Oh I hear you. We gave up on the house hunting are now looking for an acerage lot or some land to build our own. We've seen similar things and also some mighty stupid things in recently built homes. I really have an aversion to those built by owner. They seem to have the oddest things done in them especially in how they arranged the bathrooms.

There is the one that advertises extra thick insulation so I asked if the walls were 2x6 and he says 2x4. So they crammed insulation into a space and reduced the R-value instead of more insulated.

I don't think it is the price range you are looking in because the ones we've looked at are supposed to be upgraded custom homes and they want a lot for them.

LOL- there are bad remodels all over the country.

Here's a story for you...
Keep in mind that this was a neighborhood of 500K-600K homes. The new owners were bargain seekers & got their house "for a steal."
They moved into the neighborhood...kept up the property(cleanliness-wise)very nicely, BUT their taste left a lot to be desired. Everything they thought that they "improved" was taken down by the next owner-TG!

First, they freshened up the landscaping using cheap stuff. It was a very unprofessional job. The bricks were crooked. The plants looked like a jungle & needed weeding every other day, which the wife did. They were too cheap to use the weed tarp....
Second, they put up a "homemade" shed using cheap materials & painted it with ONE COAT of paint.
Third, they put a HIGH chain link fence in the middle of the yard around their vegetable garden. The neighbors had to look at this every day. Their yard was open to the rest of the development ;)

Of course, the next guy got the house for a steal because of all the detractions. The previous owners were upset because they put all this work into it. Yeah, they didn't realize that they created an eyesore. They were lucky that someone wanted to buy & undo all the cheap stuff.

It amazes me that some people think it's ok to add an "elephant" to a nice neighborhood-LOL

An eyesore I see often as not these days are ugly porches, decks and verandas made of pressure treated wood tacked onto the front of nice older Victorian houses. Rather than being copies of what once was a nice elegant feature you get these monstrosities made with railway-tie sized lumber and such. It isn't just the older Vic houses either. The 50's split level I grew up in I recently drove by and the current owners have this huge wooden deck spouting from it into the once nice front yard. It looks dreadful, like it was just dropped there with a crane from the Home Depot truck. What was once a nice full brick house now looks like it has this giant pimple on its face.

Were they that desperate for space and that tight on money not to do a job well?

Possibly.

I am convinced that some people are completely style challenged. I am not saying I can put together the best style (clothes, decorating, gardening) myself (I think I do ok though). But I recognize the difference between "good" and "bad" when I see it. I think some people honestly just can't see it.

On the road we take to get to my SIL's house there is a cute white cottage house. The house is "landscaped" with white painted rocks outlining the gardens, trees, foundation, etc. There are cheap fences and arbors all over, and they also have those wooden lawn ornaments they spin in the wind. I can only imagine what the inside is like.

I am tone deaf. I think others are style deaf.

I think the garage conversion are done that way because they were done without a permit and don't want the city to drive by and see it. Yes, I agree its ugly.
I really dislike remodels that don't match the rest of the house, the kind you can glance at and KNOW.... add on.

They may also figure (on those garage remodels) that it would be easy enough to turn it back into a garage someday, if they leave the garage door as is.

Sue36, style challenged is a terrific phrase and perfectly suits the people we bought our house from. I don't equate having a small budget with doing a bad job on a remodel or home repair. To me, there's no excuse for following basic safety standards and using the correct tools and hardware to do something right. If you don't have the cash to do at least that then make do with what you have.

We bought a beautiful piece of land with a wonderful big old barn, 2000 sf house, huge shed and lots of planting space for our small farming business. The location is fantastic, the one neighbor we have is great, the taxes are very reasonable and we got the place for a song. Why? The house is a mess. Well, it was. We've spent the last two years correcting lots of horrible "fix-ups" and "remodels" the previous owners took on themselves. He attempted to rewire three rooms in the house, stuffing newspapers in the walls as insulation behind two outlets he cut and wired (God! what a fire hazard) cut two holes in the ceiling for who knows what reason and then used cardboard (as in cardboard boxes) to "fix" the holes in the ceiling, and the list goes on and on and on.

Style? They painted their living room a salmon color (which to me looks like barf, hate the color) then took paintbrushes full of screaming blood red paint and swung them at the walls so they got a sort of drippy effect. They removed the perfectly good window and door trim and the crown moulding and replace it with 1 x 2 straight pieces of wood painted the same screaming blood red. WHAT are people thinking???

