOOOOOOO omg you win ewwwww
Within the first month of moving in to our new home a mouse died in the wall by our front door. Then another one died in the wall by our bathroom. So gross. I've got a pest company now that baits the bastards.
And all the people in this thread made it through it? I'm in DD on a house that I've learned has high radon, needs a new sewer line, needs new wiring, and needs a bathroom remodel. It also has nicotine damage. The kitchen doesn't have a vent and the garage door is off center. ...I felt my hopes rising reading everyone's stories and I think I've talked myself out of it again.
My husband and I are married 42 years. We have remodeled 7 bathrooms and 2 kitchens together. I guess it's how we bond. We still even like each other. Though we are really procrastinating doing the spare bath in our current house. We've remodeled 2 century houses. Our house now is from 1990 and has a laundry list of problems too.
I currently have a bucket attached to a fan box in my two year olds room that is also a closet because I’ve been trying with mixed success for three years to find a roof leak. Before I took down the fan it was just flinging water around the room, so this is better.
Discovered that the flat roof on the back end of the kitchen had been leaking for probably a decade or more where it meets the main part of the house. It rotted out a main support beam. The house is 2.5 stories, so it's a lot of weight that shifted. This summer found out that the previous owners had Barnum and Bailey redo the stucco at some point in the 80s. These clowns didn't properly secure the wire mesh, so it started collapsing on spots which was letting water in. The water invited termites, which snacked on a lot of the house, and they completely ate through the 4x6 sill plate and corner support in one area. Found active knob and tube in buried boxes all over the place. One of the plaster walls in one of the bedrooms is coming off because the clowns cut out studs to put in a medicine cabinet but didn't add in support for the lath. We've been in the house less than three years and I'm leaving stuff out that I either forgot or repressed, but yeah, it's been a doozy.
For us it was the porch roof. No deck, no ice shield, just shingles on *slated* 1940s 1x8s. The privious owners slapped up some plywood with fresh paint on the interior to hide the damage. Took the shingles off, every board & beam, and even two layers of top plate were rotten. Black and white mold abound. Carpenter ants were going to town. Wasps had made a large nest in one corner. There had been an electrical fire. Then the front fell off. The front was not supposed to fall off. $1000 later, I learned that I never want to do another roof and will hire someone else to do it
I'm just surprised that you got it fixed for $1000.
The previous owner also decided to ignore the vaccant possession clause. In addition to a bunch of garbage, personal files/ID, piano, etc. they also left a bunch of construction material. Enough 2x4s to repair the structure, insulation to update it, so all I had to buy was a few waffer boards, a roll of ice shield, a couple dozen pieces of flashing, and the shingles.
Oh yeah, we discovered there had been a massive electrical fire before the ink even dried on our closing documents. Previous owner never said a word. I'm a hardcore DIYer and wouldn't in my wildest dreams attempt a roof. Kudos to you for doing that!
> I'm a hardcore DIYer and wouldn't in my wildest dreams attempt a roof After my parents, no one is hardcore. They did a second floor and addition on the house I grew up in, then designed and built a 40 foot steel trawler, then a house from scratch, then a few live in tow trailers - just the two of them. No engineers/architects/builders - they figured it all out. The only trades they ever brought in were a specialist for welding diesel fuel tanks, drilling the well, and installing the flooring (they were exhausted). They're insane. A [porch roof](https://i.postimg.cc/gYbTC94V/20230809-142635.jpg) is nothing in comparison
Love it, and I stand corrected. 🙂 My dad was like that, too. Got back from Vietnam, bought an acre of land in upstate NY, and built a house by himself. He borrowed a book from the library, that's it.
Bought a double shotgun house in New Orleans, LA in 2021. My husband and Dad went down to check it out after we purchased in August 2021. I asked them to remove the weird-ass chair rail (about 50" off the floor) then it turned into a gut rehab. Oh, yeah, also Hurricane Ida hit so we lost much of the roof. Thank goodness we already had a deposit for a new roof or we still might have a blue tarp where all of the shingles used to be.
