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!!

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

i don't think you actually read what I wrote.

or perhaps you're just musing. But you might could have chosen a post that didn't say about booking a deep clean instead of one that did!

@AuntieJoyce

no, it's ONE of several things I've commented on.

No less valid though!

Theyre old enough to buy a house, they're old enough to clean it, not having the 'mummies' rush in to do it FOR them, not even WITH them but FOR them.

Yes, you're right, I misread your post. Apologies!

Dirty buggers. I guess they stopped bothering after the offer was accepted. We've moved a lot and had a few experiences like this. On our last move a year ago we had some issues with the seller who'd been caught out in a lie re having the heat pump serviced - turns out he had not, and had thus voided the warranty (which you really do want on a giant piece of kit that costs £££). We insisted that at least it be serviced before completion so it would flag any issues. This went on for ages, but he very grudgingly did so, at the last possible minute. Anyhow on completion day we turned up with a car full of cleaning materials, convinced he would have left the house in a state as he'd seemed furious. It was absolutely spotless, and the neighbour told us he'd had professional cleaners in after he left. We were gobsmacked.

I absolutely sympathize as we had the same happen to us. Wasn't our first 'official' home as we had a shared own ownership house which on the day of moving and the days leading up to moving I cleaned thoroughly. I hoovered every room that we emptied, I was cleaning out cupboards with antibacterial spray in the kitchen just to make sure there was no crumbs left etc. I cleaned the cooker a week before we moved out, I cleaned all the toilets. To be honest, I don't think I did much dusting, but I did it so that it was at least decent for them to move in cuz I knew that they would clean it properly themselves as I guess everybody would. However, when I got the keys to my new house, it was absolutely disgusting. It stunk of weed which it never smelt of when we viewed it. So clearly he'd started to smoke weed in the weeks leading up to us moving in obviously didn't care. I had two young children with me so I had to open all the windows. There was food splattered on the kitchen walls. There was kievs dripping with garlic in the oven so the smell was really strong and apart from the fact it was dirty, everything was broken! The oven door handle was loose, the letter box was broken. The chain on the door was broken. There was holes all over the walls which we hadn't noticed when we viewed it. It was absolutely gutting the first night. We had said we'll get a takeaway and enjoy it in our new home. I couldn't eat a mouthful of it. I felt so sick with how bad the house was. Things got worse from there. We found that the carpet upstairs was riddled with fleas. We had intended to start downstairs and work our way up when decorating but I had to do our bedroom first because we had to pull the carpet up, luckily my uncle is a carpet fitter so we got the carpet in there pretty sharpish and we also had to pay 5,000 for a brand new ensuite as the tiles were all loose and had leaked and this meant that the carpet next to the ensuite in our bedroom had been mouldy so we were replacing that anyway but honestly it was absolutely devastating. I basically slagged him off to everyone including the neighbours, said what a dirty piggy he was because I was so angry and I'm still so angry at him. If I ever see him because I hear that he still lives in the village I would definitely will be looking the other way because it ruined what was supposed to be a really magical day for me, dh and the kids. That said it's been 18 months and every room bar the upstairs main bathroom is decorated, clean and brand new carpets throughout. It takes time but they will get there. Sorry for the long post btw!

The kind of dirt you describe has not come in 3 months.

Carpets & blinds “thick with dust”, light switches “black with dirt”, kitchen “thick with grease” - all this takes years to build up.

They just didn’t notice at the time and possibly didn’t realise sellers aren’t obliged to deep clean.

Surprised you're surprised! Not surprised they're surprised, youngsters expect everything Instragram worthy these days from the off.

Their first home is a 3 bed semi. In this current climate?!

Just pay for a deep clean - £200 max or better still, get your gloves on and all do it. Job done. Generally speaking, even if it were clean it wouldn't be to their taste anyway so would have been getting ripped out. Don't make a big deal of this at all. The house we moved into had no gas, no electricity, the toilet wasn't connected..I could go on!

Honestly. We live in a lovely home now but when I do move furniture (thinking a bed or similar) I'm always like euuu that's grim!

are the dads not helping?

Just scrub and clean and use that extra angry energy to do a really good job.
Then enjoy the completely different feel a clean house has.

We knew our first home wouldn't be immaculate when we viewed it (in poor light haha) , but we were young and naive and assumed the people selling it would remove the things left behind and clean it up before completion....reader they did not!

It was quite a sad story really, which we learnt from the neighbour after we moved in. It was an elderly gentleman who really struggled towards the end and none of his family came near (he was child free and never married but had nephews, nieces, cousins etc). There was the usual dirt and dust but also poo smeared on the walls and switches, deep fat fryer basket in the bathroom?! A broken washing machine with his pants trapped inside, chip fat splattered all up the wall and ceiling making 1/3 of the kitchen brown, and the sellers left 3 sheds and the loft FULL of junk.
Apparently on the day he collapsed and went into hospital his relatives came and went like ants on a lollipop, emptying his house of anything of value and he hadn't even died at that point!! Hope karma bites them squarely on the bum for how they treated him!!!

