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

Why when you fitted a power shower in the bathroom did you run the pipe across the loft hatch 2 feet above the beams?

Why did you think paint would hold window frames together?

In my last house we found (or rather my the 5 year old) found 2 guns in the loft. We should have kept them for when the stream of debt collectors etc. that came knocking!
The current house, ditto loads of artex, gnomes, flowery borders, layers of floor coverings, nasty fireplace, lots of green...but I love it and although old fashioned and needs attention it feels like home. Can't remember when that lot was ever in fashion though.

When I moved into my first home, every single room was decorated with wallpaper and a paper border, and every single border was upside down, in every room, so am pretty sure it was intentional

No wonder you moved out. Sounds grim.

unquiet dad

without wanting to sound melodramatic....

The house was HUGE 6500sq foot of Georgian town house and we renovated in from August 2004-february 2005

we rented and lived elsewhere but moved in days before christmas....

It nearly crippled us financially.

I hated it- the minute we moved in I knew it was wrong ..i swear i started having terrible dreams

I then discovered in victorian times a girl had been murdered right in front of it on a small park they faced

put in on the market end of may 2005

Moved out end of July!

NotanOtter - do you not want to know? Do please go down there now and start digging now. Please also report back later because I really want to know.

UQD - Did you not consider cutting off the moulded plug, feeding the wire through a small driled hole in the work surface and then putting a new plug on the end of the bare wire?

what is under the coffin shaped hole in the concrete cellar floor .....(no really)

The house ( not the one we are in now) was a squat and home to lots of people with drug and drink problems over 15 years.....

there was a nasty shaped hole in one of the cellar room floors......

Coming late to this but I have much to add..

• Why did you put an illegal fluorescent strip light in the bathroom?

• Why did you have quite the most monstrous 70s stone fireplace in the history of humanity, which was cone shaped rather like an upside down bottle and came out three quarters of the way into the dining room?

• Did you have some sort of share option with Artex?

• Did your eldest teenage son used to wank off in his bedroom, as we suspect? There were an awful lot of tissues lying around in there.

• How are your chickens? We quite liked the look of them?

• Are you still miserable old bastards?

OK, coming clean - our buyers would say:

"Oh, very clever of you to put the bread-bin carefully in position - over the place in the worktop where you had carved out a BLOODY GREAT HOLE to feed the fridge plug through - while we were looking around. Did you think we wouldn't notice once all your stuff had gone?!"

In our defence, it was a moulded plug and it wasn't going to be taken apart, or go through any other way...

this is hilarious!

Poetic license re the tramp - think he too was homeless.

Didn't actually have a problem with him being there; dh did but that's because he was the one who got a fright putting the lawn-mower away but our tramp missed the old owners. I helpfully found and gave him their forwarding address

heated - we also bought a house with a homeless person i the garage

lots of empty aerosols daily!

i felt awful but we moved his mattress eventually and he left

Why did you glue cork tiles with what seemed to be a reinforced superglue, on one wall in the box room,( meaning I had to spend 7 hours first with a hammer and chisel, then hot gun paint stripper thingy- bearing in mind the wall was only about 4m square so miniscule) to remove them? The spent a further 2 hours filling in all the little holes with plaster.

Why did you not mention the tramp in the shed at the bottom of the garden?

Oh and why did you hang every door upstairs, upside down?

Why did you paint one radiator in red gloss, one in salmon pink and the living room walls egg yolk yellow?

Why did you never change the decrepid- skanky -mouldy -disused 'ensuite shower room'(HAH!) into an actual useable shower room?

Why did you not tell us the next door neighbour is the original Vinegar Tits?

Why did you not clean the kitchen and bathroom from the minute we'd agreed to buy your house?

Why did you let the cat pee on the carpet in the corner of the lounge after we'd agreed to buy your house?

Why did you do every job around the house yourself making every simple thing we did a nightmare for the tradesmen to correct?

Specifically:

Why did you lean the cast iron fireplace against the wall, prop a wooden surround against it and secure the whole thing with ONE nail? Apart from being incredibly dangerous the smoke leaked back into the room.

Why did you not weld the gas pipes to the fire in the same fireplace properly and yet leave us with a carbon monoxide alarm to reassure us?

Why didn't you ever strip the layers of wallpaper and paint the room properly? - in one room we had between no layers and 5 layers all on the same wall (previously disguised by carefully placed pictures/furniture)? In virtually every room?

Why didn't you extend the vinyl under you huge appliances you had so that when we put our modern and smaller ones in we didn't have to look at bare concrete?

Why didn't you use the correct thickness of MDF / wood for any of the shelves you put in the alcoves and cupboards and why didn't you just buy a proper wardrobe / storage unit instead of attempting your own?

If you loved your 32 gnomes so much why did you leave them?

