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...

We've pretty much just got our house sorted, 2 years after moving in.

Having never seen nicotine staining before, we just thought that the owners liked a specific shade of mustard yellow throughout parts of the house.

Once we moved in we were told what it was and realised why in some places it had made drip marks down the walls. We were really lucky though that the house didn't smell of cigarettes - I think they must have stopped smoking a number of years before selling but just didn't think redecorating was worth it.

There were numerous other issues, but that was the worst.

Found a house for sale - cash only for quick sale. Couple had split up and both had refused to pay the mortgage as the other would be getting half of it and it was due to be repossessed.
They had moved out and left their teenage boys in there. It was filthy!
I wouldn't have washed my dog in the bathroom. The kitchen had doors hanging off, the whole house stank of smoke.
But they were asking £95kand all other houses were £155/160.
Borrowed cash, offered them £90k, they accepted.
Completely gutted it, New kitchen and bathroom, Central heating. New doors! Wallpaper stripped and all painted throughout.
Cost me just under £30k.
So got a brilliant 3 double bedroom house, huge garden, off road parking for
£120k.

Ooh, got some classics! One bedroom had a wobbly hearth stone, the time we had lodging a bloody stone under one corner so we weren’t tipped off it!

Clever arse had made a shelf at the back of the bath, he’d used plasterboard so that was nice and rotten. He’d put layer after layer of Lino in the bathroom where the toilet leaked. Taking all of that out was fun! Dunno what he’d used for wallpaper paste but it was all falling down. There was loads of mouse shit in the kitchen cupboards which were all so shit they had to be ripped out. He’d warped the boiler by putting the cooker directly below it.

The next one was even more fun, all bins, rubbish, recycling, compost, were left full. The grass hasn’t been mowed in years, but was wet and flat, but layered with brambles and cat shit. Was fun getting that cleaned up.

Londonista the flushed nappies infuriated me too! Who does that?!?!

Oh got beamur..the words expanding foam are haunting me atm! Seems a favourite of our ex owner!!!

anachocolatte ours left us their toilet brush too.. yuck. And the sponge and cloth used for doing dishes....erm?

Another renter who could write your post! I’ve refenced, refloored, replastered, retiled, scrapped dumped cars, painted, returfed, unblocked drains, removed dead trees, cleaned like you wouldn’t believe. Worse one was when the garden flooded with shit just after we moved in we had to shovel that ourselves.

Grass was nice after though!

I think some people are just scummy

Our house was previously home to heroin addicts, think blood spatters up walls where they'd been injecting and black spots on the ceilings where they'd been heating it. We had to clean everything, walls, ceilings, everywhere with bleach before we could even think about decorating. It's a HA property and we were an emergency move so we saw it while the workmen were still clearing it out, it had been stood empty (and full of filth and rubbish) for months after the previous tenant was sent to prison.

We couldn't view upstairs the first time as they hadn't removed all the needles yet but we peeked from the top of the stairs, it was utterly disgusting. They had small children and I'll never forget the workmen telling us the only toys they'd found (they'd pretty much left everything) were dress up doctors and nurses sets with the plastic syringes

It was full of flies which took weeks to fully get rid of and we were still getting people knocking the door at all hours months later looking to score. The worst of it is it's still better than the last place we lived!

Ah gaspode I remember reading about your chisel on an old thread! Just the best example of shit DIY.

Our house was very clean when we moved in, but the previous owner had 2 loos in the house both of which were in small rooms with no ventilation. Did they have windows? Why yes, new ones which she'd had put in. She must have chosen non-opening ones for the bogs. There were no extractor fans. The downstairs one doubled as a cloakroom, so your coats lived in a little unventilated room that people defecated in. Lovely.

mine was dirty but that was down to the state the tenant left it in.... he is still a mucky bugger... and his rented house is far from clean. (ex wasliving in the flat when it needed to be sold so bought it. ex is not fond of cleaning)

the owners though had botched everything they touched. still sorting it out over a decade on as some stuff was just put behind our furniture and forgotten about until we had time. two children with sen do not make for a lot of time.

We’ve been in our new house a few months, it’s just been an endless list of things going wrong. I’m fairly sure they had no socks when they moved because I’ve found many pairs down the back of radiators along with a dress, t shirt, books and in one child’s bedroom an empty fag packet behind the rad
Still we now have working heating and the windows all close. Just need to work out why the shower temp is stuck at 38degs and what the hell the strange noise is that’s coming from the airing cupboard...
Then I’ll just wait for the next batch of issues to arise

House I bought a few years ago as a - - useless at diy - - woman had

a hole in the bedroom wall that had been filled with newspaper, masking taped over, painted and hidden behind a teddy sat on the bed.

A toilet that leaked at every flush, from the waste pipe at the back.

Shot gun pellet holes in both front windows.

Back windows nailed shut.

Broken boiler so no hot water or heat.

Shower screen balanced on side of bath, hole in bath where screen had obviously fell into the tub at some time.

Polished wood floor in little bedroom that looked fantastic, but it hadn’t been sanded, stained or waxed under any of the furniture so I had to keep the bed against the wall! I didn’t have a dresser in that room so had a nice black area where previous owner had had furniture.

Hiding I know somebody who moved into a house like that, it sounded horrendous.

