Wednesday WTF: Terrible Toilet Installations Tantamount to Trouble

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toiletHow’s your week? Just thought we’d talk about bad renovations for this week’s installment of Wednesday WTF. We’re flush with excitement, and we hope you are too.

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Let me preface this with a story of my own. Back in the day, we had this three-bedroom, one-bath house that we bought from a flipper. I love flippers. They take diamonds in the rough and polish them. Flippers are the ultimate recyclers.

But it’s always cool when a flipper knows what he or she is doing. And in this case, in the eighth month of my pregnancy, we found out that ours was not cool. In fact, our toilet had been installed incorrectly and was leaking water throughout the subfloor and onto a structural beam.

We had to gut the entire bathroom. The only bathroom. While I was at a point in being with child where bathrooms were super important.

It was um, interesting, but not as interesting as what I’m about to show you.

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So do you like dining al fresco and outdoor soirees, but hate leaving a lively conversation to go to the bathroom because of beer?

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Meet the toilet slider. Why ask people to hold that thought, when you can just open the sliding glass door, do your business, and continue telling that riveting story about the time you went snow shoe shopping with the Pope at Nordstrom?

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Are you not doing any outdoor dining, but like where we’re going with this? Well, here’s the formal powder dining room. It seats five.

But lest you think we’re all about toilets, how about this mashup of house styles I’m calling the Tudon’t? It’s like if Henry the VIII met The Waltons.

Maybe you like elements of danger in your commute, and you need them the minute you put your key in the ignition. Let me present the Weeeeee Driveway, where you’ll probably definitely harm your car, and you definitely will not be leaving the house in event of an ice storm. The Weeeee Driveway, ask for it today at Bed, Bath and Way, Way Beyond.

Some contractors look at things and realize when they’ve made a mistake, and then rip it out and start all over again. Our last two renovation jobs are definitely not times when that happened.

I mean, what’s the saying? “Measure twice and if you screw up just cut a hole in the wall?”

Or if you tell your contractor, “Hey, I like the original window frames and shape on this house, but I think I’d like something, IDK, maybe a little more energy efficient,” you would expect this, right?

So what about you all — any renovation WTFs in your life? Need to vent your spleen about them? Hit the comments.

 

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Bethany Erickson lives in a 1961 Fox and Jacobs home with her husband, a second-grader, and Conrad Bain the dog. If she won the lottery, she'd by an E. Faye Jones home.
She's taken home a few awards for her writing, including a Gold award for Best Series at the 2018 National Association of Real Estate Editors journalism awards, a 2018 Hugh Aynesworth Award for Editorial Opinion from the Dallas Press Club, and a 2019 award from NAREE for a piece linking Medicaid expansion with housing insecurity.
She is a member of the Online News Association, the Education Writers Association, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and the Society of Professional Journalists.
She doesn't like lima beans or the word moist.

3 Comments

  1. Candy Evans on January 31, 2018 at 3:22 pm

    That formal powder dining room sure seems like an efficient way to use space: if dinner is terrible, just burn it in the fireplace! Perhaps we have just sparked a trend for the Tiny House Movement.

    • LonestarBabs on January 31, 2018 at 4:03 pm

      Or, if dinner doesn’t agree with your tummy you don’t have far to travel…

  2. Erin on January 31, 2018 at 8:36 pm

    The escaped mental patients who lived in my house stained the cement floors. Then they walked on them … while they were wet. You could see where they walked in the room, clearly yelled CRAP, turned around & tip toed out. Did they fix this? No. They sealed the footprints in. It’s a Lumbergh level of greeeeaaaaaaaattttt.

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