I bought a fixer upper a few years ago and have been renovating it little by little since then. Over the last few years, I've come across quite a few cut corners and odd things. Here are a few:

1. Replacing a ceiling fan - no ground wire
Yesterday I replaced a ceiling fan and noticed there was no ground wire available. Odd, yes, but the house is about 45 years old and I figured maybe, for whatever reason, it wasn't available when the house was built. Still odd and probably wrong but I figured it's gone this long without one with no problems so what the hell. Ended up not being able to use the existing bracket/housing in the ceiling because the fan I bought was too heavy. Went into the attic to replace the bracket and when I pulled the wire, I realized the ground was there, it had just been cut off way up into the attic. WHY WOULD THAT HAVE BEEN DONE? If the previous owner/builder installed a fixture there that didn't have a ground, why not just not use the ground wire in the feed? Cutting it off a foot from the end of the feed wire is just odd.

2. All the floating flooring in my house was installed using roofing felt as a moisture barrier and no padding was installed. ROOFING FELT! Yes, technically it's a moisture barrier but it held moisture really bad and it was all full of mold and mildew. After replacing the floors, the house smelled MUCH better. And the floors were much more comfortable and quieter to walk on, too.

3. Recently gutted a bedroom to replace insulation because the room was frigid in the winter time. Figured either very little insulation existed or there was none at all. To my surprise, there was LOTS of insulation in the exterior walls. Too much, actually. The builder had actually compressed two R-11 pieces of insulation between each stud in an attempt to create R-22 insulation when in reality it was compressed so badly that it was probably only about R-8 or so. Replaced it with R-13 and the room is much more comfortable and quieter now.

I'm sure there have been others that I'm just not remembering right now but these are the ones that stick out in my mind at the moment. What are some that you've come across that made you say "WTF"?

Large pile of razor blades in the wall behind the medicine cabinets.

Also a note from my younger self when I remodelled before. Had the date and signature.

I owned a condo in college. It was full of "that's the next guys problem" jobs.

More than once, I went to replace a light switch and every wire in the box was black. I used withe out to paint the wire white and stuffed it back in.

NO barrier underneath the flooring.

No drip pan underneath the ac unit.

I don't even want to know the whys on some of the wiring in my current home. Why some things are on the same circuit is mind boggling.

I also came across the wall cavity razor blade disposal system. Weird, but I guess it must have seemed safer than tossing the blades into the trash.

Same house, which I no longer own thank-the-angels-and-all-the-saints: ripped out some built-in bookshelves in the living room, which required removing paneling and replacing it. Discovered that there was literally wadded up newspaper in the wall cavity as insulation. Newspapers dated from the early 60s.

The people that owned my house (original owners) were master electricians.

They used 2 sets of scrap wire, about 2-3 feet each, to extend a light fixture about 4 inches. Had A LOT of slack in the ceiling.

Wired one of my lights backwards. Could not figure out why my new fan wouldn't work when the light was turned off.

Used on old vacuum cord to install a new outlet in the hall. Worked for lights, not for power tools or a vacuum, ironically.

I had a shower panel fail in an upstairs shower. When I ripped it out the subfloor was rotted away, and it turned into a complete bathroom remodel.

When I pulled up the subfloor around the toilet I found that several joists had been cut off because the stink stack ran perpendicular to the joists to the other side the shower. There was no beam or anything. Three joists just ended about two feet from the wall carrying the load. I have no idea how this didn't sag. I put a double ribbon between the two joists that hit the exterior wall.

Replaced carpet in the upstairs game room of our house and found several smashed flat beer cans in the corner under the pad. We never noticed it because we had furniture there.

Large pile of razor blades in the wall behind the medicine cabinets.

this is SOP, all medicine cabinets came with a slot in the back wall to eject used blades into the wall

it was safer then in the trash since in older days most trash got burned and/or recycled and it was dangerous to have discarded razer blades mixed into the trash

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2. All the floating flooring in my house was installed using roofing felt as a moisture barrier and no padding was installed. ROOFING FELT! Yes, technically it's a moisture barrier but it held moisture really bad and it was all full of mold and mildew. After replacing the floors, the house smelled MUCH better. And the floors were much more comfortable and quieter to walk on, too.

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Felt paper is a very common moisture barrier for flooring. I laid it under my hardwood last year.

good thread

We're just about wrapping up a renovation of our circa 1995 home thanks to Hurricane MIchael. A few highlights:

- second floor master bath vent exhausted into attic, not to the exterior
- first floor bath vent exhaust piped 30' away to the far side of the house instead of 2' to the most obvious exit point
- dryer vent...sheesh... 25' and 4 x 90 degree turns of 3" PVC; we replaced with a 4" galvanized to a much more efficient exit (next to the above rerouted bath vent)
- most impactful find: improper flashing resulting in completely rotted out walls at every vertical roof/wall intersection. Kickout Flashing is not optional! 20 years of water running down OSB behind vinyl siding is disastrous.