Horror stories of home maintenance
Repairs done by do-it-yourselfers sometimes go beyond the pale
By Elizabeth Rand-Watkinson - The Globe and Mail
Having renovated a few of my own homes, and with almost 20 years of experience in design, I thought I’d seen a thing or two. That was before I looked at the website for This Old House (http://www.thisoldhouse.com), where a series of photo galleries display “home inspection nightmares,” including “the best of the worst” for 2006.
These actual findings are provided to This Old House by the American Society of Home Inspectors (ASHI; http://www.ashireporter.org) and make for jaw-dropping reading, especially when you learn that some of these homes passed municipal inspections. If you’ve ever suspected Mickey Mouse had been let loose with a hammer and wrench in one of your homes, read on.
This is just a sampling of the gob-smacking idiocies ASHI inspectors have uncovered. Remember, don’t try this at home, folks!
Instead of using the proper shim or steel plate to bridge the gap between the top of a steel support column and a girder (you know, those things that hold up your house), one innovative homeowner stuck a rusty old wrench and weightlifter’s plate into the gap. This is not okay. I don’t care where you live.
We’re not sure if he intended it as a piece of abstract art for a limited audience or a replication of his screensaver, but one amateur plumber’s convoluted drainage system could have passed for either. This one is appropriately entitled “A plumbing odyssey” on the website.
In an example of what the home inspector called “fine Ozark engineering” in a basement, another do-it-yourselfer attached a rusted car radiator to the floor joists and piped water to it from his wood burning boiler. The inspector said the homeowners always wondered why their system didn’t work very well.
Another example of the misuse of auto parts — or perhaps a case of mechanic/plumber cross-training gone horribly wrong — is the use of a radiator hose from a 1945 Pontiac to replace piping leading to the home’s main draw stack. Perhaps 1945 was the year they manufactured multifunctional radiator hoses.
Then there’s the photo of the supply and return air registers that had been installed, very neatly I must say, within three inches of each other — one on the ceiling, the other on the wall — to ensure the heated air wasted no time flowing right back into the furnace. Such efficiency!
There were so many “good” ones, it was hard to pick just one favourite. Here are two:
The homeowner who installed his chimney stack within what looks like about 18 inches of a bedroom window with an air conditioner in it. Is our air really that bad that you wouldn’t notice the air conditioner sucking in chimney exhaust?
My other favourite was dubbed “Harry Homeowner” by the inspector. “Harry” saw no problem with installing a meltable PVC pipe smack up against his flue pipe, the one intended to funnel flue gasses out of the house. Now, flue pipes are known to get a tad warm, but why worry when you’ve got a handy-dandy piece of cardboard to shove between the two?
Honourable mentions go to:
* An old jock strap used to tie an electric light to a cross beam (a case of recycling gone wild);
* A chimney supported by only air and one lonely brick;
* Broken framing members repaired with duct tape;
* Raw tree trunks used as structural support columns in a basement;
* Electrical outlets installed inside shower stalls.
* Flue pipes fashioned entirely out of aluminum foil;
* Rain gutters capped at both ends, perhaps to facilitate the growth of ferns, which is always a nice look.
And finally, there’s everyone favourite “unhandy person” trick: leaving “hot” electrical wires exposed inside walls.
In this case, the homeowner did attach a note saying, “Please be careful,” and advised that the wires were live. He gets extra points for courtesy.
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