Look
See? I told you. You didn't believe me and now it's all awkward and I don't know if I can invite you to Thanksgiving.
The stairs were a mess when I bought the place. Then one day a few years ago this man from prison knocked on my door and was like "I will patch up your stairs for negative ten dollars." Technically he wasn't still from prison. He said he had just gotten out and he was looking for odd jobs.
I really wanted to take him up on the offer because I'm all about second chances and I don't know what he did to go to prison. But also, his bid was so cheap and I figured that there was no way he could make it look worse.
I didn't have time to negotiate a contract with him. I was literally walking out the door to catch an Uber to the airport when he was getting ready to knock. So I was like "I don't have time now because I'm heading to the airport and leaving my house completely abandoned and I don't have a security system and I'll be back in two weeks and no one is watching the place for me and there's a spare key hidden right under this mat and I have mounds of jewels inside so could you maybe come back later so we can talk about this further?"
It's a miracle that I didn't get robbed. It's probably because he was just a murderer or kidnapper or something harmless and not a burglar.
In any event, the man from prison never came back, so my stairs got worse and worse. Then last summer Mr. Pham was building the patio in the backyard or ripping out my rose bushes or burying a dead body or something. I never really know for sure. But sometime during the middle of his hopefully-legal work he yelled something at me about how he was going to fix my steps since there were literally rocks the size of baseballs breaking off of them.
The next thing I knew, the large pieces of crumbling concrete had been glued back together. It didn't look good, but it didn't look worse, either. Mostly.
Then winter came and it snowed every other minute for five straight months. Freezing and thawing. Freezing and thawing. I used so much rock salt on my steps this winter that the entire city's groundwater is now contaminated and we all have hypertension.
I decided that it was finally time to face the fact that I probably need to have these steps ripped out and re-poured, which only costs exactly $200,000. I was saving that money for all of you to go to college but would you rather have a future or let mamma get herself some new steps?
Don't be selfish.
The contractor came yesterday and was like "HOW ARE YOU EVEN STILL WALKING ON THESE THIS PATCH JOB IS TERRIBLE WHOEVER DID IT SHOULD BE IN PRISON" and I was like "funny you should say prison."
I know. I bought an old house. The constant barrage of problems and endless list of needed updates should have been foreseen. Now is not the time to tell me this. Not right after I found out none of you can go to college.
Make me feel better. Tell me about your home disasters and worst home improvement experiences.
~It Just Gets Stranger
Last July my husband and I did a very adult thing. We bought our first house! We needed a washer and dryer and we picked a not cheap but not sell your soul/first born to the devil expensive type. The installers came and they couldn’t install the dryer because the wall outlet was actually for an oven range and they couldn’t install the washer because they couldn’t disconnect the hot and cold hose and they also couldn’t connect the old hose to the new washer because it didnt fit. So he suggested calling a plumber and an electrician. No thanks I’m cheap. So I waited a week for my father-in-law to come visit. He exchanged the wall outlet and found parts to connect the hose to the washer. Everything was fine until we did a test wash. The washer got to the drain cycle and we heard a loud noise. My FIL ran upstairs to find, that in all the repairs we forgot to connect the hose that drains the water to the actual drain. He yelled to turn off the water main and I ran as fast as I have ever gone, I shut off the water, and thought we were safe. As soon as I walked back inside water starts pouring out of the lights and air vents in my ceiling. I tried to move as much stuff as possible so it didn’t get damaged. I grabbed every single towel I owned to help clean up the water. I also got my umbrella and asked my MIL to take a picture of me standing in the kitchen, with my umbrella, with water dripping from the ceiling. I promptly sent the picture to my husband, who was at work, and said “everything is fine here how’s work?!?” Luckily there was no water damage and we flushed a lot of spiders out. Now I guess I can say I am officially a home owner because I flooded my own house!
ReplyDeleteYou just described an actual recurring nightmare I have.
DeleteYou simply can't make this stuff up!
DeleteAll I got from your story was that flooding your house gets rid of spiders. I see that as a major improvement and worth the flood.
