Homeowners Share Previous Owners' Repair Disasters

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2 days ago

Moving into a new place comes with a lot of excitement, especially if you're lucky enough to actually own your home. However, sometimes the previous owners leave "improvements" behind that can range from weird and annoying to downright dangerous. Recently, people on Reddit commiserated over the dumb surprises that the last owners left in their homes, and some of these are absolutely wild. Here's what people had to say:
"They built an addition over the septic tank, so there's no way to get to the clean-out."
—Cold-Level-5651
"The guy that built our house was VERY smart, as in college professor in electric engineering smart. He designed the heating system, a solar geothermal hybrid. It was all controlled by a system he designed. The outside is made of river rocks, and the walls are about a foot thick. The design is multiple octagons. All that, and he used the absolute cheapest materials on the inside he could find. Drop ceilings, hollow core doors, and cheap carpet. No one but him had an idea of how to fix and maintain the heating system, so when it started to fail, it had to be completely ripped out. His name was Ed. We've been working for 10 years to de-Ed the house."
"They hung all the gutters to sag in the middle instead of sloping to the sides, so it was just waterfalls all over the house when it rained."
"They put white gloss paint on all the woodwork, every year, for 20+ years without sanding back first. Doors don't shut properly, and there are drips everywhere; it's so thick. And they put new flooring down over old flooring. It was vinyl over carpet, and there was laminate over the vinyl. Or the three layers of tiles in the kitchen, they just did tiles over the old tiles, which were over even older tiles."
—bazooka_toot
"They cut a rectangular hole in the side of the garage so their dogs could go into the outside kennel or into the garage kennel as they desired. It was nice for their dogs, I'm sure. The dumb part, though, is they may as well have put up a 'Mice Welcome' sign. Free dog food and a nice insulated wall in which to recreate and have babies, what more could a mouse want?!"
"About three weeks after we moved into this house, the sewer backed up into our basement. Raw sewage was shooting up out of the vent pipe like the Old Faithful Geyser. We had to get a plumber to come in at 7 p.m. on a Sunday. What a nightmare that was. The plumber was checking things out for three hours. All the while, the sewer water was just flowing into the basement. He finally went outside and put a camera down into the vent pipe. He found a 3.5-foot piece of fence board in the vent pipe."
"My in-laws rented our home from us for a while. We eventually moved back in, and some of the things they did were just so crazy, we haven't been able to figure them out. They filled the gutters with stones. Like, smoothed and polished rocks. No clue why. All the water valves, like those to the toilet and sink, are glued open. They removed the flooring. They painted every room in the house at least three times."
"They sanded wood paneling that wasn't real wood. They removed all the banisters and stair railings. They planted an apple tree about four feet away from the house. They removed the ice maker from the freezer. They used some kind of sand-textured resin to refinish the countertops in the bathrooms. They spray-painted the fins on the A/C unit."—Relevant-Package-928
"Too many to list, but not capping the former well pipe so that it geysers into the basement during a heavy rain is high on the list. The house is 107 years old, so there are plenty of quirks. The former owner lives across from me. He is in his late 80s and the neighborhood oddball. Whenever I ask him a question about the house or work he might've done, I feel like I lose a few IQ points."
"They painted over the hardwood floors. They also rewired the light for the stairs, so the only switch is at the top of the stairs. We had to put a nightlight in that we can control with Alexa, so we have some light to see to get to the top at night. (There's a plug halfway up the stairs on the wall.) And the bathroom door was installed upside down and backwards, so it doesn't shut all the way."
"They glued all the valences to the walls."
—rocknroller2003yes
"They put a lamppost in the front yard made out of a spray-painted PVC pipe, which was powered by a 14/2 wire run through a garden hose that was buried 6 inches down, with landscape lighting powered by interior-grade extension cords wrapped in duct tape at the connections."
"It's a 1940s house. I wanted to add ceiling lights to the living room, on a three-way switch. So I'm climbing through the attic, trying to reverse engineer the current wiring. I found some 1960s aluminum wire, not attached to the joist, just floating around in the insulation. Also junctioned, but not in a junction box, and not with wire nuts; rather, just with 1960s electrical tape. It probably goes without saying, but the attic doesn't have modern insulation either, rather something along the lines of 1960s shredded newspaper and denim, which would immediately conflagrate when your 1960s electrical tape gives out."
"Had a pre-buy inspection done. The inspector goes to the garage, pushes the door opener button, and it goes up halfway, stops. Press again, it goes down, bounces up to the top, and closes again. After about five presses, it finally goes fully open and stays there. We look over at the homeowner that I'm considering buying from. 'Yeah, I don't know, it's been like that since I installed it. If you press the button enough times, it gets to where you need it.'"