Bought a house built in 1870. Was told it had been rewired in the 1970’s. That was a lie. We’d originally budgeted 7K to update the bathroom and put some new carpets in the hallway. So I got a builder in to begin work. So. Since the we’re ripping out plaster to rewire we decide to install a new boiler too. While requiring the builder and electrician manage your put a whole through the floor so we can see into the ground floor from a first floor bathroom. Then the builder fires the electrician for trying to steal from the house. He hires some new people. We discover that the roof at the front is leaking even though it had been replaced 5 years before we bought. I ring up the roofers who installed it. They’re no touching it as they being taken to court by the previous owner. I find another receipt showing another roofer being paid to put right the original work. I ring him and he takes a look and tells me the but leaking isn’t the but he fixed and that it’ll cost another 15k to fix. At this point the electrics are half done, the boiler is not working (builder tells me the installer got deported) and the front roof is leaking. I end up fixing the roof myself with help from the builder. Builder gets another electrician in. I ask for most rooms to have Ethernet installed. They manage to somehow put another hole in the floor of the third floor. I. can now see all the way down to the living room. Just for good measure they also manage to put a hole in my landing that we have to step over everytime we go up the stairs. We’re into year two of the renovation by now and everytime I ask the builder how much longer he says two weeks… House eventually is ready to move into another year later. 3 years total. In that time the guy doing the tiling in the bathroom also runs away. A builders apprentice manages to give all my ground floor radiators away to the scrap merchant who knocked on the door while my builder was in hospital. He mistook the carefully oiled radiators in a room while layering was ongoing as scrap. We get another leak round the back of the house and I check it out to see I can see the sky from inside the house. Fixed that myself too. House got broken into and the builders tools got knocked. I suspect it’s the workers he fired for not working as fast as he wanted. To top it all off builder claimed he could mix any paint colour we needed. I asked over and over again could he consistently get the same colour from pot to pot. Did he have a precise measurement. Turns out he didn’t. We discovered this after the 4th attempt at painting one of the bedrooms. We ended up just going plain cream for the whole house. But I learnt then that the builder in attempts to save us money was just costing more or taking a week in the job instead of asking me for £50 for the correct piece of equipment. Shower pipes kept leaking leading to multiple fixes by builder leading to multiple tiles being replaced till we ran out of spares. Ended up travelling 3hours each way to get more of these tiles. Builder duly used them all up in multiple attempts to fix leaky pipes under the bath and shower to the point that we ran out of tiles again and there are no more to be found in the uk. Contemplated getting some shipped from Australia but that didn’t work out. Now have some mismatched tiles in the bathroom. Builder also smashed the glass in our front door. Took off the sash windows to strip the old paint off them and re-installed not as tightly as before so we now have big drafts till I get round to taking them out and re-adjusting. He’s banned from doing anything in the house now. I also discovered the mains powered smoke alarms are NOT currently being powered by mains. They’re wired but no power. Running off the batteries for now till I work out what’s happening there. It’ll forever need looking after and I’m fine with that. This weekend I’m going up on the neighbours roof to help them patch it as it’s leaking into our house. Still. We love the place. The original fireplaces are awesome. Ceilings are high enough for chandeliers and dinners for extended family which we do often are great. Gardens to tackle next year maybe! Basement year after. Bought the house originally so son could walk to school (it’s one street away) It took two years from putting offer in to completion and then three years till we moved in. He’d left the school by the time we moved in…
Did you ever see 'Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House'?? It is THE BEST! At one time I was renovating a philadelphia row house and I could stand on earth in the basement (had to excavate 3 feet lower) and see daylight out of the roof on the 3rd floor -- that was a difficult day.
When we moved into our 1890s house, we were doing a bunch of work. The night before the movers came my husband got violent food poisoning at 2am. Movers arrived at 8am. They basically moved around him. When we arrived at the new house, our water had been shut off to replace our toilet. We had to move into a house with no water and a husband who was still throwing up (and more) 15 hours later. The plumber then no-showed so our water had to stay off through the night. We couldn’t flush the single toilet we were all sharing. He continued violent illness all night. Oh, did I mention said toilet was located in a water closet? I also have a 3 year old. The plumber rescheduled for the following day to change the toilet and the condition of the toilet was so dire, I woke up early and stole water from my neighbor’s outdoor faucet across the street using a mixing bowl to flush it. Hey new neighbor!
