Buying property from someone else is always a strange experience. I’ve heard it said, and you’ve probably seen something to this effect elsewhere online, that doing repairs on a house you’ve just purchased is like doing battle with the previous owners. Two forces engaged in a push-and-pull force battle through time… A constant Hansel and Gretel trail of breadcrumbs taking you to increasingly bizarre DIY hacks and bodges that were “good enough” for someone 30 years ago. But now, you can’t just fix the problem… now you also have to unpuzzle their “fix” first, delving into their mind to figure out just what in the heck they were trying to accomplish, and how it all ties back to what was originally there in the first place.
In the days before the internet, people were either taught these things in the time we all spent doomscrolling in our teens and 20s, or they just didn’t learn them at all. If they were never taught how to do said task, I imagine, and those who were around correct me if I’m wrong, they just used whatever relative practical knowledge they had been taught and tried to give it their best attempt.
Is that how we used to do things before ChatGPT? Who among us can remember with our fractured attention spans and melted minds?
For these fixes from the before times, chances are you’re never going to figure it out. Whatever knowledge was being misapplied has been lost to time, and no algorithm is going to uncover it.
But for more recent fixes, where someone was clearly making their first attempt at whatever skill or task they were undertaking, and you can almost see the steps of the YouTube video they were poorly following.
Or, if you bought your house from a “wannabe house flipper” Zoomer or misguided aging Millennial like myself trying to keep up with the times, there’s a good chance that you’ll see the suggestion for whatever dangerous build or fix was attempted suggested as the first response on ChatGPT.
Anyways this one was a strange situation, and they did get some helpful advice from readers, which you can see below.
You can’t help but wonder how it turns out.
Author: Kayitsi.com
