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Property/DIY

What was your worst house move ever?

27 replies

jb007 · 12/09/2016 09:26

Inspired by someone else's thread it set me thinking about my various experiences of moving house. So to start the ball rolling...

Had one move where the vendors were still packing when we arrived. Completion was supposed to be by 1pm. We ended up with our removal men dumping our furniture in the garden in the rain and us having to help the previous owners pack. The "man of the house" didn't lift a finger and was swanning about giving orders and generally being useless. By 5pm they still weren't gone and we were trying to assemble our bed so we would at least have somewhere to sleep and he was leaning against the bedroom door just chatting. His poor wife did all the work and we discovered they had booked into a hotel that night so they were not in any rush to get anywhere.

The next occasion I moved I didn't get the keys til after 5pm. It was January so was dark and cold and raining. There had been a problem with the electronic banking system which caused the delay. I ended up having to pay the removal men overtime. To make matters worse the vendor had left loads of rubbish including mattresses that I had to pay the council to take away and my sofa would not fit through the door.

I have stupid enough to move a few more times since then but they were definitely the two worse ones.

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NotAPuffin · 12/09/2016 09:45

We're trying to move at the moment. We're sale agreed on our house for 3 months now. We've had 4 purchases fall through for various reasons and we're back at the viewing stage as of Friday afternoon. I packed weeks ago (because one of our closing dates was the 10th of August) so we're living with big heaps of boxes and can never find anything.

I'm close to tears with it all at this stage.

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jb007 · 12/09/2016 09:47

You poor thing. It's soul destroying. Hope it works out for you soon x

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RaeSkywalker · 12/09/2016 09:53

Oh Puffin Sad

Our worst was the most recent- turned up, house was utterly filthy (toilets gross, shower thick with mould, massive clumps of dog hair everywhere). Random items had been abandoned- dirty toilet brushes (urgh), bed frames, half an old kitchen in the garage, photo frames... Basically it looked like they'd stopped cleaning when we agreed the sale a couple of months previously.

To top it all, they left us a bottle of Sainsburys champagne on the (filthy) kitchen worktop. It expired in 1998.

I'd made sure that the house we had just left was spotlessly clean, so I was really upset. It doesn't take much effort to bleach a toilet to get rid of the skid marks, does it?!

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wowfudge · 12/09/2016 09:57

The last one was fine. The one before, I did 95% of the packing and was exhausted. We didn't complete when we should have due to some cock up by the solicitor or the bank (never found out which). We were allowed access with a key undertaking but the last occupants had taken the light fittings, leaving bare wires so as it was late in the day in March it was too dark for our cleaners to do much - we knew it would be filthy as it was when we viewed.

When we completed the next day things had been taken which shouldn't have been, we were left a grotty fridge complete with old food in the completely frozen icebox and a skip load of crap in the garden and garage.

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MyBreadIsEggy · 12/09/2016 10:00

Our second military move was probably the worst.
We were only moving about 500m across the main road to a different house in the same camp....but my DH and his mate decided that it wasn't worth paying for a van to move the big things and decided to ferry them from one house to another between the two of them (I was hugely pregnant at the time, so was limited to moving the boxes containing bedding and tea making Hmm), with the help of our Vauxhall Astra Hmm Fucking idiots the pair of them.
To cut a long story short, fridge-freezer got dropped on mates foot, spent half of moving day sat in A&E with him and his broken foot, while DH continued with the move....he decided after the fridge incident that it was probably a good idea to get some more help. So 5 of his colleagues showed up, having commandeered a Land Rover from work to move the washing machine etc.
Needless to say, two moves since then have been planned with the utmost precision by me!

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ApplesTheHare · 12/09/2016 10:00

Poor you NotAPuffin sounds awful, really hope you get sorted soon Flowers

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JinkxMonsoon · 12/09/2016 10:00

Basically it looked like they'd stopped cleaning when we agreed the sale a couple of months previously.

Same happened with our first house, except they'd stopped tending the garden as well as cleaning the house. Front garden full of weeds and (tiny) back garden had turned into a bamboo jungle.

Never move into a house with bamboo in the garden.

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MadameCholetsDirtySecret · 12/09/2016 10:03

It is appalling that properties are left in such a state. I'm lucky it hasn't happened to me. There should be a legal requirement to ensure properties are cleaned and emptied on completion and checked by an independent person on completion date with punitive financial penalties if they don't meet spec.