DeleteI would like to see the picture for closure please.
DeleteSadly shutting off the water will do nothing when a washer that is already full of water is in it's draining cycle. Maybe unplugging it would have stopped it. I've done this too, where I could hear splashing/running water, only after having to search too long, discovering that the drain pipe isn't securely sitting in the drain hole.
DeleteI second the motion to see the picture.
DeleteYes, shutting off the water main didn’t do much but my FIL did unplug the washing machine. Here is a little video I also sent my husband.
Deletehttps://www.instagram.com/p/BkwIWxFARE2/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=1kqd4acmyyrkw
Closed on our first house today. I can't read any of these stories now. I haven't slept in weeks with the whole process! This def won't help.
ReplyDeleteI don’t know where to begin. We bought a 1960s fixer upper and I have regretted every second of it. My husband shut the electric off to the living room to install a ceiling fan. The lights didn’t work, nor did the tv, so we assumed the fuse box was correct. Wrong. He electrocuted himself. Turns out, we had to turn off the fuse for the bathroom, clear on the other end of the house, for the living room ceiling fan power to go off as well. Our realtor is a friend of ours and hooked up his old washer and dryer for us right before we moved in. As the internet was getting installed, I ran my first load of laundry. The internet guy said he was going to leave through the back door. Seconds later I heard screams that the house was flooding. My entire laundry room and part of the kitchen flooded. It was -10 outside, and I was standing in ice cold water with the back door open, trying to sweep it outside while my 2 year old scream-cried for me. I was hysterical. I picked her up, just to slip in the floodwaters, fall, and bang her head on the floor. Somehow we both survived. I put the wet towels I used to soak up the water in the dryer, and the dryer died on the spot. I went to Lowe’s that night for a new washer and dryer, literally still in tears over the ordeal, and the salesman laughed in my face when I told him I needed next day delivery. The next day, still not used to the TINY single stall garage door, I drove my car into the garage. A few weeks later, I had a sneaking suspicion something was wrong. I walked around the house to discover the sellers had left a hose screwed into an outside spigot. It was hidden behind a big bush, so we had missed it. It was January. We were in the middle of a polar vortex. The hose had exploded from ice and the pipe was 2 seconds away from doing the same thing. My daughter’s crib was on the other side of the wall. I had to ask an elderly neighbor to borrow a wrench to get the frozen hose off, then use extension cords to sit in the -25 temperatures with a blow dryer trying to thaw the pipe. Also! Our realtor met us at closing and told us that he had been at the house to try to stop a leak in the bathtub (we really need to let him stop helping us), and when he went to turn the water main off, it broke. The house had no water. When the plumber came to fix it a few days later, a pipe in the bathroom disintegrated. At least the water had been turned off!
ReplyDeleteWhen we moved to Kalamazoo we decided to rent before deciding on a place to buy. It just so happened that we ended up buying the house we rented because we liked it. We lived there exactly 3 years and 1 month before we closed on the house making us the legal owners (and thus responsible for ALL home repairs). Approximately 14 days after that I noticed the floorboards in my upstairs bedroom were wet. At first I thought maybe our new kitten (because we owned the house I could finally get a cat) had peed on them but they definitely did NOT smell like cat urine.
ReplyDeleteSo we called in someone to look at it and he examined our bedroom floors and walls and then went downstairs to examine the living room (which is under our bedroom) ceiling, wall, and floor. He then went outside to look at the exterior wall. When he came back in he told us that it looked like the ice from the winter (it was particularly cold and icy that winter) had punched a hole in our siding (because it's AWFUL and old) and water had gotten in and frozen creating an ice dam under the siding. It was now melting and had no place to go but the inside of our house.
We ended up having to make a huge insurance claim - one month after buying the house we'd lived in for over 3 years. They tore our part of my bedroom wall and the insulation behind it and replaced it, redid my bedroom floor, tore out the entire exterior living room wall and insulation and replaced them, and also replaced our gutters, which evidently should have protected the hole in the siding.
