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Avoid sloppily renovated homes!
This is the lesson our kitchen remodel is teaching us. Our place converted from apartments to condos in 1984 and underwent a "rehab." Quotation marks are completely required because, as we've been working on the kitchen, we've found so many weird things, particularly with the wiring. But who doesn't love bare wires from the 1940s showing up everywhere once you start going into the ceilings, walls, and even the bulkhead? :-P
Let's just say the kitchen renovation is going to take a long time. Besides only being able to work on it on weekends, MH is having to go incredibly slowly because of all the weird things he's finding. Ah, well, the end result will be worth it! I can't wait until I cook and bake in a Matt-designed space!
Anyone else have an interesting remodeling/renovation story?
Re: Avoid sloppily renovated homes!
My last house had a partially finished basement. Or, rather, a partially "finished" basement. The carpet was cheap indoor/outdoor stuff laying on top of the cement, the walls were faux wood paneling, and the ceiling was interlocking fiberboard tiles (not the kind with a metal frame, all the tiles interlocked so when one tile drooped, the whole ceiling drooped.
The light fixtures in the "finished" area were industrial fluorescent fixtures like you'd see in a workshop or behind the plastic frosted panels in a school's drop ceiling. One of them didn't work when I moved in but since I never spent much time down there, I didn't bother to look at it. I assumed it was just a burned out bulb.
When I was engaged to DH and we were prepping that house for sale, I bought a new light bulb for the fixture and DH put it in. It didn't work. He started fiddling with the bulb and the light fixture game him a shock. Uh oh. He pulled down the ceiling tiles around the fixture and found exposed, ungrounded electrical wires all over the place. Yikes!
Eventually we tore down all the ceiling tiles because there was no way to repair the hole (the tiles broke when we took them down) and they looked crappy anyway. When I got to the last corner of the room, I felt something start to fall down on me. For a second I pictured a dead squirrel or something landing on me, but it wasn't a critter. It was a stack of porn dvds the last owner apparently forgot to take with him.
Oh my! Wackadoodle wiring makes me nervous. Actually my face looked like this the whole time because of what I do for work (insurance loss control...shudder): O_O
This was the fixture we had in our kitchen until very recently. The basement in your old place was clearly a complete disaster!
I could go on and on...
Just two of our major issues with our house are not just the mold but the MUSHROOMS that were growing behind our dining room walls and the undisclosed fire 5 years before we bought it... they had told us the roof, plumbing, and the electric had been updated "within the last 5 years" but no explanation of why, and we knew the current owner had flipped it, so it didn't seem suspicious at the time. A friend of mine told me about the fire several months after we bought it.
My Wedding Bio! Not updated in a LONG time!
We bought a 2 year old unfinished cape that the previous owner was in the process of finishing (looks like he was in a hurry to before it sold but he didn't finish and we got an incredibly good deal).
Last year when DH and his friend opened up a wall to do wiring and build closets in the master br they found a piece of sheetrock that was signed and dated by previous owner's friends/construction workers (?) that said, "at least we're not Mexicans"... yeah. I don't think they were legit contractors or really knew what they were doing because all of the door frames are different sizes and we cleaned up many, many beer cans off the floor.
We hired a legit contractor this week to finish up and make sure things were up to code.