Why did you cover the previous crazy paving that someone had laid over the previous concrete paving slabs laid on concrete (!) with gravel with gravel and "flower beds" and plant things that would never survive since they had less than 6 inches of soil? (Not appreciated while pg with nr1)

UQD - mine would probably say that the wall behind the washing machine was damper than they expected it to be...but they paid the surveyor and all he had to do was look...he certainly spent a lot of time there with the damp meter so maybe it wasn't a shock after all? The gas fire was condemned after the purchase was agreed but I rang up and told the buyers that and they said not to replace it as they were taking it out anyway! The extractor fan worked like a dream as I spent a lot of time and money getting it fixed before we moved out - ironic then that the only thing in this house which doesn't work well is the extractor fan!!!

I also told them that any sofa had to come through the back fence and that the fence was on a hinge exactly for that purpose and I painted behind the bookcases in one room - on the day we were moving to avoid the patchy effect so many have described.

I think I was in fact a saint....

LOL UQD previous owners would probably say to us "why do we have to live with the smell of your notoriously smelly dogs (Bassets) after you moved out", "why did you have to point out the exact spot you gave birth on the dining room floor", "why didn't you tell us that all the light switches are the wrong way round??" and finally "why did you think painting the kitchen purple was a good idea" [wink}

People trying to sell "extras" for cash - such a scam.

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.

Now it seems to be sheds, greenhouses, satellite dishes etc. - stuff which people have no intention of taking. Glad we called our vendors' bluff on the greenhouse!

Is anyone else reading this and wondering what their buyers would say about them?

why did you paint round all your furniture so that that when we viewed the house it looked nice until you moved the furniure and there were great wardroabe and cupboard shaped gaps in the paint, you lazy feckers!

Why did you leave 5 inches of cat hairs all over the stairs.

Why did you not clean the kitchen before you left?
Why did you leave desiccated cat shit in the corner of two of the rooms?

Why - given you call yourself a landscape gardner - did you plant one giant buddleah bush in front of the windows? And only use one inch of topsoil on top of the hardcore rubble?

Why did you feel you had to leave huge holes all over the walls everywhere by taking even the built in loo-roll holder in the bath room?

To the surveyors: Why - despite us paying for a full survery which covered everything including how often we are allowed to blow our nose on a sunday according to bye-laws, _ did you at no point, did you tell us that the local electicity company forbade any planting of shrubs along the fence line as there are electric cables burried underneath, and so we found out by almost killing ourselves digging...

why did you paint round all your furniture so that that when we viewed the house it looked nice until you moved the furniure and there were great wardroabe and cupboard shaped gaps in the paint, you lazy feckers!

Why did you leave 5 inches of cat hairs all over the stairs.

Why did you not clean the kitchen before you left?
Why did you leave desiccated cat shit in the corner of two of the rooms?

Why - given you call yourself a landscape gardner - did you plant one giant buddleah bush in front of the windows? And only use one inch of topsoil on top of the hardcore rubble?

Why did you feel you had to leave huge holes all over the walls everywhere by taking even the built in loo-roll holder in the bath room?

To the surveyors: Why - despite us paying for a full survery which covered everything including how often we are allowed to blow our nose on a sunday according to bye-laws, _ did you at no point, did you tell us that the local electicity company forbade any planting of shrubs along the fence line as there are electric cables burried underneath, and so we found out by almost killing ourselves digging...

Why did you boast about the amazing shower you had, and how you'd love to take it with you to your new house when actually it was so powerful it just leaked all the way into the lounge so badly we had to take the carpet up in the bathroom and tile it out and re paint the lounge wall and ceiling.

Why have in your estate agents blurb lots of info about your garden being landscaped then tell us what a lovely time we'd have in the garden and what you'd planted where if you were going to dig most of it up and take it with you.

Why when we'd gone to collect the keys were you stood around with a pretty empty removal van having obviously made no start to loading up your van leaving us no choice but to put moving in back a day.

Why decide to move if you hadn't looked at a single house because none were up to your standards and keep us holding on for over 6 months. Then keep dropping hints that if you took it off the market and put it back on again you'd be able to get another 10k for it as prices had shot up.

Why try to sell us a crappy shed and a satellite dish and then leave them anyway when we said we didn't want them.

Oh and when you are laughing to us after you've moved about how awful the neighbours are, do one day let us tell you that they are actually really nice it was just YOU that they didn't like.

Why not spend some time pondering where half of your mail went, as when we contacted Royal Mail and discovered you hadn't bothered to redirect yours to save money as we could "drop it into you" as you were only a few roads away, we decided not to.

blimey- makes me glad we are the only ones to have lived in our house! Makes the litle issues we had snagging lists etc seem sooo tame (at the time they weren't minor things they felt pretty major to me )

Why did you buy these houses in the first place?