What's the grimmest/ weirdest thing you've found when you've moved into a house?

[ItsLeviooosar]

One house we were in (rented) had a double ended dildo in the wardrobe and tenants came and asked for it back! They also washed things for their rabbit in the dishwasher and there was sawdust in the filter 🤢.

Most recently we moved into a lovely house (bought) it's our first house so we didn't really know what to expect. However we definitely didn't want the previous owners washing machine and made that clear, they put it on the fixtures and fittings form at £500 and we declined.

Moved in and it's fucking there ! It was wedged right in and we had to store our washing machine in the basement for a bit whilst we worked out how to rip it out. I used it a couple of times but didn't like it, it sounded like it was taking off and all the washing was tingly when I went to empty it

It was German, and according to google 28 years old! Anyway we finally worked out how to rip the bastard out without killing the kitchen and found out it was a real health hazard.

It was a German plug, into a travel adapter, into an extension lead wired into the mains, worth the water pipe from the washing machine dripping onto the plug 😱 I'm
Surprised it didn't catch fire! But the guy who removed it said the reason the washing felt tingly was because the washing machine was live!

They had to pay to have it removed as we went through their solicitor.

Not weird exactly, but at one house the previous owners had just had some compost delivered which was at the side of the flower border just yards from the kitchen door. It stank to high heaven. DH got a big shovel and moved it to the bottom of the garden where it should have been all along. The smell was truly out of this world. Perhaps they were trying to tell us something.

These same people took the rocks from the rockery and every single light bulb except for one upstairs and one downstairs.

@Aroundtheworldin80moves
We have an upside down hook on the back of our door so that we don't need one on the front for the Christmas wreath: we attach a long ribbon loop to the wreath and it goes over the top of the door to the upside down hook. Could yours be the same thing?

Too late! Should have kept on reading! Sorry

In the 6 months between viewing the house, making an offer and it completing the woman who lived there seemed to have completely stopped cleaning it. It was absolutely filthy, full of rubbish, dirt and dog hair everywhere, including inside the freezer 🤢

This flat had been badly trashed by the previous tenant (which is good as it hugely reduced the asking price).

The ubend in the kitchen sink was blocked, when I took it out it was filled with pebbles, so they had purposely put them in there.

There was a big bag of weed in the toilet cistern, that was a bonus. It was also full of used condoms, very weird and grim.

We had been in our house for a while when refitting our kitchen and the electrician discovered the cooker was wired into the mains in a really dangerous way. He was really ashen faced about it literally being a potential death trap.

Under a loose floorboard in my son's room we found a Polish porn mag from the 1990s. It was quite tame with a feature on naked ladies with strategically placed fruit. We stared in wonder and then looked up at each other and had an awful moment of realisation "OMG I am looking at a porn mag with my son/mum". He broke the silence by quipping "someone ought to tell them that's not how you get your five a day".

In the same house we also found a set of golf clubs and motorised trolley (must ebay those) and one of those "Quilty Pleasures" patchwork suits (Christmas themed one). Plus a brand new tv set still in its box - sadly an old analogue one which went to the tip.

There seems to be s lot of bad wiring around

We moved into a new build and after some problems with wiring found out that one of the hall sockets was wired off the imersion/boiler. The other one was wired of the main ring.

We sat for ages in disbelief and glad we hadn't decided to change the sockets as we would of turned of the wrong trip switch

We found a cast iron bed frame and a weird religious text hidden under floorboards in the attic.

I'd prefer to think the two were not related... :o

Oh and when we did some work on the outside of the house, we discovered that the electric running down to the garage was completely unsafe - no insulation, no circuit breaker, just unprotected wire running just under the lawn.

And the back door was an internal door which had rotted through and the glass had dropped to leave inch high gaps that the wind whistled through.

And parts of the stained glass in the front door were missing and had been replaced by carefully arranged strips of sellotape. I upgraded that immediately with my high tech Blue Peter style sticky back plastic so that the whole lot wouldn't fall out in the first storm.

My uncle hid dirty letters and photos of his mistress in a tobacco tin in the eaves of the house. He must have done his own developing, as I don't think Boots would have printed them back then! My cousins and I found them when we did some work on the house after I bought it from my aunt’s estate, about 45 years later.

I did wonder whether to put a small ad in the local paper: “JD’s mistress: photos found and destroyed”. He had a bit of a history of philandering - my aunt was The Other Woman in his divorce, back when divorce was terribly scandalous. Mum always said he’d have left my aunt, too, if he hadn’t dropped dead of a heart attack first.

A gun cupboard, with ammo in, left by a Policeman.
And a mound of rubbish in the middle of the sitting room carpet, complete with a number of half eaten mouldy McDonald's burgers (nearest outlet was 30miles away). We'd had a 'tense exchange' via our lawyers just before completion and it looked deliberate: Weirdo!

Next house - they'd removed ALL the lightbulbs and ALL the doorhandles. The entire basement electricity was 'live' with hanging wires. One room was decorated with pentangles. The neighbours told me: 'ooh, no one ever stays there for long'. Smashing!