They were willing to replace ONLY the one strip of siding that was damaged. It was in the middle of the house. And the siding was 25 years old - no one sells that type anymore. So we took the money and replaced our front door (that leaked something awful) and just patched the hole in the siding.
The construction took 3 months to complete. Not nearly as bad as Meg's basement, but I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of another room until it was done.
Oh - and this was 5 years ago - this summer we're finally putting new siding on the house!
We bought a renovated Katrina house that has an addition to the original shotgun structure. If you can't understand all that, then you don't live in New Orleans and I envy you your power bills and next-to-nothing auto insurance... Basically, the previous owner bought a house that needed to be completely gutted and rebuilt, added the only bedrooms the house has and a bathroom, and then finally decided to sell it. It's a lovely home. We love it. It's gorgeous. But... My husband had to take most of the inner doors off the jams, shove toothpicks and wood glue into the holes, and then re-attach the doors because the previous owner used 1/2" screws to attach the doors. And one of our kitchen drawers doesn't stay closed... It just... slips open about 2" and stays that way. And the dryer vent hose thing was never correctly sealed, so every time we dry our laundry, the middle part of our house feels like the third circle of a very humid hell (although that's also basically August in New Orleans...) And the bottom part of the outer door frame for our back door has completely rotted away, so now we may need to replace the entire door frame, or just the bottom part. We can't really tell about most of this...
ReplyDeleteNone of it is actually major, but it all adds up. All of my sympathies for this next "adventure" in home ownership!
Kylie, I had to laugh. I thought something was majorly wrong with our house-- our front door wouldn't open and close correctly. Now, it's a large door with a large, leaded glass window. I went to my husband all like, "The house is falling apart!"
DeleteWell, when he looked at the door, it was coming out of the frame because they had used 1/2" screws. In the middle of reattaching the door with longer, larger screws, he, in a very aggravated tone, said, "This is what is wrong with the world!"... meaning that people do poor jobs, or half-do jobs, or workmanship is poor... whatever...
So, I replied, "Doors with 1/2" screws?" LOL...
That is now our basic go-to when anything goes wrong... everything wrong in the world and society is the fault of doors with 1/2" screws. :)
Congrats on your home in NOLA, btw... we're only a short drive away, and we love to come spend long weekends.
I bought my house from my brother 13 years ago. His ex-father in law had built it for him when he was married to his first wife. I naively thought this meant that a loving father had built a sturdy and well finished house for his oldest daughter. WRONG, it's a piece of crap that literally started falling apart the second I closed on it.
ReplyDeleteMultiple pipes in different parts of the house have burst. I have had to replace every single major appliance. The furnace died, the utensil drawer next to the kitchen sink can't be fully opened unless you open the oven door. The one car garage is only big enough to fit a geo metro so I turned it into a home gym instead. One of my friends accidentally drove her car into the back wall of the house and pushed it a couple inches into the kitchen and that had to be pulled out, which seems surprisingly easy. The exterior water faucet broke and flooded the first floor of my house, when the contractor came to fix it he discovered there was NO insulation in my exterior walls. One of my delightful neighbors in this ghetto neighborhood got a raging cockroach infestations and then the roaches got into the sewer system and started coming up out of the drains in all the houses (good thing I work for a pest control company). And there are three outlets in the house where if I have a lamp plugged into them they will randomly turn on if I plug anything else into another electrical outlet and turn it on.
Either the house is haunted by the passive aggressive ghost of my late ex-sister in law (yeah you read that right, it's a long story) who is having an extremely boring after life...or it was built on an burial ground. My house is going to collapse any day now and I'll have to salt and burn the ground it was built on and move in with my mother to completely give up on life.
FYI my house was built in 1997. It is younger than I am and it has problems that usually don't start cropping up in a well built home until 30 or 40 years in. I forgot to mention that it needs a new roof, new carpet, new paint, new flooring in the bathrooms where it is curling up, new blinds, and a new water heater. I'm so bad at staying on top of things. I need adult supervision.
