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

Crying with laughter over dizhin's "native turds" and beyond's terrified cats.

Why on earth did you put plasterboard over the redundant copper piping in the living room alcove? It would have been much easier to simply remove the stuff.

WTF were you thinking putting woodchip on the ceilings.

WTF were you thinking using concrete to make swirly patterns on the wall above the wood burning stove.

Didn't you think to fill the hole in the wall before you fitted the kitchen units? It was hard to spot behind the large drainpipe outside but boy it made the kitchen freezing .

Ah, how funny to see this old thread of mine revived!

that light one reminds me of thr house my mum and dad bought at auction, which had a light hanging from the ceiling to waist height. And under the stairs, with the fuse boxes and gas meter etc - A toilet.

What possessed you to NAIL UP the wallpaper in the hallway? Why did you hang a chandelier from a false, suspended ceiling so that it would hit people of average height in the chest as they walked into the room? And, while we're at it, WTF was all that blue shredded plastic in the garden all about?

OMG

This kind of put everything into perspective - the falling to bits shed which was full of junk, the outside toilet we had removed to find that the retaining wall behind was collapsing!

No porn though, and the only artexing was in the utility room and the bathroom ceiling.

And to the people who bought my old house. I'm really sorry my ex painted the front and back doors in emulsion (covering over the gloss I'd painted), ripped up the stair carpet and painted the stairs black gloss and the walls yellow. I had moved out by then. Though I did end up selling it for less than I paid for it in the end (this was nearly 20 years ago).

Did you realise that generations of raccoons had been born and lovingly nurtured in the attic? And if not how the heck could you possibly have missed them? If the noise of troops of them galloping back and forth in the eaves and barking at each other didn't strike you as odd, didn't the smell of years of poop buildup hit you right between the eyes on a warm day? Or the fact that they gathered very conspicuously in the lovely old tree in the garden on summer evenings as if they owned the place?

Did you know there were fossilised poop nuggets in one of the built in drawers along the upstairs hallway? And following on from that, how could you possibly have missed them?

Did you ever use the ancient wall-mounted oven whose door left a half inch gap when it 'closed'? I saw the former lady of the house raiding the frozen dinner section in our local supermarket a few weeks after we moved in so I suspect not.

Walk me through the thought process that led to the purple shag carpeting in the basement and also the wiring and lights stapled to the warren of chipboard bookshelves in the room down there that you called a library. Since you are an architect, the explanation of that glaring departure from code will no doubt be interesting. Did you know how many dog biscuits we found under said carpeting when we finally cleared the maze of shelving and ripped it up (which was difficult as it was nailed to the floor).

The lack of gutters would also be an interesting story. Another code violation.

Again, harking back to your profession, how did you manage to live with such convoluted electrical circuits even though the whole house got either new drywall or the godawful cheap panelling in the 25 years you lived there (convex in the upstairs bedrooms because somebody can't measure properly) and you therefore had ample opportunity to redo the wiring on a rational basis? And if you knew what outlets and fixed appliances were on which circuits, why didn't you leave a diagram? It would have saved us lots of unplugging of appliances and lamps and rearranging of rooms, and blowing of fuses.

I am also wondering about the creative process that led to the fire engine red woodwork throughout the house. I 'd like to know about the cheap wood panelling and the lowered ceiling with the ugly panels and the big blinking fluorescent light in the downstairs office/bedroom. If you used it as an office, did you ever let clients set foot in there? When you decided to turn it into a bedroom did you ever check what your teens were writing on the walls??

Oh and it was a good idea to pull back the big dining room curtains to hide the stains from water leaking through the roof over the dining room window. Full marks for cunning.

I know its many years later and only resurrected for RowanMN, but...

What did you do to your cats that made them dig so many claw marks into the windowsills??

Why did you painted all the floorboards in thick matt brown paint, every single floorboard in the entire house?

Why did you timber clad the the bathroom, thus giving it the look of a 70's swedish sauna?

massive not native..... autocorrect '

why did you cover your entire bathroom in Cork wallpaper and yes I mean all of it, wrapping it up and around the bath, up the shower step, up the walls, across the ceiling and even around the bin that you left behind? It was sticky and mouldy and utterly disgusting, letalone it looking like a native turd that you crawled inside to do your ablutions in

Ok I've just got to add to this

Why, oh Why did you put down false floors over the entire ground floor of the house.

And if there actually was a good reason to do this, WHY did you think that foam packing would keep them up?

We are going to have to rip up the entire ground floor that everything is built on, eg the kitchen, and move out to fix it.

Why did you cut the cord off the hedge trimmer, and leave it in the garage for us?

Why did you think we'd want an ancient surge-protecting multi-plug thing? Are you trying to tell us something about the electrics?

What would you like to drink?

I feel I owe you one for making our house so superficially ugly. If you had done it up nicely we could never have afforded to buy it.

