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

Why did you spend serious money having the house re-wired (you gave us the receipts with the legal paperwork), then use a hodge-podge of the cheapest, nastiest socket/switch covers everywhere?

Why did you then, when redecorating after the rewiring, fit the sockets/switches BEFORE painting? Every single one (and we are talking up to 8 double sockets per room) had been painted in and therefore pulled the paint and plaster off the wall. Just as well I'm good with polyfiller...

Why did you use six inch long enormous screws to fit all the shelves etc, including the lovely home made MDF built ins? Did you keep baby elephants on your shelves?

And why would you spend mega bucks (again, you left us the receipts) having a beautiful big studio built at the end of the garden, along with a state of the art alarm and CCTV system to monitor both house and studio, and having beautiful wooden shutters installed on most of the interior windows of the house, then sell the house to us almost immediately? I am very pleased that you did, but as you spent time moaning to me about how badly in debt you were and how you weren't making any money on the house sale, I do question your sanity...

Oh - and thank you so, so much for all the fun architectural salvage we found hidden in the garden. The enormous old wooden ship's rudder, the ornate (and heavy) wooden church panels and the huge cast iron ornate grills have been particularly fun to try to cart to the tip. No idea what we are going to do with the cart wheel, or the massive pile of slate....

Why did you rip out all the lovely old fireplaces? Oh yes, it was to sell in your junk antiques shop. They are still there, unsold, over fifteen years later. Perhaps I should buy them back?

Did you mean to build a kitchen extension without any lighting, or just forget to put it in?

You know that little room off the kitchen that we use as a utility room? Did you use it for food preparation...or food fights?

Do you know that light switches and sockets can be unscrewed and pulled away from the wall when you redecorate? That stops them from getting covered in paint!

Just how long was it since you cleaned the bathroom or ensuite? Both were so dirty that a full day with Cilit Bang and smokers' toothbrushes ended with us giving up and putting everything into a skip. I never knew it was possible to destroy loos, sinks and baths by simply not cleaning them.

I have told DH that I'm not moving again unless it's to a new build.

To the random couple who owned our house prior to us...Would you like the "swing" back which you ever so kindly left behind in the loft? And, no thanks, we are really not interested in joining your bizarre sex club so please cancel your membership for the swinger magazine or at least get your money worth and change your address!

Orange varnished pine cladding in more rooms than not. It might have been stylish in the 70s. Now, not so much.

Wood chip on just about ever ceiling. Fake beams.

A 12 ft by 12 ft bathroom but a 6ft by 8ft cupboard bedroom. Really?

And thanks for the attic full of your crap treasured stuff, and the broken dishwasher that we specifically said we didn't want.

Did you have a weal pelvic floor? (there were five loos)

Did you ever go to the loo while loading the dishwasher?

Did you enjoy watching people going to the guest loo? (It had some glass panelling on the door)

Also why did you patch up the window sills so they looked alright then dropped off within two months of us moving in?

Why did you leave us a silly note saying that the mirror in the bathroom had actually been your aunt's dressing room mirror, like that was a selling point? Yes, she was quite famous but it is a hideous mirror.

Had the windows been cleaned since Queen Victoria was on the throne?

1st home - why did you have sky blue on the bottom half of the walls in the living room and navy blue on the top half? It looked really odd. What was with the bar at the top of the stairs? Did you really like dark blue gloss? It took months to get rid of it.

2Nd home - I take it gold is your favourite colour? And thanks for the mice.

curRent home - why did you bury binbags full of 4ubbish in your back garden ? Are you ever going to tell anyone you moved out? I could have assumed your identity by now, looted your bank account and raided your pension! And why did you leave me a safe in the kitchen and no key? It drove me nuts not knowing what if anything was in there and for 7 years I tried to break into that thing before giving up when we had the new kitchen fitted and letting them throw the thing out.

not smoke but dust triggering the alarm

Why was the smoke alarm connected to the burglar alarm?

When we got the key and started knocking walls down it took forever to work out that the smoke was triggering the burglar alarm.
It's a miracle that the neighbours are still talking to us.

(Although previous owner had form for midnight burglar alarm sessions)

Why did you think that we wanted to keep 40 year old wet carpets which had been soaked over a period of months due to a broken water tank in the loft? You put them all back the day before we got the keys - and we ripped them all out again. Madness.

To the previous owners of my parents house:

What induced you to wallpaper the tiny box room with a wallpaper based on that painting of dogs playing cards?

And to my parents- why did you keep it on the walls until I was about 12?!

