To The People Who Owned My House Before Me I Would Just Like To Ask

Did you ever pick up your dog's poos from the garden? We moved in 2 days after you left and picked up 30!!
And thanks for covering your kids' lovely pen drawings on the walls with furniture - such a nice surprise on moving day.

And did you actually pass your building course at college? Cos you left behind some horrifically bad DIY - squint curtain poles, holes at the edges of flooring, etc etc
Thanks!

Why did you feel the need to smoke what I assume were around 1000 cigarettes a day, primarily in the bath, thus leaving nicotine stains an inch thick around all the bathroom fixtures?

Also, why did you choose to remove the hall light fitting, plaster (very badly) over the hole in the ceiling, (And the electrical lead) and leave a pointless light switch in place, in a dark hall.....

And why did you plaster over alcove shelves in the lounge, and their contents leaving us to find back issues of Hustler, Viz & the Sun dating somewhere between 1988 and 2001 (Among other more unsavoury items) when we tore the wall down?!

Thank you for the Dualit toaster, bottle of wine and new towels you left us.

No it didn't make up for the fact that you'd forgotten to mention that the flat was positioned above a family who were responsible for the local crime wave who made my life a misery, torched my car and threatened to kill me.....

Why did you put your pictures up with no more nails?

Oh and why leave a floater in the bog??

Why did you carpet the bath?

Why did you install a Jacuzzi bath if you'd decided it was too dangerous to have electrics in the bathroom so it couldn't be used (and also never clean it so the first time I tried it I was covered in black slime)?

Why did you steal all the light switches?

Why oh why did you pretend it was a conservatory when actually it's a wall with a French window next to it which you then wallpapered above so it looked like a proper wall (it was a plank of wood)?

Why didn't you take your stained mattress to the tip instead of throwing it over the fence into the hedge?

ha!

here i go

The junk in behind the shed, when I'd asked that the shed be cleared?! That was classy.

Why did you paint the downstairs loo deep purple and allow your drunken teenage sons to stagger in from the hot tub which you abandoned in the middle of the patio to urinate all over the untreated pine boxing in the pipework? The room was so dark and stinking my sons wouldn't go in there.

Why did you abandon the hot tub in the middle of the patio to ruin the view of the garden instead of putting it to one side? And thanks for leaving the filthy water and uncleaned filters in it [boak].

Why did you not discover that the downstairs shower has been leaking for many years so that the entire bedroom floor has had to be ripped up, and the utility room floor and the palster has all had to removed, just to try to get it dried out? And is now costing us a fortune to put right and massive upheaval, and my cat has left home over it. Actually, you did know, judging by the towels stuffed underneath to soak up the water and disguise the problem so you could sell the place. Arseholes.

Why did you allow your daughter to repaint the bedroom in black paint after accepting our offer? Is this why you suddenly went non-contact until just before completion and wouldn't let us visit. We're still trying to cover it over despite your dodgy effort with some cheap gloopy Homebase one (ha!) coat paint.

How many cups of tea and bright pink nail polish did you pour over the bedroom carpet between accepting our offer and us moving in?

Why did you spend so much money spending a fortune on extensions and other expensive work on the house but then not bother to maintain any of it?

Dear previous owner.

Yes. I know we saw the house and we were won over by it's potential. However, I'm still going to complain about:

The lack of cleaning:

Cleaning up another mans piss from around the toilet still makes my stomach churn.

The oven had to be chucked out as it was a relic from the 1970's and hadn't been cleaned since then.

And everything was just... Sticky.

The decor:

My lovely SIL described the main bathroom as 'pink, but like someone has tried to dissolve a body in it with acid'. The graduated pink bathroom suite. Words fail me. They failed me even less when we found out it was fitted in 2002. It's still in situ. Gold taps and all. And wall tiles that are weird. We haven't changed it as we can't afford to right now, and I also like showing people the hideousness of it all.

So so many pelmets. So many.

Ditto vertical blinds.

And textured fucking wallpaper. In EVERY room. We only have two ceilings and one room left to strip. It's been a long journey but I might have a party when I take off the last strip.

Fitted cupboards everywhere. Most of them have been ripped out now. Just like most of the plants from the back and front garden.

But, I love this house. It's my home.

Why did you partition off a small portion of the kitchen and place a toilet in there?

Why did you decorate the walls of said toilet like this?

My first house 30 years ago:

Why did you think it was ok to leave a fecking car engine in the attic and remove the wooden hatch, replacing it with the broken, heavy smoked glass table top?

Thanks for putting the shower behind the bathroom door, next to the airing cupboard with NO waterproofing at all. We couldn't afford to replace it and I hate baths.

Thanks for leaving the cat flap unlocked when you left letting every cat in a 200 mile radius and their bloody fleas in. The whole house was jumping with the little bastards and had to be napalmed!

Why did you think that black ceiling beams were a good look in a small Victorian terrace in the knocked through downstairs room. It took untold hours and layers of white paint to cover them up because we couldn't afford to replace the ceiling.