DeleteI can't get past your reference to the geo metro. That was my first car my parents bought for me. It had no air conditioning, no power windows, and NO POWER STEERING. I have never even heard of that in any other vehicle ever, and it was ALWAYS hilarious when I would let my friends drive it because you really had to put the bulk of your muscle into every turn and people would (because of course I wouldn't warn them) always assume the steering wheel was broken. Then once those friends were in on it, we would let new friends drive it, and watch them go through the same panic. Fun every time, teenage drivers are the worst. But that car was my favorite little thing. crossing my fingers that I can post this... the internets have really been after me lately, my phone has started blocking me from every other website I try to visit telling me they are "restricted" when the google search I had done was like "how to boil pasta" or "how far away does grandma live" and I'm about to quit the whole technology thing and commune with nature in Alaska.
DeleteI about died when I read that you can't open the utensil drawer all the way unless the oven is open!
DeleteYou should probably just move in with Eli and Skylar... problem solved (once he gets those dangerous steps fixed of course.
DeleteCJ, when Eli talks about wanting to have a baby I don't think I'm the baby or the baby mamma he has in mind, so living with them would be awkward.
DeleteYou underestimate us, The Suzzzzzzzzzz.
DeleteI didn't say I'd be the ONLY one making things awkward.
DeleteWe bought a house built in 1908 that needed some work. Our real estate agent told us about a construction loan, which sounded perfect - someone who knows what they're doing fixes all the issues and a HUD inspector makes sure it's right. Then we move in! EXCEPT, what was supposed to be done in 4 months is now going on 6 months and isn't even close to being done (my "totally reachable" goal of moving in is going to pass with lots of stuff still left to do). The GC wants more money because he's paying for things out of pocket upfront, the bank doesn't want to give him money until the work is done, we've paid for the asbestos removal, kitchen appliances and roof out of pocket to get it done/delivered, AND we're paying two mortgages. Plus, our current house is on the market so we have to keep it "show ready" ALL THE TIME AND I JUST WANT TO BE ABLE TO NOT CLEAN ALL THE TIME!
ReplyDeleteOur 2nd house was built in 1931. It had a charming breakfast nook off of the kitchen and soon after moving in, it started feeling a little soft. We blamed the leaky dishwasher, thinking that the water had slowly rotted the floor. But by this point, when someone sat at the back of the nook, the floor dropped over 1.5 inches, enough that we could peer in and see the termite infestation. We know there were termites and the house was being tested and treated regularly but obviously these were super termites. We tore up the floor, only to find that they had made a meal of both sublayers of floor, the floor joists and the sill plate. My dad, my husband and I fixed the damage. This included me going down in the inaccessible crawl space to install insulation because the guys forgot and I was the only one small enough to fit. Well me and the huge spiders and mutant termites. We decided to tile the floor after all this hard work, poured the floor leveler and it ran in streams into our quasi-finished basement. We cried uncle and called the drug-dealer/tile installer we knew to finish the job. And the termite enforcer applied enough bug killer to keep the entire neighborhood bug free...
ReplyDeleteCould you rip out the concrete and then do some nice stone work/tile steps instead? I bet Matt could do both of those things for you and he has never been to prison. I think.
ReplyDeleteMy sister purchased a home that had 1940's era faulty wiring - there had been a small fire. They knew this when they bought the house, and fixed it immediately. While they were at it they did a bit of cosmetic remodeling . Not long after, she (now pregnant with boy #4) and her husband came home from his father's funeral to find that a pipe had burst and flooded her entire home, and had been running for three days. While they were gutting the entire main floor, a neighbor called to tell them that the front yard was flooded. They discovered that the supply pipe in the front yard had rotted. The pipes looked like lace they were so thin. They and their now 4 boys under age 7 lived in a hotel until that got old, then moved in with my parents and used the insurance to re-build and re-plumb everything from the brick walls in.
