They renovated. You suffered. The design mistakes buyers inherit.

“An electrician told me we’d need scaffolding,” she said.

Thanks to the pandemic, the challenge for buyers may be accelerating, said Lisa Sevajian a real estate agent with Compass in Andover.

“During COVID, everyone became a do-it-yourselfer,” she said, “and those poor choices are now coming back to haunt homeowners — and their buyers.”

Sevajian rattled off examples with such urgency, it began to seem as if no design choice would ever be safe.

“I’m begging people to stop using a bold tile on a backsplash that doesn’t match anything in the kitchen,” she began. “Granite is making some environmentally aware buyers anxious. Primary suite baths with enough space for 60-inch vanities need a double sink … it’s a requirement for many buyers.”

Then there are the bedrooms whose closets were turned into home offices during COVID. “Now you’ve eliminated something functional, and you’ve got all these extra bureaus in the bedrooms.”

“But it’s incredibly hard for people to accept they’ve made a mistake,” Sevajian said.

Indeed, if you ask around about self-inflicted home decor, many are hesitant to talk — in some cases because they’re still doing the hard therapeutic work of taking responsibility.

But you know what people do love to dish about? The albatross they’ve been saddled with.

In Southborough, Jessica Levenson is living with a bathroom renovation done by her home’s previous owners that includes not just “blah” brown and beige tiles, but a tub so short and shallow it’s unusable.

“It serves no one except goldfish,” she said.

But not only would renovating cost tens of thousands of dollars, it feels morally wrong to rip out something that’s just been redone, she said. “I’m not going to spend money on a bathroom that’s effectively new.”

But wait — aren’t all these things visible at the open house? It’s not like you need an inspector to tell you, oh, by the way, you could land a helicopter in the atrium. Or the tub is doll-sized.

Alas, some home design features, like people, don’t reveal their issues until it’s too late. And given the cost of real estate, buyers are rarely presented with perfect options.

“It’s like marrying someone with problematic family members,” a woman buying her first home said. “You hope the trade-off is worth it.”

Eric Klein, a real estate broker with Engel & Völkers Newton/Boston and an independent appraiser, has a front-row seat to things that seemed like a good idea at the time, and are now threatening a new crop of buyers:

“I could spend hours telling you some good stories,” his email began. On the phone, he ran through common offenders: Saunas, jacuzzis, and hot tubs on decks (bought with enthusiasm, rarely used, expensive to maintain and insure); faux-fancy LED fireplaces (“gauche”), and double-height atriums (tell it to Wilkins, of Bolton).

This summer, he was the buyer’s agent for a $1.5 million Colonial in Newton that had a kitchen counter with a large built-in motorized base for a blender and a food processor, meaning you’re forever locked into whatever appliance fits onto the base, and stuck with a counter that’s partially single-use.

“It was more of an oddity than a deal breaker,” he said. (Well, that’s at least how the couple felt when they moved in.)

Many people, both sellers and buyers, are both victim and perpetrator, and so it is with Wilkins.

In 2018, when she and her husband bought a condo in Brookline, they removed the dated doors from the kitchen cabinets, leaving the shelves open. The look was on trend, but it left her now-exposed dishes with a thin film of cooking grease that accumulated dust.

“It was a terrible, terrible, terrible idea,” she said.

Happily, it was not her problem for long. The condo proved too small for their family of five, and they sold it. At which point, a stranger inherited her open shelves, and she inherited someone’s atrium and chandelier.

And so the cycle continues.

Beth Teitell can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @bethteitell.