We love the layout of the house, it suits us perfectly and looks out over some of the prettiest land I've ever seen. And it is in great shape structurally. But we'll be another 1 to 2 years getting everything done to our liking. Flooring starts next week, yaaaaa!

Sure would be nice if people would use some common sense and gave a little forethought once in a while.

Magret

Tear down the studs & drywall over the door and the entrance to the rest of the house and drive your car up over the carpet/tile? Yeah, real "easy." It's just plain weird.

I definately agree on the style challenged. Looked at one over the weekend where the "grandparents" lived and they had redone the shower tile with lovely murals of swans swimming in the pond. Well, not very lovely, very 80s looking, and not just one focal point (the swan was about 24x24"), there were THREE! I just said, "Wow."

We live in a typical middle class neighborhood near Washington DC. Our HOA is way uptight. I mean like if your garage can isn't in the garage by 6pm they send you a letter. Well, we have one house here that essentially took out most of their front lawn and replaced it with white decorative rock and silk flowers stuck all around. Our house is now on the market and I am SO thankful it's on the far side of the subdivision from us. I can imagine how their neighbors must feel.

Heehee, I like the phrase "style challenged." My husband and I still laugh about a former business acquaintance of his who bought a single-family home outside Albany, NY for $200K; invested $150K in 'improvements'; and sold a few years later for a little UNDER $200K. We used to wonder how anyone could do anything so tacky or horrible that he'd actually lose that much money on it, then we saw one picture that gave a hint of the folly: he'd taken a downstairs powder room and mirror-ized the whole room. The ceiling was mirrored, all four walls were big single sheets of floor-to-ceiling mirror...if he'd been able to buy a mirrored toilet, I'm sure that would have been in there too.

Just remember - there is no accounting for people's taste!!!

And when you remodel - you get what you pay for!!!!!!!!!

Enjoy the journey.

eal51 in western CT

I don't get the big deal about the garage thing...the PO's of my house did a huge (and stunning) remodel of all of the main living areas. They took the equivalent of the space for one car of a 3-car garage and (1) widened the entryway, (2) made a laundry room and (3) added a guest bathroom, all of which are accessible to the house. They left a (new and non-operable) garage door on the exterior, alongside a new and operable 2-car garage door).

From the exterior, my house looks like every other single story house with a 3-car garage in my 1970's-built development in a very nice coastal suburb of San Diego where the median house price is well into the millions. I don't see a problem with a partial "faux garage" and never questioned its existence.

The remodel was permitted, and resulted in additional square footage and an extra 1/2 bath on the tax rolls. Since the square footage of a garage is not included in the total sq. footage of the home, but that of a powder room and laundry room is, we gained an additional however-many square feet (they also bumped out the family room at the same time so a total of just under 500 sq. feet was added).

Until now, I never gave the garage door any thought.

BTW, I also added a 45 foot pool into my backyard and vaulted my ceilings (on purpose), so I think I'm hitting all of your pet peeves. I'd do each and every one of these things again in a heartbeat, and sincerely doubt you'd classify this as a bad remodel as it surely is not.

Sorry if this sounds defensive, but I don't get the big deal of your rant.

(And yes, I've seen remodels that were in bad taste and style-challenged, but not for the things you've mentioned)

Sue36: I am convinced that some people are completely style challenged. I am not saying I can put together the best style (clothes, decorating, gardening) myself (I think I do ok though). But I recognize the difference between "good" and "bad" when I see it. I think some people honestly just can't see it.

My BIL basically admitted this when he visted us last spring. They've been in their house 10 years, we had owned ours eight months at that point. He was commenting on how "everything goes together" and "where do you get your ideas", etc. Our house was no where near done, and yet it was light years ahead of his (and his wife's) house.

I gave him a few tips, told him where to buy some furniture, etc. We'll be heading out that way in a few months and I will definitely give some more input. These are people with plenty of money, no children and he is a contractor. They just do not have ideas about what suits their home and lifestyle. I'm sure they'd benefit from an architect who listens and can draw out their lifestyle ideas as well as an interior designer with the same traits.