When my parents bought their place in the 80s, the seller left up some very odd and dusty wallpaper which had strands of brown wool stuck to it, but they took the lightbulbs and the TV aerial. Mum couldn't get over the TV aerial thing, "even though [the sellers] were devout Christians". As if the 11th commandment were "Thou shalt leave thy TV aerial for the next occupant, please". Their previous house had come with DIY psychedelic murals, which fortunately were overpainted pretty fast.

In my last rental a girl I'd been to school with had graffitied her name on a bedroom wall in orange paint. The previous one had an entire room of cheap mdf shelving containing thousands of issues of National Geographic, and all the floor coverings (which I mostly wasn't allowed to rip up) were soaked in cat wee. Ex DP had a dead cat in a holiday home he bought, as well as a shedload of random cheap furniture and knicknacks. He got very cross at me for mentioning the cat and insisted it was a fur hat and that he wasn't going to remove it. It was probably still there when he sold up, though I gather he was somewhat more proactive when it came to throwing away my stuff.

An absolute ton of rat poison in 25 dishes ALL over the loft, enough to kill a vast plague of rats. I never saw any evidence at all of rodent infestation or any dead ones. It was bizarre.
Absolute filth everywhere, I had to have all of the plug sockets changed as I could not get the much off them even by soaking in the sink in bleach - disconnected obviously. It cost £200 to replace them all.
Clearly the owner never ever washed his hands ever. It was disgusting.
I wish I'd known I could have claimed for things like that via solicitor, it's too late now.
The bathroom and sink plugs were totally blocked with yards of thick black hair (boak). It took special tools and loads of bleach to clear them.

When we bought our previous house the seller (lived there fore six-seven years) said that their seller had been a bit of a DIY enthusiast and had done lots of work himself.

H, one thing he did build was a gas oven underneath the stairs. At one point a gas check must have happened as the oven had a certificate inside that it was unsafe to use. Our sellers never bothered with an oven, not sure if they had to get it inspected as part of the sale.

The whole kitchen was a disaster, drawers falling apart, the cabinets had no back, just plasterwork so unusable as pots or plates were immediately covered in dust.

We added emergency backs and were in the kitchen showrooms two weeks after moving, the two weeks only because we moved 4 days before Christmas.

New kitchen was in place in June.

He got very cross at me for mentioning the cat and insisted it was a fur hat and that he wasn't going to remove it.

I just read that back and it sounds like my ex was wearing the dead cat/alleged fur hat on his head, which I totally should have suggested to him. Actually it was in a dusty heap by the side door in a room nobody ever went in, which had very elaborate wood panelling and several deep built in cupboards with hooks in. There was a windowless room behind it which could have contained literally anything because my torch wasn't powerful enough to see more than a couple of feet ahead. Hopefully it contained a staircase as there was no obvious access to the first floor on that side of the building. I wish he'd given me first refusal when he sold the place but I suppose it was part of his revenge for the dumping. Probably for the best.

My uncle hid dirty letters and photos of his mistress in a tobacco tin in the eaves of the house. He must have done his own developing, as I don't think Boots would have printed them back then! My cousins and I found them when we did some work on the house after I bought it from my aunt’s estate, about 45 years later.

You would be surprised, my ex husband tool loads of pics of me larking about at a naturist club playing badminton and what have you, jumping into the pool on a disposable camera.
I was not a slim person I was overweight and in my 50's at the time.
He asked me to get the photos developed which I did at Boots as I had no idea whatever he had taken them.
There was a tense silence when I went to pick them up and I remember thinking what the hell is wrong with this guy, then got home and found a wallet full of photos of my flab bouncing around the tennis court and leaping legs akimbo into the pool. I never went back to Boots in that town ever again.

Nothing as interesting as some of these but fleas...so many fleas...

As well as everything the seller didn't want and their breakfast dishes - a six foot long Burmese python and a tarantula!

A suspiciously crusty sock behind the bathroom radiator. According to the letting agent the flat had been professionally cleaned before we moved in, and of course they tried to claim that we didn’t do as good a job when we moved out. Should’ve just put the wanksock back.

... and the flat before that where the bedroom carpet was so covered in cat hair that DH had an allergic reaction within about 20 minutes of us moving in. Once again, it had allegedly been “professionally” cleaned. By a cleaner who didn’t have access to a vacuum cleaner, it seems.

When my parents moved into their new house, the previous owner had left what looked like a brillo pad in the bathroom. Turned out to be an old bar of soap with years of pubes stuck in it.

Loving the thread! Weirdest things we ever found were a lock on the inside of the door of the cupboard under the stairs, 14 pairs of women's pants buried in the garden, along with 23 odd socks - we counted - dried glue all down the wall and over windowsill of a bedroom and boxes and 2 sheds full of rubbish left. That and covered up dry rot. All a week before Xmas too. And the place was disgusting, thick muck on everything and the smell - boak

@Idratherbeinbarbados 😱 at the pube soap!!

@LateMumma did the old owners have a dog? Mine is a shit for burying things!

A child's bicycle buried a flower bed ....

Labelled bottles of piss in a cupboard .....