Thanks for the pink bathroom suite.

A house I moved into about 15 years ago:

Why, when almost no natural light got into it, did you paint the hallway and stairs dark blue?

Why did you leave all the other wall paper on the walls in every room? Why on earth would you 'paper' on whole wall of the living room with fablon? Wasn't that expensive? It certainly took effort to remove!

Why did you attach a dado rail to the living room walls made up of several mismatched off cuts using no nails? It took a foot wide chunk of plaster off with it when I removed it, which meant I had to replaster the jeffing walls, having already removed the jeffing Fablon and layers of paper from them!!!

Why did you think that wallpaper paste was a good choice to attach your pornographic posters to the walls of what was going to be my DC's room?

Why did you write yours and your children's names into the hideous Spanish plaster stuff in the bathroom? I had to sand the walls back before I could tile them, because you also forgot to put any tiles up at all.

Why, if you knew your several hundred cats had pissed all over it, did you leave the carpet down in the living room? Thanks so much for the plague-like number of fleas which hatched the first night we had the heating on as well, DC2 aged 3 months looked like he had smallpox after the bites which he is allergic to.

This was what our oven looked like when we moved in to this house. I tried to get the landlord to clean it but it took so damn long that I just did it myself with the help of two others. It still took over two hours between us, as the inside was thick with black grease and the hobs had a black scummy ring around them which we had to shift with sugar cubes and scrapers.

Disgusting.

Also had a rubber hose with a spray gun attached to the tap in the downstairs toilet... what the hell?

I'd like to ask the previous owners of this house what exactly they have against daylight.

Why would anyone put 15W (not energy saving and therefore equivalent to something that will light a room) bulbs in every single light fitting?

Given the dinginess created, why did you think various shades of dark brown was the right decorating choice?

Why would you brick up the window in the kitchen then install a dark wood effect kitchen with black granite worktop and black tiles on both floor and walls? And why would you think that a single 15W bulb in the middle of the ceiling would be sufficient to light it?

Why would you pay for a granite worktop but not ensure that the hob was fitted properly in to it? The hob was fitted so that it was right against the back wall, and was therefore a fire hazard. Because the hole was cut in the wrong place, it meant the whole worktop had to be scrapped.

Why would you think that cupboards hanging off the walls such that you could out your whole arm down the back of them at the top were correctly fitted?

Why would you install a fancy new bathroom but not bother to seal the bath so that water would destroy the kitchen ceiling below?

Why would you decide to self-convert your garage into the most awful room imaginable? And, since you thought that was a good idea, why would you accentuate the slope on the garage floor rather than compensating for it? Why wouldn't you fill in the huge hole under the double glazing unit you fitted which meant that water got under the steeply sloping floor you installed and was rotting it? Obviously we can totally understand why you didn't apply for planning permission or involve building regs in this, as they'd have laughed in your face.

Did you think the gas meter was a design feature for the new 'bedroom' you created? Why would you plats oats over the gas pipes making the whole thing incredibly unsafe? Why would you simply cut a jagged hole in the plasterboard so that the stopcock would stick out?

Why would you leave the double glazing in such a mess that the inside of the glass became etched to the extent to which it became opaque? The neighbours (and everyone else, including us) just thought you were filthy types who never cleaned the windows, but actually you just couldn't see out of them.

Why on earth would you get an architect to draw up plans and then secure planning permission for the world's most ill-advised extension to the bak of the house. It would make the kitchen and the back reception room entirely internal and simply corridors for getting to the really absurdly designed extension. We can totally see why you opted to move rather than to destroy the house entirely by building that yourselves.

Ikea pax wardrobes are really easy to fit. How did you manage to make such an arse of it? Why did you cut out some notches from both wardrobes in the alcoves of the master bedroom so that you could fit a huge radiator on the chimney breast. The chimney breast is a stupid place for a radiator, especially if it's wider than the chimney breast and encroaches into the wardrobe.

Why did you remove the plaster from the wall before fitting the wardrobes in the back bedroom? They would still have fitted with the plaster there and you wouldn't have made such an enormous mess,

Did you think underlay was some kind of unnecessary extravagance and something you could just leave out when getting new carpet?

Why didn't you remove the enormous boxing in constructed out of plywood in the corner of the back bedroom when you fitted a combi boiler and removed the hot water tank it housed? And, more pertinently, why was the only thing to be found inside the huge box a 21st birthday card and two Viagra tablets? Our surveyor laughed.

Did you really think the lion door knocker was tasteful?

So many questions.

Where is the stopcock? We found the external one, but assume there's one indoors.

Have you ever heard of the mail redirection service?

To the little old man who sold us our family home, which will one day (but not this day) be beautiful:

Why, why, when this house was built new for you in the 1970s, was psychedelic blue de rigeur in the kitchen? Blue doors with razor-sharp metal openers, stained white Formica worktops, crazy blue tiles, bonkers blue lino, and a ruddy great gap all around the cooker so food can fall in but not come out. Thanks for that. We've run the budget carefully and it will only be four years before we can afford to fix it.