I'd like to drag them both to NC to get furnishing ideas, and drag them through a bunch of home shows for home improvement ideas. I doubt they'll go. They'll just wonder why their house "doesn't work" and why it doesn't "feel right".

Talking of garages, I have a picture of one in Florida where the front of the house is brick and the brick continues across and around the front of a really nice garage door. The really strange thing is that the side and rear of the garage are open. The side and rear have just brick pillars to match the rest of the house. I never knew why it was done that way. I figured the builder just didn't want to put any more $ into the house or possibly there was some property tax advantage....treating it as a car port rather than a garage? Anyone ever seen anything like that before?

When I lived in Mississippi, a lot of the carports were more like garages in that they had complete backs with storage closets and sometimes the sides were completely enclosed, but I've never seen one with a garage door.

Regarding garage conversions with the garage door remaining. These are common in California. I saw several where they were more like screened porches. Some how they would affix a screen unit to the outside of the garage door and when they used the room, they'd roll up the garage door and they have big TV's and comfy furniture in there. When not in use the room was secured with the locking door. These are not the types of remodels that Arielita describes, but they were functional (though a little odd looking). It seemed to me that no one in CA parked their cars in their garage, and that garages seemed to serve as the functional equivalent of a basement.

sorry, arielitas_mom, don't mean to hurt your feelings. I guess the garage door thing isn't so common around here (with no HOAs), but I could see the permit argument coming into play. And I'd probably be more forgiving if I had actually seen a GOOD faux garage remodel. These were very jerry-rigged.

And I don't mind REAL vaulted ceilings at all, I think it's the porch thing where it starts off at 8 feet on one side and slopes down to 6.5 feet on the other that just seem very very wrong.

As for the pool, I think it's just strange in large family homes in very family neighborhoods. Makes me wonder if they ever had kids of their own and where their kids played, ya know? I wouldn't question it in a small home (though they usually don't have pools anyways), a hip downtown neighborhood (with singles for owners), or a senior park.

I live in CA and park my cars in the garage all the time. We don't have a driveway, or street in front of our house, the garage backs up to an alley in the back of the house. Everyone in my neighborhood has to use their garage.

cmarlin, I do recall the type of housing development you describe, and since there was no option of course you would park in your garage. But seriously, wouldn't you love to turn your garage into a screened in porch with the big screen TV - not the plasma kind - the actual, big as a car, 52 inch rear projection kind. NOT!

I did a lot of open house hunting last year and saw a lot of awful things in terms of flow and design on additions. Square, boxy rooms with no apparent connection to the original house and closets turned into powder rooms with barely enough room to turn around. I think a lot of people worry about the expense of involving an architect without considering the value added.

Hey guys...the real problem seems to be flippers. We watch Home and Garden TV, log onto the GardenWeb and think we are all designers or contractors.(it looks really easy when seen on TV) A lot of the bad remodels are done by homeowners and the craftsmanship leaves a lot to be desired. I looked at 25 houses in two days and found out how badly things can be done. We ended up buying a house built by an engineer. Unfortunately he thought he could be a contractor, carpenter and everything else needed to build a house.

I am in the tear out and replace mode......

also, if you want to take out the garage door, will you be able to get siding that matches (especially if it's vinyl). Will you have to repaint the whole house, because the paint on the wall has faded, and the paint in the can is either old, or NOT faded?

It just opens a whole can of worms. It could end up looking worse on the outside.

Yep, I hear ya. We looked at one house a while ago and were floored by the poor quality work - it would have cost us way too much to rip out and re-do all the things that needed fixing in this house.

These people had spent major $$$ to convert a cramped 3BR bungalow into a 5BR 2-story with a nice open floorplan. But apparently they spent all their cash on the builder and did the design and finishing work themselves, despite an obvious lack of skill:

The layout of the stairs going to the upper floor looked OK from the inside, but left the front of the house with a bizarre, unbalanced look, just awful curb appeal. (And no way to fix it; extending the front porch would have made a big difference, but they'd pushed the front of the addition up to the setback limits, so there wasn't any room.)

The kitchen cabinets were pieced together - at first glance they seemed to match, but when you looked a little longer you realized that some were light oak with one face style, some were a matching-color maple with a slightly different face style.

The kitchen/entry floor (done with some very expensive stone tiles in a custom pattern) had some places so out of whack they were trip hazards!