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KittyKrap · 12/09/2016 10:14

I moved cross country to a rental house with my then DP, now DH. An end of terrace owned by a builder - great! But it wasn't. It was a freezing winter, the living room got hot, nowhere else, holes in the door frames, walls, floors, everywhere was filled with expandable foam. The garage leaked despite the expandable foam in there...and the back yard started flooding. The previous tenants were a single mum and her 4 teenage daughters who flushed every make of sanitary product down the toilet so the drains had backed up. We got the first quarterly bill on a Saturday morning, it was HUGE! By the Saturday afternoon we'd found another rental.

Moving into that I broke my finger..

We've now bought an amazing house and are never moving again. Grin

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MiaowTheCat · 12/09/2016 10:35

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

RaeSkywalker · 12/09/2016 10:38

Madame we called our solicitor, as our contracts did say that the house would be totally cleared, including shelves etc. Loads of it was left. She said that there wasn't a lot we could do except write to their solicitor and ask them to honour it, or cover the cost of the extra skip we had to hire just to dispose of their rubbish. Surprise surprise, we never heard anything.

They've been having important post sent here for over a year now (including overdue road tax notices from the DVLA, bank and pension statements, etc). I used to forward it to their solicitor, but now it all just goes back in the post box. DH refused delivery of Rugby World Cup tickets for them earlier this year, and told the delivery driver they'd have to be returned to sender as we weren't prepared to accept responsibility to getting them to their owners. I'm not running around for them any more.

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Cacofonix · 12/09/2016 10:50

Our worst house move was the one before this one. Vendors were packing themselves and doing tiny van loads. We gracefully gave them an extra 2 hours after completion but then our removal guy said if they didn't start unpacking our stuff they would have to go and store our bits over the weekend. DH went inside and told them to put all their stuff on the pavement outside as they were now trespassing and then proceeded to pick up all their crap and dumped it outside. Then they tried to leave their bloody cat with us. Hmm Plus the house was soon incredible filthy. I cried and cried. Was also heavily pregnant. Then we got loads of bailiff letters for the vendors which probably took 2 years to sort. Bastards.

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jb007 · 12/09/2016 11:18

I'm never going to move again! *scans rightmove Grin

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Ginmakesitallok · 12/09/2016 11:22

Move before last we turned up at new house to find house still occupied, no one home and owners 2 dogs still there. There was nothing we could do but wait. They eventually moved out that evening.

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Nepotism · 12/09/2016 15:09

The one where the one-woman-band conveyancer completed on our sale but not our purchase, leaving us homeless for a week while she was on holiday.

The move after that, the solicitor didn't pay the Land Registry fees or stamp duty. He ended up in prison. We didn't find out till we tried to remortgage.

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sianihedgehog · 12/09/2016 15:21

I got the keys to my house ON MY DUE DATE, having been told four months previously that the house was empty and we could move quickly and found out later that the late owners son had been allowed to move in after we viewed and made things difficult. There was rubbish in every room, dog shit all over the back garden, grease all over the kitchen and pots full of rancid fat and rotten food in the cupboards. There was a transit van load of rubbish mouldering in the drive and the smallest bedroom was some kind of hideous wank dungeon full of crispy dick shaped socks and crunchy tissues and topless newspaper ladies... Plus a lot of dog treats and half eaten takeaways.

I had to get a friend to come and help us move all the rubbish into the drive and clean the worst bits before the movers came. I did as much as I could, being roughly as pregnant as it is possible to be.

I couldn't afford the sort of movers who pack all your boxes and stuff, so the day after we got the keys, I drove my Berlingo back and forth full of boxes with the help of friends, and a man and van did the furniture the next day.

I went into labour while trying to move an inflatable jacuzzi from the sitting room to the shed.

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YelloDraw · 12/09/2016 15:53

Nepotism yours are quite bad!!!

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90daychallenger · 12/09/2016 16:08

My current house was bought from a bloke who'd rented out his house for years.

We completed at 12pm and we had to pick up the keys from his letting agent. We arrived at about 3pm and asked for the keys. The man we'd bought from hadn't told the letting agent that we were picking them up that day so they refused to give us the keys.

Neither the seller or his solicitor were answering their phones.Our solicitor's receptionist promised that our solicitor would ring us back as soon as possible.

We refused to leave until we had the keys. We lived quite far away and we were going on holiday the next day so had to have the keys that day. The letting agent steadfastly refused to hand over the keys and said that our contract proving we owned the house didn't trump the fact that the seller hadn't told them.

By 3:45pm everyone was fed up, we were at a stalemate and the letting agent called the police because we refused to leave.

The police came really quickly and were completely baffled and confused by the whole thing and actually didn't know what to do. By now it's getting close to 5pm and a lot of the letting agent staff are starting to pack up to go home. We still refuse to leave and the manager is starting to get irate because he wants to go home but doesn't want to give us the keys.

