To ask for your worst experiences viewing houses?

[DSHathawayGivesMeFannyGallops]

Please cheer me up! I had the viewing from hell last night; the place was filthy and you could tell the Estate Agent was mortified. Due to other issues, I declined to put in an offer and have other viewings lined up, but I've started to exhaust my area for now and I'm feeling a little jaded.

Please tell me I'm not alone in backing away in horror and tell me all about the worst viewings you've had!

Oh- and I'm not a journo. The Daily Mail can piss off and write their own shitty copy.

Mine is tame in comparison but it really pissed me off-flat was advertised as a one bed flat, the LL also confirmed this on the phone. Went to view, it was a bedsit the size of a double bedroom. It was dingy as fuck, had a bed, cooker, fridge & filthy curtains. The shared entrance stank and was really dirty. Think rock bottom. The LL thought I would take it there and then!
The real issue is that he had the price the same as actual one bed flats in the area-madness!

@RedPanda, it really annoyed me when I was looking for rentals, that if I ticked "1 bed" on rightmove or similar websites that also had a "studio" option, they'd still show studios and also single "rooms" in big house shares. If I wanted a house share, I'd search specifically for one!

A mate went to view a house and the old guy who lived there sat in the middle of the garden in a mouldy old deck chair, grass ruined with bitch piss marks and chain smoking/hacking/spitting on the lawn, all while staring at them all like he was about to murder them. His wife had divorced him and was forcing the house sale

The stranger thing is that he bought the house!

Not me but When I was little and my parents were house hunting.
They went to this viewing, and The bloke said. My wife's just resting at the moment. My mum and dad didn't really read much into it. Anyway when they got into the Living room there was a coffin. He must have put the blooming house up for sale the second she took her last breath.

I viewed a series of houses and took DM with me to get her opinion.
At one, a male answered the door and proceeded to show us around. There were five parrot cages, all accompanied by bird shit liberally sprinkled around the floor, in various places.
There was also a massive aviary in the garden complete with a large number of small birds. The seller assured us that all would be removed when the house was sold.
The 'conservatory' was really a lean-to greenhouse complete with sliding door.
The floors were mostly bare in the house, having obviously previously been carpeted as the gripper rods were still there. They were concrete.
The bathroom had a new bath, but no sides, and there was only one row of tiles on the wall - the rest was damaged plaster where the previous tiles had been ripped off.
In the kitchen, a range cooker was installed but you couldn't open the back door properly because of its position.
To top it off, most of the upstairs doors had big holes in them, exactly like someone must have punched them. (The man did tell us he had split from his wife.)
Considering the house was on the market at the same value as similar houses which had no such problems, I thanked him as graciously as I could for showing us around, then left.
All I could say to my mum when we got in the car was 'arr-harr me hearties!' (with reference to the parrots) before we drove away crying with laughter.
It was a definite NO.

We viewed a house which had locks on the outside of the childrens bedrooms. Didn't like that much.

They had also taken the light bulbs, property was empty, and it was middle of winter 4pm. We couldn't see anything.

I now wish I had bought it though as friends did and made it lovel7my and it was a super location

Years ago I viewed a large house that was in bedsits but in a nice road. It was disgusting. So I put in an offer 30% under asking price and to my horror/amazement they accepted
I bought it and paid people to clean it and make it habitable. We lived there for 20 years, till the DC left home.

When we started clearing the loft, we found a suitcase full of old blood samples. We're still fond of the house though, just fewer blood samples around these days.

OMG it's Dexter's house!

viewed a flat, admired lovely cooker, vendor told us she never used them as she couldn't get them to work , always had take out, discovered after buying that flats had NO gas supply, missed by EA, Surveyor, got a few quid back for that.
Recent viewing 3 bed house in same street , old lady died son selling , not been touched since 1975, wants more than street price.EA offered us free valuation on our newly renovated 2 bed, told us it was worth 60k less than the one one we viewed. Turns out he is the son.

