Worst Case Scenario House

I love our house, I really do, but sometimes it feels like she's out to do us in. First the tornado, then the roof, and now the master bathroom needs major work. People always remark about of wacky doors, usually something like "every door in your house is a different, hideous color!" and I explain to them that the previous owner's painted them to ward off bad luck. Obviously, he took any good house mojo with him.

The bathroom issue came to our attention when our two-stories down neighbor mentioned a drip in his bathroom. Since the neighbor between us had been gone for two weeks, it was obvious that the problem was coming from us. When the contractor came over he pointed out about 10 different sources of the problem including cracked grout on the walls and floors, a toilet that looked like I got really drunk and installed it with foam insulation, an unlevel toilet pipe, and a sink that was falling apart.

We new these things existed but faced with about a month of work to make a not great bathroom look still not great, we decided to tack on another week's worth of work and gut it. A further inspection revealed tons of damaged plaster and drywall, a floor that sloped an inch in four feet, and a radiator that's about 3 times too big for the room.

So in the middle of our extremely busy lives we now get to do a bathroom reno but at least we have two bathrooms! If I could speak directly to the previous owner (which I've considered doing), I'd tell him to lay off the DIY. A love of spray foam and duct tape should be symptoms of not being very handy.