Why shut up so many rooms in the house leaving them to moulder? We've seen the tape on the doors. Was it the vomit-orange carpet and wallpaper that put you off?

Thanks for all the shrubbery in the garden. We particularly enjoy the hypericum with nice toxic berries to poison our toddler; oh yeah, and the toxic yew as well.

Why put in hedges four feet from the fences boundaries? I know it's the done thing to maintain hedges this was but the garden is 100ft long with hedges which require strimming on BOTH sides and the top. Brilliant. And it leaves a massive gap for our child to hide in, and the bloody cat when she escaped outside on the second night in the new house.

What the actual jeff did your 'cleaner' do when you paid her to clean an empty house weekly? The kitchen, floors, skirting, and walls were all filthy. The bathrooms (carpeted) were soggy with old man wee. I still can't go in the downstairs loo from lingering memories of inhaling stale urine as I scrubbed the walls, toilet, and floorboards (carpet having been evicted).

Why why why glue the 70s Laura Ashley wallpaper back down on the seams? And all that wallpaper paste... We had to wash every wall 3 times before we could paint.

Oh and we adore the secondary glazing. Thought I could live with it but it streams with water and we're now forking out for new windows years ahead of where we'd budgeted (though admittedly this was our own ignorance).

Thanks for leaving the firewood though, we now have a lovely fire to keep us warm

Thanks for the shit-stained pants you left in the cupboard under the sink.

Why did you paint over the front door bell, which won't work? And why did you knock a huge hole through from your study to the kitchen, in order to thread your speaker cable through?

Did you not realise that the porous tiles you used in the bathroom wouldn't do anything to prevent water seeking through the wall? And that a shower door on a hinge would leave a gap for water to go on the floor? The rubber seal you stored in the shed fixed that.

What year did you stop cleaning your oven? Was it because it had stopped working? And no, I will not continue to keep forwarding on mail from your DM for ever because you don't want her to know you've moved.

Could be here all day but here goes

Why did you lay a wooden floor in the kitchen over a smelly old carpet?

Why did you put the wrong type of roof on the extension?

Why did you pour concreate on the drive over the manhole that covers the pipes we need access to?

Why did you fit the worlds smallest oven in the kitchen with plenty of space?

And last but not least ...

Why did you fill the old loft hatch with your granny's curtains then try plaster over it so it falls down on my head one day?

Mintyy so how is your kitchen now after this time lapse?

To mine: Why did you feel the need to put so much trellis into the garden. I know the idea of 'rooms' but honestly we lost half the garden. To get out the back door and into the garden I had to walk under at least three arches.

Why did you put a rambling rose by a small arch. I loved the flowers but the poor thing was over the top of the arch and reaching another 3 metres into the sky... if you'd planted it the other side of the arch I could have trained it through the holly tree. I miss that rose and it's been 10 years.

Why paint the dining room creamy orange. It went a little too well with the orangey varnished pine floor, picture rail and window surround.

Dark terracotta is not a bedroom colour.

But really why sell the house? It's been lovely to live in, even the first year when we saved to replace the windows (you could poke your finger through the rotten wood under the glass in the living room) and didn't have a sofa. I've heard through the local grapevine that you'd love to move back but we're not selling.

Why did you wallpaper the kitchen in rust coloured fake brick wallpaper?? And use breeze blocks to make the 'quaint' fireplace in the lounge?

Oh, yes, and the new door way through from the kitchen, shame you didn't bother including a lintel to support the wall above - the standard of your other D-I-Y just made DH a teensy bit suspicious, just as well he checked...

Oh, and (reminded by DH):

You know those railway sleepers that you used to landscape the garden? The ones that you made the steps out of, right next to the large pond? You know, the ones with no grip or textured surface finish on them. Just bare-wood steps. Yeah, those.

Did you realise that when they're wet, even just a little bit wet, they are slicker than black ice?

For six months of the year, they join forces with the pond to form a lethal landscaping trap, designed to deliver people a sharp blow to the head before depositing them in a foot of water.

Good work.

Why, when you had the new double-glazed windows installed, did you decide to put non-opening casements in both loos? Every other window in the house opens. I can only assume that you liked being sealed in with the smell of your own poo, especially as neither room had an extractor fan.

Why did you remove the perfectly good internal kitchen door and dump it in the garage, meaning that there is now no way of stopping cooking smells filling the whole house, and that the smoke alarm in the hallway outside goes off incessantly?

Why did you decide that your quilt-thickness, super-insulating curtains should be floor-length when all the radiators are under the windows? Every time they were closed, over the top of the radiators, you were insulating the heat out. I mean, thanks for leaving them n'all, but they're useless. Plus the ones in the dining room, with the green fringing, were absolutely hideous. Not even people on Freecycle want them.

Why, when you had the doorknobs on the doors changed, did you paint over the marks left by the old ones in a different colour to the rest of the door?

And why, in the name of all that is holy, is everything in the house sodding beige?