I’ve been scrolling through some home renovation horror stories lately, and one particular bathroom disaster caught my attention. Someone posted photos of a fallen bathroom tile, revealing what can only be described as a landlord’s nightmare behind it – black mould, sure, but also an absolute shambles of a tile installation job that looks like it was done by someone who learned tiling from a fever dream.

Now, I’ll admit my own home improvement skills are limited to deploying Docker containers and debugging CI/CD pipelines, not waterproofing bathrooms. But even I can tell when something’s gone catastrophically wrong. The photos showed what happens when you hire someone who thinks “close enough is good enough” – tiles stuck down with random globs of adhesive like dollops of whipped cream, no visible moisture barrier, and enough gaps for an entire ecosystem of mould to thrive in the voids.

I stumbled across a discussion today that made my blood boil, and honestly, it’s got me thinking about just how broken the rental market has become. Someone in the UK moved into what was supposedly a “deep cleaned” rental property, only to find mould so thick on the toilet cistern it looked like something out of a horror film. The photos they shared were genuinely shocking – we’re talking about black mould caked onto surfaces, the kind of mess that takes years of complete neglect to accumulate.