ReplyDeleteI broke my leg 8 weeks ago and looking at all those steps makes me cringe. If you decide to redo the steps, have a thought for those that are less mobile. If they can't get in your house, they can't tell you how great your hair looks. ;)
ReplyDeleteI wonder how much a ski lift would cost me!
DeleteOh, the last house I lived in was bulldozed after I moved out. Best thing that could happen to it.
ReplyDeleteI bought a 6 year old house about 9 years ago. It's in a well-known, utopia-type neighborhood in Utah. I thought this meant high quality and perfect, but I was wrong (don't get me wrong, the neighborhood is great, but the houses aren't the quality I thought they'd be). 4 months after I bought the house, we had a big snowstorm followed by a big freeze, and then a thaw. When everything thawed, the whole neighborhood flooded. I think 5 or 6 people on my block had flooded basements, including me. I spent Christmas Eve and part of Christmas vacuuming water out of my basement every 20 minutes. I had to tear all the carpet out and set up fans to dry things out for the next week. My dad and I jack hammered a hole through the foundation in what had been my bedroom and installed a below-ground sump pump. For months I was scared to put carpet in again in case it flooded again, but I eventually did. The next summer, one of the solenoids on my sprinkler system broke while I was out of town and water seeped into my basement over a few days. Luckily I had good neighbors who called me and then broke into my house to turn off the water and stop the flood. Again, I pulled the carpet up a little bit (thankfully not all of it this time).
ReplyDeleteI also had a shower that never drained right. It was a long skinny shower with a tile floor, and the drain was in the middle. Somehow, when the original person built it, they set the lowest part of the floor to be about a foot in front of the drain, so all the water would pool there and never dried, unless I mopped it out after every shower. After a couple years I decided to be fancy and I hired someone to reset the floor and install a glass door while he was at it. He told me it'd be easy and said specifically to go to Home Depot to buy a door because he was familiar with their doors and could install it. So I did. When he came to do the work, he took out one tile and replaced it. Did nothing to change the slope of the floor. But of course I couldn't test it until the grout had dried a day after he left, so I didn't know he did nothing. Also, he spent about half a day trying to install the glass door, and finally said he couldn't figure it out and left me with a completely unusable shower. It took me a year to find someone who was willing to try. They took out the whole floor, re-sloped it, and installed the door. About a year later, I noticed water damage around the outside of the shower. By then, the company that had redone everything was out of business and the warranty was worthless. So I found yet another person to come in. They found that the last company had cut the walls off the shower pan, so water was flowing freely out the sides. Seriously. And they had to take off the glass door to make the repairs. So many thousands of dollars and a few years after I started, I was basically back to point A. So I sold the house and moved. Also, in the 8 years or so I lived there, EVERY time I had to have someone repair anything, they told me the way it had been built was the cheapest way possible, and a few times the materials used had been out of code compliance at the time it was built. I loved that house, but it had so many issues. And now I'm so paranoid about water getting anywhere near my house.
This sounds a lot like a case I handled once for a bunch of homeowners (one of the most stressful experiences of my life). Who was the builder?
DeleteI think it was Gold Medallion. They had gone out of business before I bought, so I had very little recourse.
Deletehaving worked in architecture and land development, this is a very very common practice, even when you pick the 'highest' echelon of the ivory tower builders if you get what I'm saying.
DeleteSince commenting seems to be working for me today, I'm just going to jump in and say hi everybody, even though I don't really have any nightmare stories like these... although I will just say this in all caps and shudder while doing so: CARPET BEETLES. I will spare you the living nightmare that was finding them but it involved my - no. No, seriously, I'm cutting this off. Doing all of you this favor. I don't want to relive it and you shouldn't have to either.
ReplyDeleteMatt's stairs in his house look great, so I bet he could work his magic on your front steps. He has PLENTY of time for extra projects like that.
We do have to have our entire backyard re-graded this summer, it's taken us ten years of flooding and water issues to get up the guts for this major job and I am so terrified of hiring the wrong contractor because look at all these stories of what happens when you hire the wrong contractor!!!
