To think cleaning up after the old homeowners is never ending!

[TartanDr3ams]

I dont just mean dirt (but the house was bloody filthy when we moved in!)

We purchased a house and got the keys 7 months ago but I feel like were constantly rectifying the old homeowners issues still to this date.

Maybe we werent thorough enough on the visits but on a look it sempt like most things were just cosmetic (sticky lino, horrid decor etc).. the kind of things you expect to have to do when you move. But it seems thats its much more than that.

4 days after getting the keys we realised the drains were badly blocked. As home owners, despite it only being 4 days, we had a hefty fine to the local water board for unblocking mainly caused by flushed nappies.. we dont have children yet ( :( boo). Weve found toys lodged in weird places, plastic forks and nerf guns melted in the radiator grooves. All the light fittings had the wrong bulb wattage so pretty much every bulb blew in the first few weeks. The guttering was held together with masking tape that obviously didnt hold well. They "did us a favour" by leaving us the dishwasher (with free food chunks inside pukes) but it turns out it was cause it was so poorly wired in that it was just a hastle to remove. The loft is still home to some of their crap etc. Altho been checked safe, the electrics are awful..they swapped out good plugs for silly gadets and left fuse boxes all over. Took the electric fire out to wire it the opposite side so it reaches a plug and the chimney breast just had loads of rubbish in (screwed up magazines, empty nappy box etc). One of the worst is that we have just had the bathroom flooring changed so took the bath panel side off to find that the bath is actually propped up with a snapped off bit of fishing rod..

I really have bought a house from the real bodge it and scarper havent i...

Oh my I could have written this myself we moved in early October and the list of problems is never ending. You have my sympathies op it's so infuriating

I’m currently living this nightmare too,
On the day I moved in 5 months ago I had a safety inspection and needed all new light fittings as the ones they installed were dangerous.
I’m just starting to tackle the decor... to find they have painted radiator pipes, and plug sockets, and door handles and the locking mechanism for the toilet and bathroom doors.
In bright colours! Why?!
Taking up the tired flooring is now revealing broken brown council tiles underneath.
Just weird wires everywhere that disappear into the walls.

You have, but if you had an electrical check done then some of this should have been spotted. Your surveyor should have seen guttering issue. You could sue for clearing loft rubbish but probably not worth it.

Baths are always chancy. Ours was sitting on chipboard that was sawdust in places.

I'm renting mine from my dad and the state if it. I've been in almost a year and I'm still bloody cleaning. The radiators.. There's questionable splatters up it and I've scrubbed and scrubbed. I need to paint them.
I spent 6 hours cleaning the cooker when we moved in, grease up the walls etc it's still on going. I've accepted I'm just going to redecorate

'Fraid it's just one of the issues you get with a lot of houses. Hope you can feel more settled and less oppressed by their leftover crap soon!

That’s bad but I’ve always found stuff in the loft. Tho I never leave any.
We found that a doorway made through to a room had no supporting lintel. He’d just knocked a door shaped hole !! Only realised after buying that fireplace was made of breesblocks.
Shower had open vent to the outside! And shower floor grouting all stained with hair dye. Polystyrene tiles on lounge ceiling.
But it was clean.

We moved in 8 years ago and the upstairs en-suite still doesn't drain properly despite numerous plumber visits! However at least we got the plastic bits out from down the back of the radiators. You have my sympathy!

Yeah, ours was like that - my sympathies. The owners seemed nice but didn't appear to understand the concept of housework, and God knows I am pretty lax myself. Fleas in the carpets, accumulated grime on all surfaces, sheds and loft full of stuff. They told us the oven was broken - it just needed cleaning! The front room floor was varnished around a rug, so it had a large rug shaped areas where it was not varnished...and the overflow to the toilet cistern comes out of a pipe that runs directly into the conservatory so if the cistern is too full it drips onto the conservatory floor.

We had this. Moved into a filthy house that had animal urine soaked into the flooring, no working boiler, everything tank of animals. Loft, garage and driveway full of their junk! We knew there was work to do but not the extent of it - we didn't know about the boiler for example as the estate agent showed us round so we assumed the heating was off whole the owners were out. Also put the animal smell down to the dogs that were in the house while we were viewing.

Do you plan to renovate?? Itas depressing for the first year or so but we completely redecorated - new flooring, wiring, heating, kitchen, bathroom. 4 years down the line I honestly never give the former owners a second thought.

stank of animals

Yeah, that’s bad.

After last time, I decided that if I ever sell
this house and buy elsewhere, I’m paying for a professional deep-clean. I don’t care what it costs, I will consider it part of the purchase price.

(Which probably means I’m never moving! )

Thanks for the replies! Sorry youve all had to deal with crap too! But it does make me feel a little better that im not alone! I dont really understand some of the decisions people make!?

Re: the guttering.. we thought we were just unlucky that it broke a couple or weeks in but we got a guy round and he showed us that it had been put together with masking tape and a little vinyl tape to mask the split so it passed the house survey and is actually quite common apparently!!

And the electrics question.. the safety test was done after we removed the dodgey dishwasher and realised there were random fuse boxes everywhere.

Yanbu. Not a single door in our house could be closed when we bought it. Previous owners had layered so much white paint on them. Ridiculous.