Etc., etc.

It all reminded me of my dad, who used to tell me, "if you can't do something right, don't bother doing it at all."

Juliebatt-
Unforuntaely that seems to be the result of hot real estate markets. I think the phoenix area is probably one of them or was. People do anything they want to the houses without regard to how it will be viewed by a potential buyer in the future as they assume they can cut corners or D.I.Y. on many projects and still not have a problem selling. (And they don't)

I think you'd be doing the right thing to avoid those houses with such evident cheap improvements and unprofessional or shoddy D.I.Y. additions. If you can't find anything decent in your price range, time to load up the carriage and explore some new frontiers. Never settle for less that what you deserve. Good luck with your search.

I think there have always been people who are "style-challenged." We bought our home from two sisters who qualified, LOL! Everything they did was so tasteless that my first words when I walked into the house were, "This is the UGLIEST house I have ever seen in my life!"

Fortunately they were already in rest homes and couldn't hear me! But this was all stuff they had done over the years since they first bought the place, back in 1960 from the original first owner.

I was just thumbing through a past issue of one of my many Kitchen/Bath remodeling magazines, and saw again a photo shoot that fits in with this thread. The house is a lovely, well built contemporary with lake and tree views, clearly not a mass development home.

The previous owners had elaborately tiled the master bath with turqoise tiles and installed bright pink bath fixtures. And on the wall above the tub, there was a huge stuffed marlin! With the pointy end aimed straight at whoever was sitting on the toilet....heaven forbid, one good earthquake (being a Californian I can't help but think in those terms) and whoever was sitting there would be skewered like a shish-kebab.

The remodeled bathroom was gorgeous, but really, anything would have been an improvement!

I blame some of this on the HGTV DIY-Big Box store. I go to Lowe's, HD, Menards, and see all these gomers getting all this stuff they are going to do themselves. Really scary. Looked good in the store. Looked easy in the store.

I call it "re-muddling".

dabunch,

I'd just like to note that as a Master Gardener for my State's Cooperative Extension...I would never use weed cloth. And, it's not becuse I'm CHEAP. It's because I'm a gardener.

That stuff is just awful...visit the garden forums here to see how much it is detested by true gardeners. With that stuff over the ground, it's impossible to enrich your soil with leaf mould, manure, greensand, lime, etc. It also prevents seedlings from growing which you might see as a positive but a gardener will not. A gardener will pull the weeds & leave the young self-sown flowers until they are large enough to transplant.

Mother Nature did not intend for the earth to be covered in a tarp.

Tricia

Triciae-
About not using a weed cloth. Are you referring to a flower garden or shrub/bush type of landscaping?

They had bushes/trees (?) planted, not flowers. All you saw were one bush on top of another with mulch in between with lots of weeds & some type of Home Depot bricks around the area. When they moved the weeds took over the entire landscaped area. It was awful. Looked like a haunted house for the movies ;)

I'm not a gardener, but I did some lanscaping using evergreen plants/bushes. I used the cloth & it was fantastic. Never a weed in 12 years!
Call me & most of the neighbors lazy ( I hate outside work), but the cloth worked wonders for us.

Trust me, those owners were "cheap" (I have other stories)and that is why they did the things a certain way, not because it was the thing to do.

i find weeding to be very relaxing, particularly when a pitcher of gin and tonic with fresh muddled lime is nearby and the radio playing some Springsteen or Southside Johnny...ahhhhhh, can't wait for summer :)

My ex-model home in MD was a "backwards" remodel.
The garage had been the main office for the sales. Looks perfectly normal from the front. The side has a double french door, and if you look carefully, you can see a faint path in the grass where there used to be a sidewalk leading to the ex-model home next door. The back wall has a huge bay window.
The interior has lovely crown moulding, chair rail and wallpaper, window treatments, and it's own HVAC system (which we used in an emergency when the main house a/c went down in July). We told the PO's that they could take out the huge chandelier hanging in between the garage door openers. Also has about a dozen phone lines that took us a couple of hours to sort out.
The four cabinet boxes in the laundry room, which also had a lovely window treatment, had four different finishes, light maple, cherry, oak, dark oak.
The highly wallpapered and bordered house conveyed with all the matching pillows and bedspreads.
I'm actually worried about what to do when we go to sell in June because it's all so dated (1985) and tired and dingy. But I'd rather give credit to a buyer so they can redecorate to their own style. But I think it will show poorly, although it fits the style of the neighborhood and the colonial design.