"I did buy the house because I figured it shouldn't be too hard to fix. Shortly after I moved in, I went out with a screwdriver to take the panel apart. I'm not mechanically inclined, but maybe I will notice something. I take the cover off, and the panel underneath is warped. Badly. I go to unscrew the first corner, and it's really tight. Like an insane gorilla screwed it in. Barely got it off. Same with the other screws. I inspect the panel, and there is no obvious damage. Reinstall it, but this time, screw the mounting screws in more gently, so it's just slightly firm. The panel is no longer warped. Put the cover on, press the button. The door operates perfectly. Has for the last 23 years. Why the hell did he screw it in that hard?"—bombocanada
"Whoever painted my porch removed the trim and glass from the porch lights so paint would not get in them. Then they proceeded to shoot paint right over the light bulbs, still in their sockets. They put everything back together, sold the house, and my wife and I were wondering for years why the porch lights were always so dim!"
"They used a chainsaw to turn a closet into a hallway to go from the living room to the bathroom."
"My friend bought a house a few years ago, and found an urn full of someone's ashes in the back of a built-in cupboard! The previous owner had to make a 7-hour round trip back to collect their forgotten relative."
—BeagleMadness
"They installed a downstairs bathroom without enough grade to the outgoing sewer pipe. Their solution was to put in an outgoing pipe with the top half cut off, then cover it with some sort of metal mesh(?), which was then covered with cement and carpet. We discovered it 10 years after we moved in when my foot went through the family room floor into the outgoing pipe."
"They wanted new outlets, so they wired outdoor/green extension cords to the existing outlets and ran them in the crawlspace and then wired them to the new outlet. They also built an addition to the house, but forgot insulation under the floor and in the attic. They put down the slab for an addition, then waited until that slab sank and cracked, THEN built the addition. So if I want to level the floor (mud jack), then it's gonna make the walls uneven."
"The previous owners of the house were very big fans of HGTV. Not fancy HGTV, budget HGTV. They installed their own tile, with no spacers, no level, or no ruler. The grout lines are inconsistent, some spots 1/4 inch, some 3/4 inch. It's also super slippery when wet."
—maybenotJuju
"When I first moved into the house, the city tried to saddle me with a water bill for over $1,200 from the previous owners. I laughed and said no chance in Hell as that sounded like they let months go by with it being delinquent since my brother's bill in a similar house two streets over is roughly $50/month. When I noticed the hot water pressure seemed off, I went down to the hot water tank to investigate. There was a strange splitter right about where the brass line was feeding off from the top of the tank, and the valve was closed in the second direction."
"They put in a shower right against the exterior siding of the house. No interior wall or insulation. The damp moved up above the shower until it rotted away the main beam supporting the upper two stories of the house. We live in a row house, and it was this close to collapsing and possibly taking the back of the neighboring houses down with it. Thank goodness the first thing we did during reno was pull out that janky bathroom."
"They put in paneling floor-to-ceiling to conceal crumbling plaster walls. Did they think that the humidity of Savannah, GA would not be soaked up by that crap??? Caution: due to rippled walls, walking or even looking down the long upstairs hallway may cause dizziness and/or vomiting."
—Low-Association586
"They wallpapered the windows in the bedroom. Not kidding. Apparently, they never heard of blackout curtains."
"They did a remodel and moved the washer and dryer, but left the full dryer vent under the sink fully open to the outside, so there was like an 8-inch hole through the wall. Their idea of fixing it was to shove some towels in for 'insulation.'"
"They connected the sewage off-gas to the vent fan pipe. What's that smell? It's sewage."
—Hot_Lifeguard6297
"They put in a new bathroom in 1975 or so, but didn't demo the old one. They just built over it. Tile and everything. So we had to demo two bathrooms, basically, when we renovated."
"Rather than fix the underlying issue that made the vent in the front office rattle, they just put bricks in the ductwork."
"There are three switches that control one receptacle in our living room, presumably for a lamp. If one switch is turned off, the others won't turn the lamp on. (I think.) Similar problem on the staircase. Turn the overhead light off downstairs, and you can't turn it on upstairs. We have an electrician coming."
—Accurate_Birthday278
"They made a 15-foot-long faux beam out of 1x6s, nailed it to the ceiling, and mounted a fan to it. Luckily, nobody was sitting on the couch when it all came crashing down."
And finally, "They encased the top of my chimney in concrete so much so that it looks like the head of a penis. I've got the dick house."