Inside a small airing sized cupboard they found hundreds of tiny child-sized footprints :( that has always stuck with me. I hope the child(ren?) are happier now.

Some of these are grim! or perhaps to you all.

2 years ago we puled out of buying a house 3 days before exchange. I still feel bad about it, to when we went round with a specialist builder (it was Grade ii) the elderly owners has started to move things out & in doing so exposed all sorts of horrible stuff that had been hidden by furniture, carpets etc.

It turned out the entire house was sat on a rotten sole plate (which we could only see now they had made the cellar accessible) and that rot has been caused by them sealing off all air vents (again, previously hidden by 'stuff'). In addition, the walls in the kitchen (hidden by welsh dressers etc) were riddled with damp and infestations, and all sorts of structural stuff became apparent. NB this hadn't been 'missed' by our v expensive English-heritage-recommended surveyor, they had denied him access to various rooms and carefully hidden other bits. He was a retired architect, so i have no doubt he knew what he had done.

When my DH bought his first house and took the side panel off the bath, he found hay bales inside propping it up!

Five years down the line and we are still rectifying bodged DIY jobs which we inherited. Cloakroom ceiling collapsed, faulty wiring, live wires exposed, wash hand basin hanging by a thread. Wardrobe door in danger of toppling on you in you were silly enough to brush against it. The list is endless!

That's really disturbing Bertie, there was scribble and drawings all over our house, even on the hall ceiling where the children had obviously leaned through the stair bannister, they must have been completely unsupervised a lot of the time from the looks of it I know they were taken into care, I hope they ended up somewhere better.

We had a 💩 left in the toilet (water had been cut off so it had been left to rot) of our home when we moved in boak. The house had been empty for almost a year before we finally completed and from neighbours, we believe the previous owners daughter and her family had been coming and going before the locks were changed. I'll never forget the smell as we walked in to view the house. That was just one of many problems including floorboards sodden with dog urine and knackered electrics (whole place had to be re-wired) that we had to sort before we could finally move in.

Yep we have this problem. A lot of the issues we knew about thanks to a Homebuyers survey and were able to knock some money off for but every single thing is badly done - from big problems (like cracked render letting through damp and a rotten floor thanks to them painting over the air brick and letting damp accumulate) to small (like not cleaning the grout off the bathroom tiles and just leaving it to go hard ALL OVER them). It's so infuriating as every job takes twice as long and costs three times as much.

@wink1970 We had a similar experience and in retrospect I wish we had pulled out.

I moved into an indescribably filthy house years ago. The vendors said they'd left me a moving in present in the bedroom(?). It was a threadbare and black with filth bedside rug. It actually made me sad because that had been their daughters room and she had presumably had this piece of filth by her bed for many years.
The loo seat (I inspected before I had my first pee) was covered in brown and yellow gunk on the underside. I suppose it went with the brown staining inside. That was the first thing to be ripped out. Honestly, how some people live is horrific.

I really sympathise.

We moved into our house in late November. One small window was open upstairs and we thought that is was nice that the previous owners had attempted to air the place. No, it was because the window was broken and because it was above the conservatory the whole window needed replacing and hundreds of pounds worth of scaffolding - bastards. It was freezing. Looking back at the estate agents photos that small window was open in them five months previous. It could be that it had just broken but I doubt it. No other windows were open in the photos.

They also left a massive skip worth of stuff in the garden.

We moved into our current house 7 years ago on Friday 13th. It was lashing down rain and I arrived first as I was waiting a fridge freezer delivery. The house had been empty years, and previously rented out. As I walked in the front door a rat ran one way, a mouse ran the other way and there was a giant turd stuck to the inside of the toilet bowl above the water line with Mould growing on it.. the water pipes had so many air locks in them the water wouldn’t work, tree roots from a hedge were growing in the drains (found this weeks later) and blocking them, the stench of rotting fish in the kitchen was foul. Simply where 25 years of grease had accumulated without being properly cleaned. Also a skips worth of garden rubbish (pots and old garden ornaments) left in the garden. It’s stunning now as we completely renovated it but had to live in it for 5 years before getting planning permission and the money to do so. The day we moved in I sat outside waiting for my husband to arrive and when he did I cried and said I wanted to go home (to my old house).

God Mamma that's bloody awful....
why do people do this??!

They definitely had the attitude they were selling Buckingham palace also.. allegedly the place was up for sale for about £650k some 8-9 years ago.. we thankfully didn’t pay anywhere near that. It’s a grade 11 listed property and all the crap renovations the previous owners did we have since undone. Another classic was painting the render outside in white non breathable paint (gloss I think). It looked lovely the day we moved in. 4 years later it was green. There was green mould growing under the paint, difficult to explain but it couldn’t air so it trapped moisture underneath the paint and started to rot the building. We had to pay extortionate amounts to specialist grit blasting company to get the paint off, then line render it and repaint in a special breathable paint. They did the same to the windows, painted over rotten wooden frames with gloss paint. And these were the people who actually applied for the grade 11 listing to gain certain ‘status’ regards the house and had it featured in Country Life or some such magazine years ago.. twats.

Gosh mamma thats awful! Makes my complaints look silly!

I definitely do feel a little more relaxed to see all these other horror stories that have ended positively.. makes me realise we can make it a nice home in time.