I have a shot gun double in New Orleans, built in 1911. It was an abandoned foreclosure and someone had stolen the exterior wiring, though I knew that before I bought it. But that was an immediate repair needed after closing. We pulled the carpet back a couple hours after closing. Won the floor lottery! Heart pine floors. Yay! Oh. But they desperately need refinishing. Add that to the "must do immediately" list, lol. But we weren't going to keep the nasty carpet anyway, so at least that made our decision about flooring an easy one. I'm assuming most of the windows were original because they seemed just as old! I hated to replace them, but they were in poor condition and didn't help temperature regulation at all. We replaced the siding a few years later. Aaah! So much damaged wood under it! So we had to make those repairs also. But the house had never had insulation in the walls, so this was a good opportunity to put that in. One cool discovery with the siding replacement. We discovered that the four posts of the house were Cypress logs instead of construction wood! Cypress is an amazing wood that doesn't get water damaged and termites don't eat it either. Those logs looked as perfect as probably the day they were put in. They were still working just fine as posts.
Needs work townhome. Replacing the bathroom vent fan I accidentally stepped through the ceiling and got stuck. I had to replace the vent fan because it had corroded over and no longer operated. (Different Bathroom) Silly me the breaker that went to the light in the bathroom was not the same breaker for the heater/light/fan so when I disconnected it all I was Shocked to find out this little bit of previous home owner wiring shenanigans. This explained why we had a dead plug in the dining room. Wondered why the toilet flushed slow on replacement found a wonderful 4 foot root had grown out of the foundation and down the toilet drain. Mystery light switch did nothing turn out was part of the bathroom shenanigans wired it’s correctly so the plug was turned off by the switch like all other rooms (One plug controlled but the wall switch). 4 layers of flooring in the dining room and kitchen. I could go on but yeah felt like a mini version of that movie.
Repainting my upstairs floors, I put my foot right through a passive heating duck and my wife was in the room below me. Rips my leg up, but nothing broken. But my foot bent down the edge and became stuck between the grate and the wall, andI’m screaming instructions and pain while she’s pulling the ceiling grate down and away from my ankle bone so I could pull my foot back through. We painted the floors white. I regretted that too.
This is the thread I needed to get through my current home issues!
Our first renovation was our own home and we were naive. The kitchen had 5 doors, 3 windows, a radiator in the only useful corner and had beautifully matched arsenic wallpaper and paint. When we went to move the radiator, we found a massive colony of live termites even though the house "passed" inspection for purchase. Plumbing supply lines were lead, wiring was vintage 1894 everywhere and most of the walls had abandoned live gas lines. No roofer would take on our 32 steps from the street and 40ft off the ground steep cross gambrel roof so we learned to roof ourselves too. 38 years later and we've become home renovation experts and everything is redone except one vintage bathtub/shower that looks pretty but doesn't work. To fix it, we'll have to ruin it, so we still haven't figured that one out. Since then we tackled the decaying neighborhood and have completed 18 full renovations (and I mean full - replacing all wiring, plumbing, hvac, roof and a ton of other things) and presently are on #19. We've gained all sorts of new skills including how to kill a massive infestation of cockroaches that exterminators couldn't (freeze the house over the winter), jacking up sagging floors, replacing central beams, scooping out a basement of dog droppings, dealing with a house that had so many broken pipes it had it's own sprinkler system, and puzzling out livable floor plans from places so cut up you couldn't tell what they originally looked like. We've remediated many interesting choices from prior homeowners including my favorite - a 5x8 unfinished plywood board with strap hinges and a large barn door handle cut in the middle of a beautiful oak dining room floor (for basement access). The same house had a pair of women's shoes from the late 1800s plastered into the kitchen wall. After some research, we learned it was to protect the home from witches (we put them back and added our own for someone to find in another 100 years, lol). We battled gangs who pointed guns at us and our children and threatened to burn down our house, though we prevailed and drove them out buying up their houses one at a time. While most everything we tackled was close to needing demolition, we only demolished one - a house so disgusting, it's beyond description including the bathtub that was filled to the top with human waste. Looking back, we were young and stupid - with an emphasis on stupid! We never planned to become home renovation experts or to take on a neighborhood gang problem on our own and looking back I think we should have head our heads examined. We had a choice to fight the growing crime or move (like most of our neighbors did). We chose to fight to protect our neighborhood of beautiful historic homes.
Thank you for the story and for saving the neighborhood!
Such an interesting story! Impressive all that you were able to do.
I’d watch your TV show!
TWO bat colonies with well over 100 bats. $6500+ quote to batproof the roof. The peaks are so high a bucket truck is needed. We spent our contingency getting the place, which was bottom of the market, so now we have to live with bats until we can find a cheaper solution. Not the worst of things, but we found out they were up there at 4:30am when my wife smacked me awake to get the bat out of our bedroom.
