• saigot@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    the old owners of my home neglected to get the the eves-troughs fixed (they were shitty landlords), it cost me about 10K for the replacement which will last 20+yrs. the leaking water ruined every window frame in the house, and cost us about 50K to repair that damage. replacing those windows also like halved our heating/cooling bills (and made the upper floors comfortable to exist in). Luckily we got a nice interest free government loan because it’s greenifying our home.

    they had all kinds of other landlord specials, like pouring concrete (not levelled right) down the basement drain and making the stairs to the attic out of plywood. fuck landlords. Did I mention they made over 400k on the appreciation of the house and were probably making 2-3K more per month than their mortgage from renting.

  • over_clox@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Lightning struck my late father’s homemade CB radio antenna back in the early 90’s. It made the antenna explode, and fried around 3/4 of every electronic device in the house ☹️

    Thankfully the refrigerator survived at least, and of course thankfully the house didn’t burn down.

    If he had only properly grounded his antenna and CB radio…

    • RebekahWSD@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Huh, I was told a story of my father in law having the same thing happen to him, but luckily for them it only burned the electronics that were plugged into the antenna, and one tv that was too close to a radio that also got screwed up. Never got to meet the man though, unfortunately.

      • over_clox@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        My late father was a bit weird and eccentric. He built his custom CB antenna around PVC plastic tubing. Yeah it worked, hell he could communicate around 300 miles radius from the home base.

        It worked, until it stopped working…

        We ended up scavenging as many pieces of the PVC as we could, to reassemble it as a superglue/jigsaw puzzle haha!

  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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    5 months ago

    Shortly after we moved in, someone was taking a shower in our second-floor bathroom, the bottom of the shower cracked, and they didn’t notice. End result was an entire shower’s worth of water draining out the bottom of the shower, flowing about 10 feet inside the first-floor ceiling, draining down through the hole from a light fixture, across the kitchen floor, down through the kitchen floor into the basement ceiling, soaking into a bunch of exposed insulation, and making that insulation collapse onto the (concrete) basement floor.

  • Nomecks@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    60 year old house. They used to use this stuff called “no corrode” pipe for sewage. It was made of tar and straw and had around a 60 year service life. Mine finally collapsed, backed up and caused $30k of damage to my basement + 25k cost to dig up my back yard to replace it.

  • ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I used a convection toaster oven in the kitchen.

    That fried the circuits of 1/3 of the house. Some amateur electrician tied in several new circuits into the same kitchen breaker. They used undergauged wire on top of it.

    Cost us $6k to fix and that was a hell of a deal from some Covid - unemployed union electricians. They put in 3 breakers where there was one before. The electrician had a hell of a time tracking where all the lines came from. That included a 3ft fireball shooter ng out of the wall because a line was love when it shouldn’t have been.

  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    My sister burned her apartment down by leaving a portable battery bank plugged in and charging. Luckily the reason she wasn’t home at the time of the fire was because she was bringing the cat to a cat sitter, or else the cat would’ve been cooked too.

    Be careful with portable battery banks folks! Don’t leave them unattended!

  • paddirn@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    My daughter didn’t check the toilet after she flushed it right before bed. It was in a back bedroom that nobody else really goes to. It ended up flooding overnight and I didn’t discover it til the next morning, when I found my kitchen flooding from the ceiling. It apparently wasn’t from poop though as I didn’t see any fecal matter around (unless it was in the ceiling that got torn out). Whole kitchen ceiling got torn out, along with the floor of the bathroom. Not a huge amount of damage, but the most the house has sustained… so far.

    • Drusas@kbin.run
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      5 months ago

      My daughter didn’t check the toilet after she flushed it

      Who does?

        • paddirn@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          TIL I’m German. I just always doublecheck everything has gone down, just a listen for something not right, a quick glance. It’s not like I’m hovering over the bowl like, “Yes, my little fecal babies, your time with me may be at an end, but your journey in this world has only just begun…” I mean, who does that? Not this well-adjusted person.

          • erp@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            They are referring to the meme about old German toilets having an ‘inspection shelf’ (Flachspüler)

      • otp@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        I think the implication was that she wasn’t aware of whether or not the toilet finished flushing.

        I have one toilet that flushes quickly, and I can usually tell that it’s finish flushing by the time I’ve finished washing my hands.

        • lud@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          ? Are the toilets usually slow where you live?

          The toilets here take just a few seconds to flush.

            • lud@lemm.ee
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              5 months ago

              Ah, you meant the refill. I don’t know how fast that is. It’s way slower than the actual flush though.

              • otp@sh.itjust.works
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                5 months ago

                You can’t be certain your toilet has completed a flush “safely” until it’s finished (and stopped) refilling!

      • paddirn@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Still no idea, she could’ve put a paper towel or something in there or just used too much toilet paper. This was a month or two ago, so not likely we’ll ever know.

  • Volkditty@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Trusting the home inspector that said the roof wouldn’t need to be replaced for at least another couple years.

    • baldingpudenda@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Mine too! There’s slight water damage to the bottom kitchen cabinets and wooden floors, that we can for too fix, as water slowly leaked down the walls, but at least we got new roof, windows and doors.

      • DVNGY@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 months ago

        I’ve been dreaming of new windows (century+ old home) but the prices are insane around me. Nothing like fresh air in the spring & early fall

        • baldingpudenda@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          The prices are high over here as well, when the interest rate drops again I’ll look into taking a HELOC or refinance. I’m trying to put as much money into the principal as I can in the mean time.

  • The Bard in Green@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz
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    5 months ago

    My nephew (it was my own damn fault for leaving the equipment set up because I was halfway done with a project) siphoned 55 gallons of water from an aquarium I was building into the carpet.

    And that’s the story of how I learned to do flooring and replaced the carpet in my home office with linoleum so that the next time something like that happens it’s non issue.

  • RBWells@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Not damage but the most entertaining, terrifying, and educational event - I made a mango soda, fermented it with some ginger beer and it was lazy getting fizzy so I bottled, refrigerated and promptly forgot about it. Found it a few weeks later and figured since it wasn’t fizzy ok to open.

    Mango soda on the floor, walls, ceiling of three adjacent rooms. It exploded up but did not break the glass bottle. The second one I opened outside facing away from me and got to taste the small amount that remained in the bottle - probably the best drink I have ever made, all lost due to my negligence.