Moved in yday, filthy house, took everything, raging!

[Mimmi78]

Don't post a lot, but am awake on a mattress on the floor of my new family home at 5 am, just raging/worries & generally cluttered mind! Completed yesterday
It's taken a year, mostly due to the sellers, they were slow, didn't produce paperwork and refused to have direct contact with their own agent! Then insisted dates etc were all convenient for them & no one else in the chain (4 property)
AIBU, when I walked through the door, I felt a surge of foreboding followed by disappointment. It's filthy. Not just a dust & vacuum required, I mean, never cleaned the shower, windows, vacuumed since showing the property! We asked to view again prior to exchange, they let us eventually, but insisted on not being there and I thought then, this needs cleaning. I asked solicitor to ensure it stated this, he said it always does. There was rabbit pop in the kitchen sink, their bodge a job removers had trailed the whole outside inside (& were there 2hrs after completion as was the owner, who refused to acknowledge us!) they had taken every single lightbulb and ceiling rose (this is a breach of our sale contract!), every pole, not even a big roll, just filth, piles of it, everywhere!! I'm furious, my sold property was left immaculate, little notebook with useful info and a welcome basket. The sellers have only moved a couple of streets away, wibu to trash & discuss their filth with new neighbours, who will no doubt know them and if I see them, call them filthy animals???? Make me feel better so I can get on and make this house a home for DD1 (7) & DS1 (5) who arrive today. Thank you

toolazy here it's pretty common to leave the white goods. We left ours behind. It was just as suprise rather than an expectation.

Hmm. Apart from the ceiling rose, I'm sure you must've noticed the other things on viewing including the filth? It's likely that they were happy to live like this all the time and so they were never going to leave it spotless for you I'm afraid! As for the Christian comment, that's just nonsensical.

Oh yes been there. Two moves ago I left a sparklingly clean house, immaculate and because they had said they weren't gardeners I left them descriptions of all the plants, when they needed pruning, how to take care of them. Left another note with useful info and welcome.

Arrived after a long drive to new house, it's was just bleurgh. I spent the next two days armed with bleach and scrubbing brushes, peeling marmalade of kitchen cupboards along with inch thick dust. First visitor who popped in two days after moving nearly collapsed at the bleach fumes 😂

I hope your solicitor hounds them. I can't believe anyone would take the ceiling roses ffs, surely they twigged it was dangerous and illegal.

It's the luck of the draw how people leave houses. I doubt if you have any legal redress, Don't waste energy in anger, roll up your sleeves, get it right and enjoy your home. Sleep easy that you left yours in good nick your conscience is clear.

TBH if you moved in and started ranting about the previous owners (who I presumably knew and had no beef with) being "animals" I would give you a wide berth from then on. I've never heard of houses being immaculate when you buy them - ours was a shocking state but it was a doer upper so I was expecting that.

I'd contact a local cleaning service and get them to come out, and suggest they might like to publicise this service on their FBpage/website...lots and lots of before and after photos of their "Moving in or Moving Out Deep Clean"

dirty wee scutters to leave the house minging!

They don’t sound like the sort of people who will readily pay up for cleaning bills/replace ceiling rose/light bulbs and so I would put it down to bad luck. You could take photos and send to your Solicitor but don’t hold your breath.

Our bastard sellers left the house dirty, cat hair everywhere inc the oven and with three sinks leaking. They took the curtain poles that were included in the sale. A call to the solicitor had them delivered back but I was still pissed off. They were cheap and nasty ones but I just didn’t want to have to fit a whole houseworth in one go.

This happened to me - I left our house immaculate even though our buyers said not to bother as they were getting the decorators in.

We moved into a shit-hole with the garden full of manky rotting wooden toys (which we'd previously highlighted with the solicitors) and broken brooms.

I know where they've moved to so I'm tempted to dump their crap in their new garden - but our boys start at the same school in September and are likely to sit next to each other in Maths. I'm staying dignified (curse it).

I bought an ex vicarage. He took the lightbulbs but left me his socks.

A deep clean could be quite reasonable. I'm in London and paying £400 for inside windows, ovens, carpets and the whole house deep cleaned (4 bed, 3 bath townhouse). And I'm moving out, not in!

Take photos and get you solicitor to write to them asking for monitory compensation for the bits they should have left (get estimates).

Don't bad mouth them to neighbors. They may have been friends and it'll just make you look bad more than them.

I gasped when I saw the exposed wires. It is dangerous and illegal to expose live wires like this. When I lived in France you didn’t have to leave anything. Just a plastic end attachment screwed on to make wires safe.

In my experience - your solicitors won't do anything. Mine were useless.

Our house was absolutely disgusting and they had left dilapidated furniture in every room and the shed was full to bursting with crap.

We had to remove it all at our own expense!

Really feel for you OP, moving house is stressful enough without this! We sort of had the opposite when we moved into our house. It wasn’t dirty, but the owners had left loads of stuff e.g. curtains, hideous light fittings, other random stuff ‘in case we wanted them’. Err, no, I’ve paid a removal firm to bring my things, why would I want your manky old stuff? No useful information such as meter readings, bin collection times like I had left for the new owners of our previous house, just a note to warn us not to dig up their deceased dog that was buried in the garden!!

It's not personal, they are just filthy weirdos. Don't take it personally but try to make it nice.