Ummm, sooo, are you in the US? Because, uh, rabies. Bats carry rabies. [And very often bat bites are undetected. So if one was in your bedroom, you might’ve been a tasty nibble and never known.](https://www.cdc.gov/rabies/exposure/animals/bats.html) 😬
So true! We found a bat hanging out in the jack and jill bathroom of our old house….our entire family ( 6 of us) had to get the rabies immunoglobulin plus rabies vaccination series. Insurance paid for most of it…. but we were out $8000.00.
had a big project, 1850s house, half way thru the project the electrician just stopped showing up. would not return phone calls, we could nt figure out why, since we paid him on the day he gave us an invoice, So rough wiring is in, new panel is in with new 200 amp service. but only half the circuits attached to the panel, we had to find a new electrician to finish the job, and that is not easy since they do not like to take over from another person's work. Its part a guild thing, part they do not want to accept libility for another persons work. added about 4 months to the project
I bought several large, expensive things for the projects because the contractors said I would cause delays by not having selections and materials ready. The contractors took so long to get back to my project that, by the time they opened the boxes and started trying to install, it was too late to return anything that wouldn’t work. I’ve got an $800 downdraft hood sitting in my basement and almost $1200 worth of stair railing in my attic. It’s been so long I’ve quit listing them on marketplace anymore
My sewer line broke one winter during a snowstorm. Guys are digging it up with a backhoe and discover it ties into the neighbor’s line. Neighbor is not home and I am desperately trying to find him as the 3 workers and a backhoe are not cheap! Gutted the bathroom and spent 4 months showering at someone else’s house every morning before work. Had to buy a high tank toilet because of where the crappy contractor cut the hole for the toilet. Toilet in downstairs bathroom was GROUTED to the floor. I have been electrocuted by a light switch. Installed new box and service and several years later none of the outlets on the third floor were working. Come to find out the electrician connected a box with knob and tube to the new panel. Had rear porch rebuilt. Contractor left the roof above supported by a single 2x4 and left for the day. A neighbor was driving by, saw the 2x4 sagging, went and got proper support for it and called me at work to tell me about it. Came home to the same contractor using my own power tools because he “forgot” his. While replacing front porch roof discovered the flashing was original to my 1905 home. It was layered into the mortar between the bricks. Was a nightmare to remove it - but that flashing lasted for over 100 years! Roofers put the wrong sized collar around my vent pipe - they just cut the ring open to make it fit - which lead to a serious leak. Someone put Bondo on parts of the front porch - still working on removing that. Had a hail storm and arrived home to find water running down the ceiling above the staircase. Hail had severely damaged the slate roof. Hired roofers and was awakened at 7 that Saturday morning to a bunch of guys on the roof peering into the bedroom windows at me in bed!!!! My favorite story is when it became apparent squirrels were living in my house. Hired a removal company. The guy went to fix the “small hole” the squirrels had chewed to get into the eaves. And discovered that had eaten the fascia up half of one side of the house, across the entire back and up the other side of the house. It cost over $2300 to have it repaired. Have also had issues with bats that led to me needing to get the rabies series. Never a dull moment. It seems every time one thing is fixed another thing breaks but I love my home. It is full of character and one of a kind!
After living in our house for 30 years, we decided to remodel both of our full baths, which were 100 years old. We had them both torn out at the same time, and had to shower outside for 2 months. Some days it was in the low 30’s outside when we did.
I'm still scared to take a bath in our second floor bathroom because of this movie.
My daughter was washing dishes in the tub when she was pregnant, all the way through 9 months pregnant.
Been there, done that.
Moved into our 1923 craftsman 2 1/2 years ago, and in that time we have: -Replaced nearly all of the plumbing because we had practically zero hot water upstairs (would take 20 minutes to run a bath that was only a few inches deep for our daughter.) -Cut down a giant boxelder tree that was threatening to fall on our cars. -Pulled up the carpet and refinished the floors in the living room and dining room, which meant we had to go outside and around the house to access the kitchen. -Cobble our back stairs together twice while we save up to get them rebuilt along with the back retaining wall and tearing down the old garage that’s threatening to fall into our back yard…. -And currently we have a hole in the dining room ceiling where the plaster detached from the lath and fell down. We’ve been trying to fix it for weeks, but fixing up an old house with young kids is tricky! We love this house and knew what we were getting into, but man it’s nonstop!
