So angry at sellers, left the house FILTHY

[Oldperithia]

I feel so sad for DS and his GF. They’ve saved and sacrificed so much for 3 years to scrape together a deposit on a house. Finally were able to buy a small 3 bed semi. Viewed it, offered 5% under asking and it was accepted.
They’ve been no trouble during the process whereas the older (60’s) sellers (who are apparently moving to Spain) have dragged their feet throughout the whole process to give them as much time as possible.

Well, DS and GF finally got the keys yesterday and were so excited but that soon turned to dismay when they got there to find everything really dirty, like they’ve not cleaned for months.

Carpets, skirtings, blinds thick with dust, walls all grubby and marked, light fittings greasy dusty, light switches black with dirt, the kitchen thick with grease and food stains and spatter over cabinets and cooker. Wasp nest in the roof.

Floors are sticky and grimy, the whole house is just dirty.

How do people live like that and how do they think it’s acceptable to leave like it for the next person.

We will all muck in and help clean and decorate but I feel so sad for them, it’s really taken the shine off the whole thing.

I know that they are fortunate to be in this position but it’s still made me so angry. If you know of an older couple moving to spain soon know that they’ve lived like dirty pigs and they’ve no thought for the people they’ve sold to. I hope karma bites them!!

@BananaPeanutToast

You don't know they are in good health. If you met me you'd assume I was in good health, I'm not.

if I moved from here, I'd book deep cleans for here & the new house as well as a removal company though.

I presume the years of filth were from behind furniture. I remember when we last moved, I keep a tidy/clean ish house in general BUT I was surprised just how dirty it was close up once you got the furniture out. I did clean it but I can see why an older couple might not be able to or have the motivation to. It took me days scrubbing

Not sure why the 'kids' aren't doing it. Apparently old enough to buy a house, but not to clean it?! Wonder if the 'mummies' are on a rota to do the weekly house work, laundry & batch cook?!

Is this really what you’ve taken from this thread?

You're over-reacting. It sounds mainly just dusty and the kitchen needs a clean? And why can't your DS and partner clean it themselves? I'm rolling my eyes a bit at the 'mum armed with cleaning products'.

I left the flat I sold a bit dusty and with marks on the walls because I would assume anyone moving in would be cleaning and decorating, and it was hard getting everything sorted in the short time-frame. The place I moved into was clean, but they had left a burnt-out mattress in the garden with no explanation. That definitely did 'take the shine' off a bit. But it's all just part of buying and selling, you spend the first week or more cleaning and decorating.

Having read this thread I'll take more care in leaving this house clean when I sell, but honestly thought everyone left it not exactly pristine (not talking about piles of shit levels of filth).

This just happened to us when moved a month ago. It is truly awful. We had a lot of his junk to get rid of as well which we had said we didn't want when he tried to sell it to us. It was so upsetting. But a week of cleaning and it will all feel better.

in the end we just feel pity towards him. A sad man living in a dirty house. I'd hate it of our buyers viewed us like that. We cleaned everything as best we could and left the place clear.

In a case where a house is being sold for a seven figure sum, there must surely be a bit of cash available for a deep clean before moving out. Just common courtesy.

This thread is bringing back memories of moving into our previous house. They're not good memories. But we survived! Onwards and upwards.

We had the same. I was so excited to move into our first home and when we arrived I just wanted to cry. Dirty and they’d left loads of broken stuff around, especially in the garden. Didn’t tell us the oven was broken. Left the freezer full of old, half eaten food! They called on the move day to ask for more time to pack up and we said yes, take as long as you need (as we were still in our rental) but then they came back in an hour to say they were done! They could have easily spent a couple more hours sorting the house out. It was so disheartening and I’m still annoyed about it 4 years later! Of course it didn’t really matter though, our home is lovely now!

My DH would 100% be someone who would leave a house dirty. We're due to move soon and he has been baffled at the sorting and cleaning I'm doing. He seems to think it would be "nice" to leave things behind.

I've also discovered, on moving to clean behind furniture in preparation, that he only partially painted the skirting boards and left the covered bits. So he'll be fixing that before we go...

It's slightly disappointing, but it isn't anything to be angry about. I expect to have to clean when I move in, and if I don't I am pleasantly surprised.

We had a similar situation when we moved, although a little luckier. The house was mostly clean, but it absolutely stank of dogs, and the kitchen floor was grim as fuck - incredibly filthy, covered in dirt and dog hair. We have a dog ourselves, and we've never had a house in that state! The kitchen doors have deep scratches on them that had been painted over when we did our viewing, so didn't notice at the time. I'm guessing they'd leave their dogs locked in the kitchen. :(

We were lucky as we had a crossover period where we still had our previous house, so were able to get the new one deep cleaned. We always get houses we've sold deep cleaned when we move out, wish our sellers did!