You know - I was wondering why Eli didn't just canoodle Matt into doing the steps . . .
DeleteMaybe because Eli has never learned to smize as well as Matt... but I have no confirmation this is accurate. Someone needs to do some research for us.
DeleteWe decided to work on our master bedroom, including changing a doorway & wall, removing wallpaper, carpet removal & having the original hardwood restored, etc. We moved our bed to the basement to sleep there during this process. Well, we got part way in to the project, then got kind of lazy and didn't work on it for a while. As in, more than a year. Finally I told my husband I was tired of sleeping in the basement and that we should get working on the master bedroom again. Somehow we decided to move out of the basement and into the guest room. But the guest room already had a bed, so we put our mattresses on top of the guest bed and slept on a stack of four mattresses. I had to use a step stool to go to bed. This lasted another YEAR. I had about had it by then. We ended up both taking time off work and spending several days plugging away day and night to just get that project done. House projects are a pain in the you know where!
ReplyDeleteFlooding seems to be a common thing on here. One time the washing machine overflowed. It wasn’t fun to clean up, but I did fix the machine on my own. Last fall my bedroom flooded and I had to sleep on a mattress on the floor in my living room for like 6 weeks while they dealt with each step they needed to take. But I didn’t have to do so much that time. Being a renter has some perks, I suppose.
ReplyDelete(I may have left this comment 3x now...Google is being difficult!)
ReplyDeleteMy front steps are also horrendous right now, I’ll have to send you a picture. I have photographed them because I need to tell my landlord about them. My landlord is Albanian (I think. I know his wife is from Kosovo and I believe they speak Albanian to each other but I know nothing about Europe). He considers himself something of a contractor, and if he can’t do it himself, he has 37 “cousins” who are in all manners of trade and he sends one of them to fix whatever is wrong with the house. This means that when we notify him of problems, it either takes months for him to get to it, or he majorly inconveniences himself and multiple family members to get it taken care of the very next day (he came and replaced the boiler on his birthday!!) Neither solution is great and he doesn’t trust anyone else to work on the house, so we can’t just hire someone and have him reimburse us.
ANYWAY. I believe he and a cousin re-did the steps a few years back, but they haven’t held up to the bitter New England winters well at all. They’re supposed to be decorative, with like a slab of stone for each stepping surface, but one slab is currently threatening to completely slide off each time it’s stepped upon. So yeah I feel very safe walking in and out of my house multiple times a day while carrying children. Yay stairs!!!
Also my not-contractor landlord tiled the entire bathroom a few years ago when he lived in the house. Literally the floor, shower/bath walls, and halfway up all the other walls are done in the EXACT SAME TILE. Anyway I don’t think he mixed he grout correctly because it crumbles off and he color of the grout wipes off on my cleaning rags....but I don’t know how to approach him about that problem.
The best part of this house is the plumbing. The original owner put in a “dry well” 50-60 years ago but it definitely doesn’t work anymore because all of our “grey water” (everything but the toilet and the dishwasher, which go to a septic) just shoots out into a ditch in the yard. It’s real nice. We call it the stinky water ditch and sometimes it backs up into the washing machine.
Last December my husband went downstairs to find the carpet wet and the hardwood floor making a squishy noise every time he took a step, and discovered our water heater was leaking. So, we started drying what we could with towels and, my husband - in his panic of mold growing - quickly began ripping up floorboards, carpet and padding to avoid said mold. Luckily the leak only spread to about a 6 foot diameter, so he didn't have to rip up much hardwood floor. I invited my dad over a week or so later to help us lay down the boards once it was dry, and he proceeded to tell us:
ReplyDelete1. We did not need to rip up these floorboards because it is extremely rare for cold dry concrete to grow mold especially with the moisture barrier padding and 2. We cannot just snap back the pieces we took up because of how it is laid the entire floor will now have to be removed and lastly 3. We cannot use the same boards because once they are torn up they will no longer fit back together and lay flat….
So we had to buy all new flooring for our basement. Oh and a new water heater.