Five years later it looks stunning (our taste, our work) and it's just right for us.

I love how so many people can't see past wallpaper. Makes ugly but potentially beautiful houses all the more affordable for the rest of us! Thanks and enjoy that drink.

Why did you advertise the house as having a burglar alarm when you knew damn well it was still in its box in the cupboard under the stairs? (Kind of you to leave it for us, though..)

As self-builders, what on earth made you think that that lovely deep plaster coving through the downstairs could be held up by glue alone? After the first couple of bits fell off, we have had to take the lot down and replace it.

That clover leaf bath, which costs a fortune to fill and you cannot straighten your legs in? That was a mistake, especially in such a lovely big bathroom.

Oh, and taking all the curtains with you was fine by us (they were vile). But we did expect you to make good and put up curtain track. Not just leave us lengths which were too short for the windows and had no fixings with them. Oh, and sodding great holes in the walls where the tie-backs were attached.

You are supposed to be a joiner for heavens sake - why are half the skirting boards flapping in the breeze?

And I won't even start on the horrors we have found in the garden, other than that you sold us more land than was actually yours to sell, which we are still trying to sort out 5 years later.

So much for a new house being less hassle than the (very) old one we left behind!

Why did you remove the smoke alarm from the ceiling especially when you knew a young baby would be moving in?

why would you stain a pine floor mahogany red? which everytime something is moved across the floor takes the paint off and leave lovely pale yellow marks?

why not just varnish it with clear stuff?

MADNESS!

One I previously forgot.

Why did nearly every bit of floor squeak when stood on?
Why, when the floorboard became loose, squeaky and needed repairing/replacing did you just decide to hammer MASSIVE nails randomly about the floorboards. And then to help matters why did you glue the underlay to these ridiculously squeaky floorboards??

Meaning when we stripped back the hideous carpet to see if we could repair the floorboards and have lovely wooden floors - we discovered ruined boards with bit of green and brown underlay stuck to them. Resulting in a MASSIVE clean up job of ripping out the whole floor in nearly every room, just to stop the squeaking.

To whom did the red lacy g string hanging neatly on the washing line belong? (we bought the house from 2 elderly sisters).

Why did you not clean the kitchen? Ever? We had to rip it out.

Why did you act all shocked at the fact we completed and complained you "ran out of time" so couldn't vacate (or as it transpired clear out the sodding attic) even after your solictor had our cash? We had been negotiating the purchase for months it was hardly a surprise.

Why were you so greedy that you tried to charge us extra for carpets despite the fact that we were paying a large amount for a house that you had inherited and needed alot of work anyway you avaricious witch.

Do you know your over-enthusiastic use of borders almost reduced DH to tears? The blasted things were glued on around every room - the rooms in this house are massive high ceilinged ones. Obviously twee 1980s borders not the look we were after.

I had to return, because my DH reminded me of the real party piece of our house last night.

Why did you leave 'dad' and 'nan's' urns in the back garden????

"It used to be carpets and curtains - as if you'd pull all your carpets up and take them. That was just a way of sneaking an extra thousand or two in without paying stamp duty.
"

Actually they did in the last house I lived in (where DH is living now) they wanted to take the main bedroom carpet - I have no idea why - it didn't look/feel like anything special yet of all the carpets in the house they took it with them

(and it's still got no carpet now 4 1/2yrs later )

Why did you not tell us you ran a business from this address (not a dodgy busines, though)?

Why did your business partner not forward his mail when you left? Or change the address on his driving licence? If he had, then the lovely, kind person who found his credit card wallet would have known where to send it rather than sending it to us. The temptation to use his cards was almost irresistible.

Why did you fail to tell Companies House for 2 years that your business was no longer at our address?

For anyone who has a problem with non-redirected mail, DH used to send things back (especially official mail, IYKWIM) in another envelope with a letter stating that the person no longer lived at the address and we would consider it harassment if they continued to send us unsolicited mail. Worked most of the time.

Dear Landlord,

Do you come from a culture in which the boiler is a household god and therefore needs to be enclosed in an enormous throne-like cupboard, leaving feet of unusable space all around it and not enough cupboards for the pots and pans?

One of the things I love about this house is all the daylight - I think you feel the same way and hate to waste this glorious natural resource, which is why none of the curtains are as wide as the windows by a few feet.

Like another poster I am amused by the sloping kitchen surfaces, in particular the infallible consistency with which washing up water drains into pastry or biscuit dough on the one bit of surface big enough to roll baking out onto.

Did you get a wasp in your shirt while gluing something in the cupboards in the kitchen? Or are the streaks of yellow glue all over all the surfaces some kind of decorative effect?

You are very clever and thrifty to have fitted the shower head 10" above the shower door, so that when one person showers in the bathroom another person gets a free shower below in the kitchen, without paying for any more hot water.

Putting the rent up? up? Now? by £50 a month? Bless you.