Don't know how they put up with living here. Was horrible (2 years on it's better but still quite a way to go. Everything, but EVERYTHING is being gutted and replaced).

I sympathise.

And yes minniemousse we are renovationg bit by bit. We did the living room and bathroom fairly soon after moving in and looking at the kitchen next.. the kitchen works ok for now.. we bought a new oven when we moved in cause no amount of elbow grease could clean theirs! And obviously removed the dishwasher but everything else is just a bit worn and dated in there so its held out until we got the bathroom upto scratch!

Oh god OP, you have my sympathy. I've been in my house 5 years and was stripping wallpaper at the weekend and still the steam from the stripper leaches out nicotine from the walls that was embedded by the previous owner. Everything we've touched has cost twice as much as normal to fix due to neglect or being a botch job. I feel so sorry for her that she came to end up living like that, I wonder about her a lot and hope she's happier in now wherever she ended up.

I'm here to sympathise as well. My house has been a very long string of 'discoveries', including but not limited to:

• Damp hidden behind wallpaper lined with polystyrene sheeting
• Rotten ceiling from leaking roof hidden behind polystyrene tiles
• Windows that don't close properly once you open them
• Asbestos floor tiling under the carpet
• Electrics to garage cut off prior to the sale (literally the cable was cut)
• Weird problem with woodlice (they were everywhere, I unscrewed a light fitting upstairs and one fell out - alive??)
• Wallpaper that was actually holding the walls together, once removed the plaster fell off
• a gap for the oven that no normal oven could fill. They could have left the one that was there, but removed all gas appliances including the gas fires that we saw upon viewing, presumably to avoid having them safety checked
• A boiler with a poorly fitted flu meaning it drips constantly when it's on because it's at the wrong angle
• Garage door doesn't open from the outside

Some of this stuff should have been picked up by the surveyor, but wasn't.

I moved into my house 14 years ago. A week after I moved in I came home at 1.30am having fallen out of a cab 😂 to find the kitchen ceiling on the floor. Turned out the shower or bath in the en suite above leaked and they'd said nothing. I'd been happily showering every morning in my lovely new ensuite......... When you looked closely it had obviously happened before as the kitchen ceiling was plastered and painted but the utility room ceiling (which is connected by an arch) was artexed

A visitor also got a massive shock off the hob extractor fan as they'd left it in a dangerous state.

Oh, and I forgot the guttering held together with dark brown parcel tape

Two years on and we are still clearing up dodgy DIY jobs done by the previous owners. I used to have a good relationship with them, but the more money we have had to spend because of the crappy job they did the less friendly I feel!

In our last home, we burst into the master bedroom and heard a dull thud as the door knob went right though the wall...closer inspection of the crash site revealed this was an old hole that had been "mended" by the last owners using loo roll and sticky envelope address labels

Oh gosh ginislife i bet that was horrific to come home to! Glad im not thr only one with bodged guttering though!!

sleepysheepy sounds like youve had quite a time of it too - we also couldnt find an oven to fit the hole!! They did leave theirs but it had clearly never been cleaned in the 12 years they lived there. When we viewed the house there was electricity to the shed but when we got the keys that cable had been cut too.. the fuse box was still live etc for it and tested as safe so im really not sure why they cut it???

We bought a house with a Jacuzzi bath in the master en suite .
NEVER ever have a Jacuzzi!
The pump didn't work which meant the jets and pipes had been filling with dirty bath water for god knows how long- you're meant to run the air pump for a few monemts after bath empties just to clear the pipes.
I didn't realise the pump didn't work until I had my very first bath.
I'm lying there and see a leafy bit of green gunge floating in bath- it looked like a little bit of seaweed. I shift about in the bath and see another bit of seaweed float out of one of the jet vents...
I get out the bath, empty it, try to flush the jets and ...nothing.

So I get the over bath shower attachment down and direct a jet of water into the jet vent and this load of green gunk washes out.
After doing this to all the vents, the base of the bath looks like low tide around beach rock pools!
We get the pump fixed (it was only an electrical connection)
Fill the bath to cover the vents, chuck in a bottle of Jacuzzi cleaner and turn on...
What came out was indescribable. After 5 minutes there was a mountain of grey green filthy foam rising out of the tub.
It took about 5 goes before stuff stoppped coming out....

Did they take all the light bulbs an curtain rails too?

Same here.

We bought the house on our utter maximum budget. No money left over. Was a great size and would be worth a lot more done up.
The surveyor checked the boiler and all was good on paper. When we put the heating on the boiler had no hot air at all. We had to get radiators put in as they had air vents on the floor which was fine we knew that. We had to get a brand new boiler because it was actually fucked. Surveyor said something in the small print meant that we had to pay for it. We had to take out a loan to pay for new boiler and central heating.
Our windows are a nightmare to shut after opening and our bedroom one hangs off the hinges if we open it. Our washing machine died so we had to get a new one.

The electrics kept on tripping.
My dp got an electric shock whilst fitting a light because the electrics were done wrong. Wrong colours of wires.

Our bathroom toilet leaked all over the floor, as did our little toilet downstairs.
Whole house needed decorating.
Fence is fucked in the garden and the shed is soaking inside.
We are getting there now but what a nightmare.

Us too! They also left us a full size bin full of dog poo, that was a fun afternoon (definitely not envy!)