That here is the problem. A house not built for specific buyer will always be terrible - people are surprisingly irrational when buying houses. Very few people ask: "hey, will I be able to change the temperature easily"; but a lot more say, "this has SMART THERMOSTAT with AI. Sounds cool!".
This is wildly true. When we were house hunting, we saw a flip house, and I immediately spotted two problems:
- the kitchen drawers were meant to be opened via a recessed "grabber" type thing; you pull the actual drawer with your fingers, not a specific handle. But the drawers were set so closely together that not even our five year old could get their fingers in there to open them. They installed the drawers, and either never tested to see if they could be opened, or just fully didn't give a shit that they were un-usable.
- I ran the faucet in the ground floor bathroom, and was greeted by hissing and spurting and some brown water. They had never turned the faucet on after installing it, or some other downstream pipes. They skipped the "integration testing" step.
Between those two things, we realized the house probably had other horrifying surprises in store for us that were hidden in the walls, or elsewhere that would be difficult to even diagnose, and moved on with our lives.
(Of course mine each have little glass bulb half full of mercury in them, but that's a separate issue).
Edit: now that I look at them they might not be quite that old, but several decades anyway. Still theyre delightfully simple, there is a single wheel that you rotate clockwise or counter clockwise and that's it. Not a single button on them.
Lost my uptime today due to a power outage, first one in years. The house in the OPs article sounds like absolute hell.