Renos gone wrong

Photograph by: Photos.com, Victoria Times Colonist

Wow, just wow

This Vancouver SUN article has some DIY stories that nobody would believe were they not true, including:

Toilets on mountains must flush crazy fast…
It’s often said that a person’s house is his castle. In one house, builder Rov Dosanjh found a throne — at least a seat fit for the king of the castle. He was hired to do some renovation work in a house a few years ago. On his first day he went to use the bathroom and found the toilet sitting atop a 60-centimetre base. The homeowner casually explained that he had experienced unsatisfactory results with waste removal when he flushed the toilet. He reckoned if the water bowl in his gravity-fed toilet was placed higher, the water flow would be greater.

Hey, maybe he was trying to send his wife a message?
In yet another bathroom, Dosanjh, owner of Rayn Properties, found an electrical receptacle in a shower stall. The plug was live and wasn’t protected by a Ground Fault Interrupter switch — required for plugs found around water. The husband casually explained he installed it there because his wife liked to use a hair trimmer in the shower stall because it was easier to just wash away the hair after a trim.

You have to ask yourself: am I an innovator or is there a reason nobody else does this?
At one house, he was asked to relocate a doorway. He was puzzled because the house was brand new. It turned out the homeowner had insisted the house designer create a layout in such a way that the doors to the bedrooms would be hidden from view. The designer complied, locating the doors around a corner at the end of a hallway. Unfortunately, nobody thought about the repercussions until moving day when the movers could not get the bedroom furniture into the room. The owners ended up sleeping on a futon, which was the only bedding that could be bent around the corner to get into the room.

He says builders and designers earn their keep by using their experience to avoid costly mistakes in design and construction.

From “Renos gone wrong” in the Vancouver Sun

Tags: bad renovations, DIY disasters, horror stories