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

No worries at all 😊

Expecting basic level of clenliness when you are handing someone this amount of money is wanting things instagram worthy.

My first house was 3 bed. 80k 10 years ago. Still doable in many parts of uk

Oh well OP, I think they're pretty lucky: they've just bought a house and their mums are putting right what isn't perfect, everything will be ok.

I once sold a house to someone I knew vaguely. We had renovated and remodelled it a year before, it was perfect. I had had a cleaning lady twice a week, who did a deeeeeep clean after we moved out and then I went over everything to finish it to perfection (OCD).
Just wanted to feel good about the place, and for the buyers to have a happy, relaxed move and stupidly thought it would be appreciated. The house was glaringly, obviously, clean and sparkling, top to bottom, inside out.
The she-buyer asked me to go around the house again on moving day to show her how the light system, plumbing and appliances, etc. worked. As we did that, a gang of her friends arrived and started enthusiastically 'cleaning' everything, hoovering away absolutely no dirt, smearing everything with cleaning products. She and her friends obviously thought sanitising my family out of the house would need a big group effort and didn't care if I knew it or if the house 'looked' clean. Nice to know.
Mostly, people are rough as shit OP, it's important to have very low expectations.
(As it turned out, these had overstretched their finances and had to sell a year later in a market dip.)😏

It does...

When we viewed the house were in now it was pretty spotless - i literally checked all the light switches. Carpets looked clean. I was fastidiously checking because we had been burned before with a filfthy house move and I was moving into thisone with a toddler and a new born. When we moved in 3 months later it was vile. They had three big collies who were taken elsewhere for viewings. They did no cleaning in the three months leading up to us moving in. It is an old, rural property and gets really dusty - that alongside the dog hair and general griminess (and dog shit in the washing machine) meant it was exactly what Op described. It just goes to show how quickly houses can become disgusting.

The OP literally says in her first post “we will all muck in”

If I knew their new address in Spain I'd find someone who is fluent in Spanish and let their new neighbours know. With photos.

Previous owner of mine had an unofficial animal rescue - 17 cats and no idea how many dogs. Stank when we looked round, and we knew it would be bad... but luckily put other purchasers off so we got a house we wanted and could see potential in a place we wanted to live for a fair price that reflected the cleaning requirement.

I have not read all of the RTFT but if they have left things, then you contact their solicitor and make them pay to have it removed. You can't charge them for the filth unfortunately, but you can for disposal.

You have my sympathies. Our house was utterly disgusting when I moved in. Lifted a rug in the glazed lean-to which was so dirty underneath, it was actually soil. The cellar was filled with rubbish to the top of the steps (and included an 18th birthday cake). Old mattresses, old furniture, a cross trainer. I could go on. But the icing on the cake was in the sitting room. They had a house rabbit and there was rabbit poo everywhere, including all over the mantlepiece. How the rabbit managed to shit on the mantlepiece is beyond me. It took two midi skips to get rid of their rubbish, and all I can say is thank goodness for the local scrap dealer! We laugh now but I burst into tears! It will get better, trust me ❤️

Did they take any pictures of the mess? A family members mother brought a house and the person hadn't bothered to clear any of the furniture they didn't want, her removal company helped cleared the house in a hurry so her furniture could be moved in. She contacted her solicitor a few days later and they said if she had taken any pictures then they would have contacted the sellers solicitors to seek costs for the extra time her removers had charged her for clearing the new house. Might be worth a phone call

But no delay was caused here. At least, not that the OP mentions.

I'm so sorry they did this.
When we left our old family home of 35 years we cleaned to within an inch of its life, we had been happy living in it and loved it and I cried to leave it even if we were passing it over to a new family with a new baby. Their MIL turned up ready to clean and was delighted there was nothing for her to do.
It is a sort of rite of ownership though, by cleaning and looking after it they will make it their home and stamp their ownership on it.

Did they look around the house before committing?

Happened to me, filthy kitchen, sticky floors, plus a broken full size trampoline in the back garden, and a garage full of broken shite. It’s awful and lazy on their part, but within a month it was pristine, inside and out. I won’t bore you with the decor…

This happened to me, too. Granddad's mattress (you can guess), carpets decorated with poo and urine on either side of the beds, cabinet shelves turned over to look clean, and scraper-filthy underneath. A rolled-up rug coated with vomit. The dustbin was half-full of wodged sandwiches of dog dirt and newspaper, many layered and well compressed. Don't ask about the toilets. On completion day they met me at the door. 'I've left it clean for you,' and a wink.
The carpets throughout the house had to be scraped up and burned, and all the floors scrubbed and sanded. When I viewed, they'd covered the floors with dustbin bags half-full of clothes and bedding, pretending to be packing ready to move.

My house was disgusting when we moved in. I had to use oven cleaner on the kitchen worktops to make a dent in getting off whatever was on them. The washing machine and dishwasher had black mould and they had left the washer full of soiled underwear. Took me hours just to clean some space in there to put some things away. It was grim. The rest of the house was absolutely fine in comparison but the kitchen was a disgrace.