Our first flat was disgusting when we moved in too. Oil in a cupboard from where I assume they moved the deep fat fryer, filthy oven. Everything needed cleaned. They also left us clothes and furniture to dump and they never emptied the loft. Topped off when the bailiffs showed up looking for him for 10 years unpaid council tax starting when he was 22 years old. Meaning he was only a year younger than me. Thankfully though we live in Scotland where the bailiffs do not have rights to enter the house and the solicitor who helped us with buying the property was happy to confirm to the bailiffs that we were not who they were looking for. A year later and an electricity company was looking for them as they had run out on the property they were renting and had used the flat we live in as their collateral and claimed they still owned it. The solicitor used when we bought the flat was again happy to speak to the electricity company. Six years after the electricity company and we haven’t heard anything from or about them and now every trace of them has been erased we are happy and it is ours.

It is thoughtless and horrible, and I would be embarrassed to leave it like that.

However, the last house I bought had deliberate issues. They took all the lightbulbs. Had swapped out nice chrome light switches and sockets for plain white old ones. Removed a fixed bed leaving holes in the wall. The kitchen was beyond minging. The garden had been left with no mowing etc since the day I viewed it seemed. They had been smokers so I expected it, but the reality of trying to clean the carpets and curtains in the back room was grim.... They even lied to say they had lost the shed key but there was nothing in there. Two weeks later I cut the lock off and discovered they had filled the shed to the roof with the bed they had ripped out, mattresses and loads of crap they could not be bothered to take to the tip.
They also called on moving day to demand hundreds of pounds from us as they could not move the other shed (A bike shed) and so I had to pay for it...
Then three months later, after much shenanigans with their cat which kept coming back to my house, turned up on the doorstep and demanded I keep the cat. They had even brought the cat food, feeders etc in preparation that I would say yes....

Some folk are just weird.

I don’t actually think people do this on purpose, I think it’s just logically the last thing you do, after the place is emptied, and there’s so much going on around moving house that time gets away from them and it gets left. Pretty much to be expected and not worth getting angry about.

I would never expect a house to be particularly clean when you move in. I think that’s just unrealistic. If you want that, buy a new-build.

I’m probably slovenly by mumsnet standards but the only house I’ve moved into that I wasn’t disgusted by the cleanliness was when we bought a new build.
It’s grim but sounds like you’ll all band together and by the end of the weekend it will feel very different.

I'm so shocked by these responses, every house I have ever moved into have been pristine and vice versa with how I have left homes. Both renting and buying.

There's a big difference between a bit of dust on the skirting boards appearing once furniture is moved out and sticky carpets, broken-down sofas stinking of dogs and thick grease on everything you touch in the kitchen. This is what we found when we moved into the house before our present one. It was as if they had had deep-fried food at every meal and never, ever wiped over any surface. We also found wood effect wallpaper held up by blutak over crumbling plaster (very, very damp). Tip of the iceberg, unfortunately!

If you have a thick layer of burnt,stuck on food on the bottom that nothing you try seems to shift try using a pumice stone! My teens destroyed my oven and that was the only thing that restored it without causing any damage 🙂

I've moved a lot over the years. One house was so bad we thought the owner hadn't moved out! Food in the grill, butter in a dish, piles of washing were some of what he left. It wasn't a house we stayed in for long. The first house I moved to after I separated was absolutely filthy. There were rabbit poos in the kitchen and utility room under the filthy flooring. It took my cousin all morning to just clean the oven. Every bedroom wall was dirty, finger marked and their kids had scribbled on the walls. I could have cried. But it was all cosmetic and eventually I had a lovely home.

When we moved into our house, it was filthy. They had taken the lightbulbs - and we moved in at 4pm in January so it was pitch black. They had also painted around things when they decorated so when they took things off the wall, there were large patches of the previous colour underneath. Not just a different shade but bright red or terracotta. What was funny was that she was an interior designer and had what seemed to be a thriving business…..and they had two young children who had to live in all the filth.
Years later we met a couple who lived next door to their second home in Majorca and said that was filthy too. They never wanted to go for dinner there as it was so foul in the house.

I'm enjoying this thread far too much .I'd forgotten about a friend who was told that " herring " was in the shed .She totally forgot about it and didn't open the shed till next day when a very angry black cat ran out .Apparently they had left her the cat .
Thankfully he did return to the house and she adopted him

How could they .

And even then, you can be dealing with dust etc for a while, and the perennial snag of many newbuilds, a garden in which a base of building rubble has been disguised by a thin layer of topsoil and grass seed.

We once moved into a house and found an assortment of tupperware boxes left on some built-in shelving, about ten or twelve in total.

We opened one of the boxes gingerly to see what was inside.

It was a dead pet mouse. A rotting, dead pet mouse.

We assumed by the size of the boxes and the vague shapes we could see through the (thankfully mostly opaque) sides that the rest were similarly deceased Mickey and Minnies. We did not open the rest of the boxes to confirm our suspicions before throwing them all away in double-bagged garden refuse sacks.

On the plus side it made the pans full of old, stinking fat, the carpet gopping with fleas and the piss-stained toilet seem almost normal in comparison.