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ffs - why? (aka why do people not do DIY properly?)

The joys of renting are revealed with this thread :D

Some years ago, my cousin bought a house that had had lino superglued onto the marble floor in the hallway :eek: They're savages up in Grimsby.
 
It's not just the DIYers the 'pros' can do it too. My house was taken in part exchange by a national house builder whose TV adverts for part-ex houses show decorators using half inch paint brushes to go round door frames. This looked like a Mr Bean job :eek: Magnolia window frames, sockets, light switches and even light bulbs. :rolleyes:

Whoever did the damp proofing tried to plaster round the radiator brackets in the front room so the only thing holding up the radiator was the pipes. So when I went to remove the radiator to put proper skirting board on I undid the valve at one end and the radiator fell off the wall. They also hacked off the bottom 18" of the window shutter box and left it virtually unsuported. 1 tweak with a crowbar and the whole thing came off the wall.


This house has been wallpapered that many times that when you got a hole in the wall instead of stripping all the paper off and repairing it one of the previous owners just patched the hole flush to the 10 layers of wall paper. So when I've done the job properly there is the odd lump in the wall.

When the backbedroom was split to provide a bathroom the studded wall was bodged out of scrap bits of 2x2 and screwed to the laths in the ceiling so if you leant against it it moved.

The back bedroom had been wallpapered and they obviously got fed up doing it so they didn't bother trimming the last length of paper leaving 4" of paper stuck to the ceiling.

When the bathroom was installed instead of taking the bath waste pipe a few inches further it was put through the lead flashing of the kitchen roof and not sealed so every time it rained water came down the kitchen wall straight into the light switch.
 
aqua said:
what have you lot found in your houses when you've come to decorate?
Click to expand...


Not just decoration, my bungalow seems to have been constructed by a load of cowboys. Gable wall and common wall with my neighbour four inches out of parallel. Some of the blockwork in the walls is of a banned type of block for house construction because it has Blue Halvin (Sp) in it which bloody near close to impossible to drill into. (Mind you it would probably stand a nuclear blast with few problems.)
 
I think DIY is one of those areas where people believe its a doddle, that its something that doesnt require any thinking about whatsoever, I guess such peoples thought processes only switch on when they have their severed index finger packed in a hanky of Ice as their daughter runs them to casualty, think before you do DIY:o:D
 
Oh id forgotten all about this...
My charming ex partner redecorated the hallway. We moved to a house up the road a few months later as ours was damp.
New tenants moved in and decided the hallways wasnt to their taste, stripping off the wallpaper he found some 'charming' cartoons my ex had drawn which apparently showed me and him shagging in a variety of positions.( complete with arrows to our names-why the hell he did this is anyones guess)

I almost died when they told me:o:( He didnt see the issue and was quite proud of it. he was a knob. Fortunately they were lovely about it
 
moose said:
My walls have been papered over and over since the middle of the century before last. I'm not brave enough to peel it off cos I think the house may fall down :D

When we took up the stone flagged floor a few years ago, we realised the house had no foundations. Small detail :D
Click to expand...

Yeah, my folk's is like that. Still its three hundred years old so it'll stand for a few years yet. Upstairs has oak floarboards about 8" thick and nearly a foot wide. They're fucking ace.

Was built in 1723 IIRC :cool:
 
I had a house which had been last decorated in the 70s by somebody who did far too finer a job. Everything I tried to remove was glued, nailed, screwed and reinforced with steel buggering bars.

The worst was some nasty 70s stone clad fireplaces that where reinforced with steel bars running through in all directions, including the concrete back fill.
 
i decided to redecorate my bathroom, started taking the tiles off and pulled a section of wall out! barrats had tiled straight onto plasterboard!!!!!!!!!! :eek:

when my mom moved into her new place, she wanted rid of the laminate in the front room, so i got to work. the bloody pratt who lived there last had put a new fireplace over the top of the flooring!!!!!!
the fact that he is a plumber, the bathroom is shocking
 
Oh, our house is much better now!

We had loads of work done on it.

The bathroom floor is too fucking squeaky for my liking, but we can't do much about that - again, the previous owners ex fucked it up, and we don't even know if it could be sorted out without digging the floor up - there used to be a fireplace in the bathroom, when he took it out, he just bunged down a load of concrete.. I sometimes worry that one day it'll fall out and the toilet will end up in the mungle room!
 
My living room floor was laid by previous owners who employed either a very drunken builder or Stevie Wonder. It's uneven as fuck and upon some excavation seems to be on top of about a foot of sand. Wouldn't surprise me if somebody ex-spouse was underneath the sand.

Somebody also wallpapered the front room and built a brick fireplace on top of the wallpaper. They put a plastic damp-proof sheet directly behind a gas fire which I had removed. My Bro (a Corgi registered Engineer) nearly had a heart attack when he removed that shitty old fire and found it was surround by plastic sheeting.

The electrics are......something else!
 
Jesus, thought ours was bad.

Knocked down our old lean-to/outhouse thingy as the window frames were all rotten, found out the concrete plinth finished half-an-inch above the damp course. Also found the kitchen waste goes into an open drain, surrounded by said concrete plinth.

It pisses me off as it would have taken zero effort not to have left it so crap. We had hobson's choice on the lean-to, it was so badly built we couldn't knock through and make it part of the kitchen, and we couldn't afford to have it rebuilt properly. No idea why they couldn't have left it lower, and put in a closed drain.

The other disasters were just poor taste, and a downstairs carpet full of fleas and the piss of a Doberman. It stank, but at least we could rip it out.
 
butterfly child said:
Oh, our house is much better now!

We had loads of work done on it.

The bathroom floor is too fucking squeaky for my liking, but we can't do much about that - again, the previous owners ex fucked it up, and we don't even know if it could be sorted out without digging the floor up - there used to be a fireplace in the bathroom, when he took it out, he just bunged down a load of concrete.. I sometimes worry that one day it'll fall out and the toilet will end up in the mungle room!
Click to expand...

What's a mungle room?? :confused:
 
Our landlord is pretty hopeless. I reckon it's because it doesn't matter if he does it or not. He bought the house for buttons about 20 years ago. He's going to make about £250 k profit if he sells it. Bath about to descend into kitchen? Minor detail. Just keeps painting over the damp...
 
we've just taken some more wallpaper off the wall :D there's now quite a lot of plaster off the wall too :D :o

this is turning into quite a big job :D
 
Dovydaitis said:
i decided to redecorate my bathroom, started taking the tiles off and pulled a section of wall out! barrats had tiled straight onto plasterboard!!!!!!!!!! :eek:
Click to expand...

I didn't think there was anything wrong with tiling onto plasterboard as long as you dress it with PVA or something :confused:

Surely your problem was that plasterboard wasn't fixed to anything properly. The fact that pulling the tiles off pulled the wall out suggest the tiles were rather well stuck :D
 
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