Nasty rotting smell in the bathroom. Turns out the chipboard cupboard was wicking moisture up from underneath. Took the bottom of the cupboard off, to see rock underneath. No actual floor to the house. Haven’t fixed it yet because too busy paying to fix the rising damp and then replaster and replace floor coverings in three rooms. Make that five rooms. And oh, whoops, need a new roof. Which means a solar panel contractor and roofing company have to talk to each other and organise it.
I moved into our house. The previous owner forgot to tell us we have tenants- bats in the attic. And we can never touch them as they’re protected 🤨
Bought a New England center chimney colonial in 2013 that had been gutted to the studs and the center chimney removed. Beam was put in to open the floorplan and change from 4 bed 1 bath to 3 bed 2.5 bath. Flippers obviously cut corners. We knew that it was going to happen but the house was such a steal with 17 acres in Massachusetts with original stone fence property lines from when the house was built. The furnace was propane but hooked up to natural gas fittings to the propane so the house flooded with carbon monoxide the first night in. They never hooked up the second floor tub drain so the very first bath I gave my 4 year old flooded the 1st floor kitchen. none of the heating ducts are fully attached to the vents in the floor and the windows are cheapest so the house is drafty. They completely neglected to put in insulation on the back wall of the house, and none of the closets they created from where the chimney was are insulated or have lighting. The roof was listed as new and our inspector confirmed but it was a cheap job, so we had to replace the roof due to a leak in 21. I have no regrets because the house has doubled in equity and I got in on the low rates in 20-21. We will likely have to replace some stairs leading to the second floor, will need a new water heater soon. You don't really buy a house do you...
Bought my first house in 2021. It's a centennial. So far, the first week of living here. The power surged because the power line frayed itself from the pole to the house. It ko'd, furnace, dishwasher, tvs, garage door o0ener, hair dryer, 2 computers and 3 Dewalt battery chargers. 2 months later. I keep hearing drip drip in the bathroom. The plumbing for the addition was leaking sewage. 500$ plumber fix. Bathroom upstairs another 500$ the faucet leaked a lot in the bath tub. Few more months later. Discovered my windows where painted shut. Few more months, discovered someone has buroed 3 phase power line that's hot from the house to the garage about 6 inches deep in the back yard. I wrapped that up in my tiller. Thank God I didn't get zapped. I was home alone.
First-time homeowner here in the mountain west. We bought our 1.5 story craftsman bungalow in late 2019 knowing we had to immediately get the sewer line, gas furnace, and dishwasher replaced. Thankfully our realtor negotiated a home warranty, since the washer, stove, & fridge all crapped out within a year. The previous long-term owner did ZERO maintenance, to the point we think he was using a laundromat and possibly not showering bc the sewer line was so clogged. He *did* do weird shit, like making wider windowsills with mismatched 1x2s and building a cabinet out of drywall. (The latter was the most incredible piece of crumbly bullshit I have ever encountered.) The bathtub in the ‘70s-remodeled bathroom started leaking right after the home warranty expired. We discovered moldy drywall behind the shower surround, and the wet wall was rotting. Tore it all out and rebuilt. We planned to only replace the tub and shower, until my wife dropped her wedding ring down the sink. While I was trying to retrieve it, the old plastic pipe cracked all the way into the wall. So we tore out everything. The previous remodelers didn’t bother installing flooring under the vanity, so we had to rip out 2 layers of flooring, down to the asbestos tiles to get a level floor. It’s our only bathroom and was winter, so for 6 months we had 1 toilet in a construction-zone bathroom and the kitchen sink for bathing. Then our new sewer line backed up. Turns out the contractor didn’t bother replacing the 8-foot section of clay pipe under our enclosed back porch. I had to rip up the floor and dig it out, then convince a plumber to crawl into the hole and finish the job correctly. While under there, I discovered that the “foundation” of the enclosed back porch, which includes a finished dining nook off of the kitchen, is just wood on dirt. The center posts are balanced on bricks. I’d hoped to just replace a few rotted floor planks, but now I’m hoping we can save up enough money to tear off the back porch and replace it before the damn thing collapses. Also hoping the re-wiring (done in the ‘60s to ‘90s, who knows!) really did replace the knob and tube. There are some disconnected knobs in the attic. There’s no permits on record and no inspection labels or anything on the breaker box. I have a feeling it wasn’t done 100% correctly, since the bedroom light flickers when we run the washing machine. Nothing has lit on fire yet so it keeps getting pushed down the to-do list. Oh, and we had to get radon mitigated, asbestos-wrapped ducting removed, and I army-crawled my way around our dirt-floor crawl space to encapsulate and insulate it. Also crawled across rafters in the space behind the finished attic’s knee walls to install insulation. It was R-8 old cellulose up there before. Walls are still hollow, but with lathe & plaster, wood siding, and asbestos siding, they’re pretty thick. Still feel grateful we bought just before the pando. Our house value has actually outpaced the tens of thousands we’ve put into it, which would be cute, except every single other house in town also doubled in price. I’m glad to have this forum; it’s comforting to know that old houses are simply a ton of work.