House before this one: When we came to look round you told us that most people pointed out all the good things, but you were going to point out all the things that needed doing. Very refreshing, but you somehow forgot to mention that the roof leaked, the wiring was dodgy, there was no heating system and the kitchen was so damp that the wallpaper was held up with blutak. Also, it was not kind of you to leave all the furniture you couldn't fit in your new house - it was laziness, wasn't it? Especially as it all smelled so badly of dog that it stank the house out and was so clapped out that we had to get it all to the tip.

Current house - to whichever previous owner or their builder did this: when your cold chisel got stuck in the wall a few inches below the ceiling, wouldn't it have been better to get it out and fill the hole in, rather than leave it there and build a little box out of plywood round it to hide the chisel?

why did you plaster over wallpaper

why did you not connect the toilet cistern overflow to the overflow pipe.... and then box in the toilet cistern so when it starts to leak it takes hours to work out where the leak is coming from.

why did you carpet the kitchen

why when replacing the windows did you fill in the gaps with wet sand. Wet sand dries into dry sand. Which then pours out when someone takes the wall paper off.

Why build a wardrobe over a beautiful original fireplace, destroying the fireplace sufficiently to make it unsalvageable, but not enough for us to not notice it ever existed and therefore be able to mourn its destruction.

Why did you plant raspberry bushes under the washing line, meaning anything longer than a t-shirt gets raspberry stained in summer.

How me and DP laugh....

Was there a glut of fake wood panelling in the late 70s? Is that why you covered every fecking wall and panelled the (aqua)bath with it?However, it was nice of you to just nail it up over generations of wallpaper and paint. Did you also lose a tape measure as not one was either straight or the right size (nor was the bleeding awful nylon shag pile you tried to charge us fir, but when we said no left anyway). Nice of you to just use 6inch screws to put up the kitchen cupboards too. (Wood panelling on the doors too-nice touch) thanks also for having a shave and a shit and not cleaning up after either.
However,to the people after us, sorry about the Thomas the Tank engine wallpaper and the bed base that dh forgot to have put on the moving truck.

Why did you paint and plaster in the dining room without putting down dust sheets, ruining the lovely Victorian tiled floor, and then glue the disgusting carpet to the floor?

Why, on completion day with 3 young children, did you leave us to pack and move all your belongings, then clean your entire house, including vomit from the sink?

Oh yes, because you were an alcoholic

Nice of you to recarpet the stairs for viewings which were then ruined by dirty boots when you moved out.

And thanks for not cleaning anything after sale was agreed. There was about five layers of foil on the grill pan.

Why did you line the alcove around the range with ordinary plasterboard rather than the flame-retardant type, which when we removed it also turned out to be held in place by pieces of wood. The ones next to the flue were nicely charred. Basically, you lined the chimney with wood. Why?!???

First house

How did you use the bath with 4 adults and a baby and not notice that it was so stained that we thought it was a brown bath. My DH who lived in a house for his first 20 years with no bathroom refused to even wash his feet in there. Why only rewire part of the house, the kitchen was a nightmare with the old 2 pin plugs. Thanks for all the 5 layers of wallpaper in the 2 living rooms, I had to spend 4 weekends removing it.

Second house

As a qualified electrician why have we to this day got two live wires in the front room and why did you leave the light wire in the outside toilet live and not tell the next owner. We told them 8 years later after we broke the door down to see what was in there. Why did you build a brick fireplace right up to the ceiling but not tie it into the wall. Good job my husband was able to jump out of the way after only removing the top two bricks. Why did you use 4 inch nails in every bit of wood especially in the tongue and groove in the kitchen ceiling and walls, we had to have the whole kitchen re plastered. The wardrobes in our bedroom were the worse example of DIY I had even seen.

Why on earth would you paint over light switches and plug sockets?

Why would you spill something brown and disgusting looking down your living room and bedroom walls and not clean it up???

And why would you leave all your kitchen work tops with a layer of god knows how old grease for your buyers?

In fact, why were you such dirty skanky twats that must have only ever cleaned once in your lives, and only then, the obviously viewable areas when we came to view the house????

Erika that's brilliant! Did they ever say anything?

Why, when you had your kitchen floor tiled did you decide to not do the whole floor?? Just doing up to where you put your kitchen units in, leaving a two foot gap around the kitchen walls. So that when the kitchen is to be ripped out, we have to replace the floor as the tiles are no longer available....?

Did you move into one of my previous houses? .

Answer to your question: It worked out much cheaper, and why tile under the units when you never see them??!

Why did you leave a fish under the floorboards?!?! Oh wait that was us, after you screwed us out of almost 10 grand right before completion .

It was lovely to find so many electric sockets in the kitchen after finding the rest of the house contained about four in total, but really, did you have to fit one directly underneath the kitchen sink amongst the leaky pipework?

Also - and I'm not even going to ask what you were doing up there - as you'd taken the light bulb out, it would have been nice to let us know you'd left a shitload of broken glass in the attic.