Basically, we're waiting for the seller to call back and say 'yes' that the letting agent can give us the keys or for a solicitor to ring us back and say who's legally in the right. Our solicitor eventually called me at 6pm to confirm that the letting agent absolutely should hand over the keys. We got out of there at 6:15pm leave a very amused police officer who was being ranted at by the letting agent manager for not removing us and making his business look bad by having a copper in the reception all afternoon.

We laugh now but at the time I wanted to cry.

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Nepotism · 13/09/2016 23:00

Yellodraw, I'm famous for my disasters....

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ladybird69 · 13/09/2016 23:13

Worst move ever was the Friday before Christmas 18th Dec. . The money got lost in between banks so we were sitting on drive way of new house that was empty. All bank , estate agents and solicitors employees were breaking up that day so they were already pissed as farts and told us to basically find somewhere to stay over Christmas and put our belongings into storage for 2 weeks. It took a lot of choice words then miraculously funds were tracked and found and deposited at 3 o'clock! Nightmare.

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whathaveiforgottentoday · 13/09/2016 23:23

Money didn't go through on completion day at the beginning of the chain due to incompetent solicitor/buyer. Whole chain of 6 couldn't move in so we all spent the night in hotels/friends front rooms with all our furniture in storage. The only ones not bothered were the 1st in the chain as they were the only ones not actually moving in (they were a buy to let I think).
I cried myself to sleep that night desperately hoping the money would actually arrive the next day which thankfully it did.

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pepperpot99 · 14/09/2016 13:18

Our worst ever move was 15 years ago when I was 7 months pg with dd1. We rolled up in the pickfords van with, keys in hand, only to find that the sellers had only just started moving their stuff - into a bloody minibus which wouldn't fit the contents of one room let alone a 3 bed semi. They were thick, lazy and deeply vile. They said we could sit in the house whilst they moved out (how kind - we fucking own it you wankers). I was 7 months pg and it was a boiling hot day...I felt really rough. They had made huge platters of food for themselves but they didn't even offer me so much as a glass of water.
They clearly hadn't even bothered to carry out a royal mail re-route for their post, all of which I destroyed as an act of revenge for their bastardry.

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TeddyBee · 14/09/2016 15:13

Same. We moved after a hideously drawn out process (I was four months pregnant when offer was accepted and DD was three months old when we moved), vendor had asked for two extra weeks to pack between exchange and completion, I had been packing for two months into beautifully marked boxes, hired a nice removals firm who promised to do the lot in two trips with a trailer for the garden stuff (we were only moving five miles away), in laws came to keep an eye on DD, we had five cats and a bunch of chickens to move as well. Completed at midday. Showed up an hour later at the new house. Nothing, not a thing, not one tiny thing in a five bedroom house had been packed or moved out. I sent my removal men away for lunch. Two hours later, I got them to come back to start moving her stuff out. She had no removal men, she had her lazy ass son and a couple of his mates and ONE TRANSIT VAN. After a couple more hours, we managed to move enough of their stuff into the garage (where quite a lot of our things were supposed to go) that we could start moving our things in. Then she disappeared, still leaving ALL HER STUFF. By one am, I'd had to go home, get the cats and the baby and move them into the living room. The chickens had to spend the day locked in their house and the night on the drive because I didn't have time to set them up in the back garden and couldn't get through the garage (the only outside access to the garden) to move them in. At 2 am, her pigging son and his mates and THREE transit vans turned up, idled outside the house for hours and moved some of her stuff in. The next morning, she let herself into MY garage and started moving more stuff. Then she just abandoned everything else she couldn't be bothered to take, and I had to pay someone £400 to take it all away. I still hate her with a passion. I never forwarded a single piece of mail, but that was mostly because she didn't leave a forwarding address. She also didn't leave the code for the alarm, the keys for the garage or a single bloody lightbulb.

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lilymty · 14/09/2016 16:42

Ours was going great until 4pm the day before we were due to complete, when the buyer after not answering his phone all day decided to pull out. Everything was all boxed up and movers booked. The next day he told us he want to still buy our flat but wanted us to pay him 5,500 for all his fees. Which we ended up having to do as we would of lost our house and over 3,000 in fees ourself. He then messed us around for 6 days promising to exchange everyday and then not answering his phone again. One of the most stressful times ever but I just have to look around my lovely new home and think it's worth it to be here now. Although I have nothing but hatred for the man and hope karma comes and bites him in the bum when he comes to sell.

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ShortLass · 14/09/2016 18:27

Shock just Shock !

The worst that happened to me was I moved in my new house and decided I didn't like it. I hadn't been able to find anything else and my mum had talked me into buying it. I was there for two years and was never happy with my purchase.

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