Our house had been fully renovated when we moved in. In the early '90s, two brothers bought it for a song, gutted it and slowly brought it back from its earlier leaky, rotting, crack house shabbiness to a nice place to live. Considering where they started, it sure looks good now. However, they did a lot of things on the cheap, because they had so much to do.

We've changed every light fixture in the place. We had to put a new metal roof on our front porch, because the one they put on fifteen years ago had been poorly done and had aged and leaked like it was fifty years old. We're working on replacing the cheap, knotty pine they used for casings around the doors and windows. Some day I hope to put in nicer bathrooms, because our current ones look exactly like the cheapest possible bathrooms you can find in brand new starter home subdivisions. They put on vinyl siding -- really cheap vinyl siding. The list goes on. Things that I can live with until we can change them, but I do hope to change them eventually.

I don't particularly like the necessity of redoing their work, but most of it does not cause me to wish to call down curses on their heads. However -- they glued mirrors to the walls in each of our bathrooms. As we paint these rooms, we've had to pry them off, clean up the shattered glass when they don't come off intact, and patch large amounts of drywall that got shredded by the glue pulling off with the chunks of mirror.

We pulled down two mirrors several years ago and have been dreading the last one. Finally, it came down the day before yesterday and last night we got the wall prepped for patching. It's all doable, but not fun and wouldn't have been necessary if they hadn't used glue to hold the mirror up. It's a bad, bad thing. But at least my joint compound technique is getting perfected.