My ex and I bought a house that had been purchased by the bank. Lovely house! Day we moved in we found; no light bulbs, no carpets, they'd taken the whole lot and even ripped out the fitted wardrobes!
Dog poo in the garden so I had to clear the whole lot before my son could go outside. Some people don't care.

Been there and experienced very similar, including ceiling roses removed and bare, live wires exposed. We saw it was filthy when we viewed and arranged cleaners to go in on completion day as we were moving in the following day. I gave up cleaning the fridge as it was so rank and the gasket was split. It went in the skip we had to hire to put all their crap from the cellars, garage and garden in. Ours even had greasy marks all up one side of the chimney breast in the living room. We worked out that they were from someone putting their feet against it whilst lying on the sofa!

Sorting everything out cost us a few hundred pounds and we decided against legal action but only because we actually completed late - to this day we don't know if it was the solicitor or the bank that stuffed up.

You're doing the right thing getting it sorted OP. Get the bathroom and kitchen cleaned then do bedrooms.

I have always left the places I have lived spotless - it's in the contract to leave them clean and tidy and I just wouldn't ever do that to someone.

I’d say something to the estate agents or solicitor today! this happened when we moved in to our new house and things got worse after a few days we realised the house was full of mice and the kitchen was overrun with ants. It was a few days before we could contact anybody with it being the weekend as we moved on a Thursday and we didn’t have any rights, the people before us said it was fine when they left and must have happened in the four days we had been living in the house 😕

Ignore those who are telling you to just get on with it!!!! We completed on our home last year and had the same situation. The house had been left full of crap and was filthy, the garage was again full of crap including paving slabs and lumps of concrete. We took photos and immediately complained to the estate agent. He spoke to the vendors solicitor and she said she would come and take it a bit of a time in her car!! We refused and within 24 hours we had a professional cleaner and a clearance company in at her expense.

The difficulty is that while you will probably be covered in the contract,if the seller refuses to pay,which as CFs they will ,you have to sue and then enforce the judgement Often it's simply not worth the time money and hassle of that
Most solicitors are not useless but they are also not magicians

Our house was an absolute shit-tip when we moved in and as we decorate each room we discover little death-inducing gifts the previous owner left like non Earthed plug sockets because he thought he could do DIY but couldn't.

But they did at least leave the curtains as that wasn't in the contract. They're hideous curtains but all the windows are huge (one of the things that drew us to the house) and made to measure so it would have been very expensive to replace them all in one go. The light fittings are also horrible and the decor is like an episode of Changing Rooms but it gives us a laugh as we try not to die. It also smelt like wet dog for ages and the net curtains were greasy to touch (dumped them the day we moved in though as I hate net curtains).
My sister found a house full of fleas and had to restrict her son to a tiny portion of the sitting room and cleaned it daily to get rid of the little bastards. A friend found half the plants ripped out. People really are weird.

I think if it's worth your time and mental energy then chase it, especially as they left it so dangerous with the exposed wiring but in the end you might just have to shrug and deal with it yourself. and for tonight, you'll have earnt it!

@thefishwhocouldwish If they do a good job could you PM me their details? Also in London and need something similar. Thanks!

def go to lawyers about breach of contract. when i moved into my rental it was filthy, cried it was so bad, got professional cleaners to make start on worse areas(the people had let animals go free and i'm allergic to fur) also got a carpet cleaner (but as you own the place take all carpets up and get rid pronto, also clean the insides of your radiators (mine had so much fur and dirt in them was horrid also big location of smells) then buy flash floor cleaner that stuff neat will takeoff kitchen grease, and get rid of most real dirt its pretty strong stuff (just do not use any bleach products near it) im sorry this happened to you its so upsetting when folk are such arses.

When we moved in the house had been rented out to a family of 5 adults and two dogs. They clearly weren't happy about the house being sold.

When we got the keys, five days after the tenants left, we came in to a filthy house. Balls of dog hair everywhere, huge spiderwebs and spiders, floors thick in dust and food splatters all over the kitchen. They also left garlic cloves in the extractor fans (that were also full of dust), took every single light bulb, left gauges in all the lovely wooden floors, took tiles out of the fire place, left a huge heavy wardrobe upstairs, an old stained mattress, a table missing two legs, dusty moth eaten old curtains, the dishwasher was blocked with old food and full of mouldy plates and cutlery -full on white fluffy mound, the kitchen was so dirty I had to buy a wallpaper scraper to get rid of the grease. Fucking disgusting it was.

I called the estate agent who assured me that the vendor had been in and checked the property after the tenants had left and had paid for a cleaner too. I sent photos to her and copied in our solicitor. The estate agent called me back within minutes of receiving the email and I honestly think she was angrier than I was. We managed to get the vendor to pay for a deep clean of the house and pay for a night in a hotel for us.

I put the wardrobe on a Facebook selling site and the woman who had lived here commented saying that what I was doing was theft and told people not to buy it, then sent me abusive messages. I went out the next day and came back after a few hours to find that the wardrobe had gone. No break in, they clearly had a set of keys still. Called the estate agent again and the police. Apparently they had been waiting for me to leave, sat in their car parked down the road. They thought it was ok because it was their property and they used a key to get in. Couldn't quite understand that it may have once belonged to them but their "property" was now taking up space in our property. Locks were changed immediately! Which we were planning on doing but a few days later.

I saw the mum and one of her sons in our local shop and she hid from me!