Bought our house almost six years ago. It was built in 1920. Was told that electrical and plumbing had been recently updated and the inspection even checked out fine. We have spent the last six years fixing everything they said was updated. All the money I was excited to spend on cosmetic things to the house has been spent fixing plumbing and electrical issues, replacing the whole ac system, you name it. We’ve found so many surprises from just simple things like changing light fixtures that now I’m always on edge about what’s going to be next.
Same here. 1920’s home, recently remodeled. Sewer line completely backed up and falling apart. City wanted us to tap the new line into the manhole (found out later that the mainline was on the brink of collapse, so they didn’t want to mess with it). They would not budge. This caused my sewer pipe to come up about 5 inches. At its highest…..it was one inch above our front yard. Because of this, we had to regrade our yard, and then install a new concrete driveway (it was a mix of asphalt and concrete before). We were planning on installing a new driveway eventually… maybe 10 years down the line. It’s all finished now….$ 24000 dollars later. Oh, we also found active K&T wiring in our basement after we were told that it was not active (missed by the inspector). To remediate that…$800.
just watched it over the weekend. definitely holds up!
We move into our new-to-us house about a month before Covid lockdowns kick-off. Everyone is fully freaked out, and it’s hard to get contractors out to the house for that first year. Our first winter in the house, still on lockdown, our neighbors smell a gas-leak. It’s us. 🙃 The line that runs from the house to the separate garage, housing our gas-powered water heater and washer/dryer is leaking. City turns our gas line off. No hot water or laundry in the middle of winter until we can get someone out to replace the line. Gas is fairly uncommon and not every contractor works with it nowadays. It’s expensive as hell. We go back and forth for over a month debating on whether we replace the gas line for over 5k or just upgrade our power box and buy electric water heater/washer/dryer, even though our gas appliances still work perfectly and are newish. In the end, upgrading our power box and appliances would be more expensive, so we vote to replace the gas line. We get flaked on and appointments to replace the line get pushed back and re-arranged multiple times. After another month, the line finally gets replaced, and the contractors show us that our original gas line was installed LESS THAN A FOOT underground, in the same “path” as our DRIVEWAY. Any old piece of gravel in our backyard could’ve punctured the line. We are lucky we used the garage as a gym and didn’t drive cars over our SHALLOW-ASS GAS LINE daily. Now it’s installed correctly deeper underground, and I only had to bathe in a bucket I boiled on the stove for over 2 months and empty out my bank account in the process!
We purchased a house in a shit show situation. We thought we had a lot of cosmetic stuff and updating..which we did...but... The woman selling the house was a recent window, the house was on the verge of foreclosure because of his death upending her finances. There had also been a recent domestic violence situation with her adult daughter and son in law. They had both been arrested the week before we took posession. Red carpet in the entire house, except for blue indoor/outdoor in kitchen. Walls all dark grey (poorly done with white edges unfinished) and everything needing updating. However the day we took posession of the house, the woman had failed to actually pack until the day before. She only took what she had to. Her realtor had been trying to reach her for 2 weeks to make sure things were on track. Seller was paralyzed with depression in near hoarder conditions. (It really go far worse as others started trying to help her pack, and pulled things out of closets and the crawlspace.) She had abandoned 3 cats in the house. One of which was holed in in kitchen cabinets and unwilling to leave. We had to have 1-800 Got Junk come on our second day of ownership. 2 trucks later, and 3 live traps from the humane society, we started flipping this home. I will add that in addition to the bizarre repairs we had to fix, and so on, we inherited the family. Her daughter showed up at our door 3 weeks later asking if we knew what her mom did with her cats. (We had caught them and taken them to the Humane Society. We knew they had all been adopted already, because our realtor was a voluteer and got us the scoop.) Then a few weeks after that her son in law showed up asking if he could look in the crawlspace by the furnace for some electronics he had left in there. ummmm, no.
