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I'm not an installer, but as an engineer have sometimes been involved in investigating "odd" faults. Once found a house where one end of a (UK) ringmain ran from the intended 32amp breaker but the other end was terminated in the 16amp intended for the water heater. The water heater cable went into the ring main breaker. The consequence, (un-noticed for several years), was that neither circuit could be switched off until both breakers were off.

From my house, a flying splice wrapped in duct tape and plastered over, zip cord in conduit feeding some lights, a circuit fed at both ends from two different breakers. In a friend's basement, turning off the lights and seeing the dull red glow of some old corroded BX feeding the stove and using the armor as one phase conductor.
/mike

I had the zip cord in drywall method in a bathroom, partially buried behind tile. Originally, the bathroom only had a wall light above the sink and somebody wanted a ceiling light pronto.

Back in the 50s and 60s, grossly undersized wiring was extremely common for quickly added sockets in Austria. People clipped all sorts of flex to the wall, including 0.5mm2 low-voltage zip cord with nails driven through the centre, sometimes accidentally hitting the conductor itself.

Isn't that Ok as long as the nail "only contacts one conductor"?

Well, there's no short, but unless the nail goes through the neutral, I'd consider it a serious isolation fault <In one case, the extension wasn't even ahrdwired but connected with an old non-earthed plug, which means there was no means to ensure polarity. Depending on how the plug was inserted, the nails could have ended up either in the live or in the neutral.

In my dad's house (built in 2000) a whole bedroom wall with no outlets. The entire wall on the opposite side of washer/dryer space in the laundry room with no outlets. Some switches in unexpected places, like laundry room light out in the hall by the door to the laundry room. One of 2 kitchen light switches out in the hall next to doorway to kitchen. A couple places in the living room and music room are beyond 6 feet from an outlet.

My dad just thinks the electrician was a cheapskate.

An electrician will do it right. That's a hack job

For some reason, in Florida the switch for a light was out in the hall until sometime in the 70s. In the condo I had in Treasure Island, the switch for the overhead light in the kitchen was in the living room.

Let's face it - some so-called electricians ARE hacks and destroy the reputation of the entire trade. In Vienna there seems to be a shockingly large number of them. Recently I had to walk a journeyman with 30+ years of job experience through wiring an RCD like a kindergarten kid!

He seriously didn't get it why the RCD would trip if the phases were connected to the RCD and the neutral taken from elsewhere. An identical situation would be a GFI or GFI breaker in the US. Even an apprentice should know that if you are downstream of a GFI outlet you can't just "borrow" a neutral from an unprotected circuit! He'd also happily connect the line side to the screw shell of an Edison fuse holder (Neozed fuse).

My house, built in 2005.. First owner.. Plug anything into a master bedroom outlet and the AFCI trips. Found a backwired outlet where the installer had stripped about 2" more insulation than necessary on the neutral and the bare ground was making contact.

A problem that crept up about a year later was the lighting circuit for the east side of the house would trip if you took a shower in the guest bathroom... Turns out that a wire was pinched in the bathroom light fixture and condensate was finishing the connection to the metal fixture base..

Light fixture in the toilet area of the master bath was being held by one wood screw (They put the box too close to the HVAC vent to mount it correctly.

Other than that just replacing the cheap outlets as they wear out.

My grandparents house had a Bulldog panel where the whole 3bd/2ba ran off 3 circuits since someone broke the screws off all the other breaker positions in the buss..