Tricia, I'm with you. Any type of weed block is not allowed in my yard and it's the first thing we pulled up when we bought our house. Nothing worse than the weed block with 5 years worth of weeds growing in the accumulated dirt. Organic yards, please.

All of this is really pretty subjective. People have always done bad remodels. We've bought houses in the early 80's with bad stuff done. We've bought houses now with bad stuff done. As far as decorating items (which I consider paint and tile to be), I'm not impressed with all of the things people are doing in new houses.

Gloria

Weed block fabric, bad. Weed block plastic, positively evil. That's all I'm sayin' about that.

There's always going to be differing opinions about whether or not someone "should" have done Project X to his/her house, and I think it's rather a waste of time to discuss taste. But what I don't understand is when work on a house -- or a garden -- is done 90% of the way, when just a little extra push/time/money would've made it a great job.

Examples? How about the houses that have "finished basements" -- but there are no switch plates, base moldings or light fixtures installed? Just a couple of bulbs dangling from the ceiling. How much more work would it have taken to add those little finishing touches that really complete the room?

Or the back garden where they've splashed out on quality paving materials and had them delivered to the site -- but then they're dropped randomly onto the ground instead of being properly placed, and they're wobbly and unsafe to step on. Why not take the extra time to prepare the base and secure that material in a way that's appropriate for your climate and practical for people using it?

Or the "sunroom addition" that's larger than a bump-out but too small to hold usable furniture... I was in one not long ago that was five by seven feet. If you could afford to hire the workers to pour the slab foundation and build the "room," how much more cost would've been involved in making that room 9 x 11 instead?

Just yesterday I saw a book in the home remodel section of the bookstore called "What Not to Build," and it shows what doesn't go with what. I guess the authors have seen too many DYI jobs by clueless people too! I live in a town where many people owned and stayed for a long, long time, and they patched up the houses needed it. Not well, in most cases. I have newspaper insultation in part of the ceiling. I try to do much better but who knows what the next owners (in 20 years or so) will think of my remodels? At least everything is up to current code!

How about a bunch of nice laminate flooring that after a year or two is developing strange gaps in the middle here and there because clearly it didn't fit neatly to the walls and has shifted. They could have shimmed something in before tacking on the baseboard.

Then they did the roofing without using the layer of metal sheathing at the drip edge. And all the shingles are crooked at the edge as if done by a kid or a drunken monkey.

Of course, this was done by pigs who didn't even clean the gross moldy bathroom wall or the oven and were using a "safe" (but not inspected!) wood stove. That got taken out before the purchase was completed, at their cost. Idiots.

As someone else said: property flippers in a hot market.

liltingbelle The kitchen cabinets were pieced together - at first glance they seemed to match, but when you looked a little longer you realized that some were light oak with one face style, some were a matching-color maple with a slightly different face style.

This is why I haven't extended our kitchen into the back laundry section because we have decent cabinets that I can't match. The back section is a 6x8, not including the laundry section. The cabinets could be extended back there, making a nice pantry. If I were staying here, I'd take out the french door, add a single door with a large window, or I would take on knocking walls out and redesign the master bedroom / bathroom behind it, totally moving the laundry area.

This house is fairly large for an L shaped ranch; the people that lived here before us had no clue when they added on. Gutting the house would be something I'd love to do.

Reading these have been very entertaining and brought back memories of bad remodels I have seen. To many to mention here so I'll add just a few.
In one friend's house they decided to faux brick one wall in their living room. They started off with even spaces, then partway up the wall it looked like they either let the kids have a go or had a few too many themselves, the line of bricks wobbled up the wall.
In a relations house I was shown their newly laid vinyl flooring, that they proudly said they did themselves, complete with a huge stretched out of shape bubble in the middle of the floor. In another house the bathroom was remodelled, covering old tile with marble-look green vinyl panels, the bath removed and a shower put in. The vinyl may have looked ok if the flooring was redone, they just left the floor undone where the bath was, a second hand - cracked- glass surround was put in for the shower - which has now completely broken and been pulled out, not replaced though.