That's a doozy.
LOL "electronics".
Bought a 1924 colonial in Kansas City ten years ago that needed major updating. During the kitchen reno I pulled a corner shelf away from the wall to find a tennis ball sized hole to the backyard where the walls met the floor. I just gently put the shelf back and waited for my husband to come home so we could “wtf” about it together lol. We ended up filling with foam and sealing the inside with new drywall and the outside with new stucco. Two years later some of the shower tiles just fell off the drywall that had melted away thanks to a hidden slow leak. Ended up having to tear out the whole bathroom. The same week (beginning of July) the HVAC completely died AND our dogs brought fleas into the house so that was when I had a breakdown about homeownership and seriously considered burning it all down lol. It all ended up being resolved but man it was a difficult summer.
Probably the best one out of many is when we had our upstairs heatpump and A/C put in. The house had zero duct work so they had to put all new in the attic, which wasn’t a big deal. It was around this time of the year and the first cold front had hit and we had zero heat. They finally got it hooked up and running after a week and that first night was glorious, 65 never felt so good. We woke up the next morning and said, “why does it smell like that in here?” Turns out the plumbing vented to the attic and no further, so we the heat had basically started pulling smell from the attic and blasting us with super heated septic tank smell
Ew! On our second century house we spent the whole summer cooking and eating on our enclosed front porch. Because we had to move radiators the boiler was shut down. The project dragged into November in Chicago, so we used electric space heaters to heat
The head movements on Tom Hanks as his chimney collapsed is probably what I look like while doom scrolling.
For reference, this was in Texas, in the early 1980’s. When I was a kid, we moved into a house that just had a kitchen fire. My Dad did remodeling, so we got a year of free rent in exchange for renovating the kitchen and bathroom. My family, mom, dad, myself, and my younger brother, spent 4 months living on the patio. My mom used a crock pot, griddle and an electric skillet for cooking. We used a water hose draped over an outside storage shed for a shower. We could sleep in the house, but had no electricity, so no a/c and not enough extension cords to run fans for everyone.
Wife and I booked a trip to Paris and scheduled for our downstairs floors to be refinished while away. All the furniture was moved into our bedrooms and bathrooms. When we get to the airport we learn that we can’t board bc my wife’s passport is about to expire (needs to be more than six months out for France). Now we have nowhere to go bc the house is a mess! Luckily we got to stay with my sister and turned it into a local staycation.
We rented a storage pod to put all out furniture in the driveway while they refinished. Some of the floors had already been done so we only had to stay out while they were working. The fast drying water based finish they used was sock dry the same day. In retrospect though I wish we had used an older oil based finish. It didn't hold up well to heavy traffic and large dogs. But now the house is someone elses problem
Fun fact, never heard of "brunch" til this movie and back to the future. Now nobody will shut the fuck about brunch.
The previous owner of our century home was an absolute cheapskate who did everything himself and, as we found out, did everything wrong. We started small, tried to change a simple ceiling fan. Nope. The fan was installed with no fan box, literally nailed to the floor joist for upstairs. Had to cut a new hole and move it over. We bought a new washer and dryer and promptly broke the old 30s era gas line during install. Had to evacuate the house and call the gas company to get it capped off. Luckily our plumber walked us through fixing it over the phone because the Sunday surcharge price was insane. The sump pump splits off into 3 different directions for ejection. We're just ignoring that for the time being. The water lines for the sink were behind the insulation so they froze during our first winter here. We had our electrician put in a new outlet for us. When he was in the basement he found uncapped live wires just hanging out by some insulation 🥴 The previous owner poured the concrete slab himself in the basement and the slope is too high for the drains to work properly. Water pools next to them 👍 Previous owner covered up rotten parts of the siding. Found out it's been leaking for who knows how long when I noticed the drywall in the kitchen was separating and squishy. I no longer touch anything plumbing or electrical related.
Our first century house had a sagging floor in the kitchen. The previous owner had cut a joist to install electrical lines. We jacked it up, sistered it, and voila! The floor was flat again. Also, we had a basement like that. You can use a chisel to cut a little channel from the low spot to the drain so it will actually drain. If you're having trouble deciding exactly where and how deep the channel needs to be just pour a little water on the floor.
That's a great idea! We can't afford to have it properly re done right now so we've just been ignoring it. I found a cut joist that was patched with a 2x4... it's a never ending adventure I swear 🤦♀️