That reminds me, Woof. I went to see a house where the owner was a settled traveller (she told me this when I admired the photographs of Romany caravans).
As you can imagine the house was spotless.
I admired the kitchen, especially how clean the oven was. She told me she’d never turned it on, it still had the manual in it. She had 7 adult daughters and they brought her dinner, each on a different day.

We viewed a lovely 3 bed bungalow. It was a desirable rural village and next door to an old church yard.

From the outside it looked lovely, inside was disgusting. Filthy dirty boxes piled so high in 2 bedrooms we were physically incapable of entering both rooms.
Lounge carpet sticky underfoot and piled high with all sorts of crap everywhere...... And then the kitchen omg it was far worse than anything I ever saw on how clean is your home.
The couple who lived there were long standing tenants and the owner had moved to the US and was wanting to sell. It had been on the market for over 12 months as it was so bad nobody would make an offer and the tenants were so amazingly hostile about the viewings. I think they did it deliberately as they did not want to move out.

When we bought a house eventually it came with bare wires in the lounge with no lights or plug sockets, the kitchen sink was not plumbed in, no washing machine or dishwasher pipes and the cooker socket on a different wall to the cooker and hob and also not wired up for use.

We got the house at a decent price and had an electrician and plumber in to fix everything up on the day we completed before it was properly ours.

When we sold it after 16 years on 2016 the new owners could not believe how clean and well decorated the house was.

I am a professional cleaner and love painting and decorating!

She loved that the kitchen was so clean that she was able to just unpack without having to do anything and was overjoyed to find that after we had accepted their offer we fitted a new bath and toilet upstairs in the main bathroom as it needed doing but was not essential.
The couple split up 8 month after they bought it from us and now he lives there alone but is having it repossessed by the mortgage company.

Sellers Son had painted bedroom wall with car under seal. Kitchen cupboard door held on with spiders web. Dirty nappies left on the living room floor. Holes in floorboards so could see into cellar. Only bathroom in house accessed through main bedroom. Just a few of the issues found when viewing houses.

When I was a student some friends and I were looking at potential houses, one of them had a big mould ring on the ceiling of the lounge. It had apparently been due to water damage or damp or something, but it was brown and rotting and..I kid you not...had mushrooms growing out of it!!

The rent, funnily enough, was ridiculously cheap.

We passed on that one...

Not a viewing on someone else's house but people coming to see ours: estate agent neglected to tell us he was bringing a couple round - DH sat on the sofa wearing only a t shirt and nothing else. Cringe. Thank god I was at work!

We viewed a house with 5 indoor cats! Very big vocal cats who wanted attention and launched at us from the tops of doorways and jumped off the walls at us (they had some kind of webbing on the walls for them to climb!)

The owner was lovely and I actually enjoyed the viewing as I like cats, but DH hates them and DD (18 months at the time) was petrified of these furry yowling things flying through the air! It was very surreal, like we'd entered a sort of cat world!

I viewed a house twice which was dated and in need of modernisation, but seemed tidy and in good order. Paid for a survey which revealed damp in bathroom and 1960s fuse box. A "fixer upper", so I knocked a few thousand off the asking price and bought it.
When we moved in, we found that:
A sliding door was held on with duct tape, painted over white. It almost fell on my 18 month old daughter.
The electrical sockets and some wiring were DIY and positively dangerous.
Every morning ground floor covered in slugs.
Underneath the bath was a pool of water from no seal around bath edge.
Flea infestation in upstairs carpets
All garden plants planted in flower pots- I think the owner had planted them for the viewings and had planned on taking them and forgot.
Garden full of dog toys and dog shit and weeds (she'd obviously stopped tidying as soon as the house was sold).
In the corner of the garden, behind the rotten shed and an overgrown Bush was "dogshit corner"- a cleverly-hidden pile of grass cuttings, dog shit and dog food tins.
They'd obviously cleaned and "staged" the house for viewings, using tape, blue-tack and paint to "fix" issues.
They'd even painted over grease and spider webs on the kitchen tiles, and then hung utensils over the top to hide it.
It took 4 years to renovate, as I didn't have much money.
First kitchen, then bathroom, then living room. It's bloody lovely now! And spotless.

The house we bought was disgusting. Ingrained smoke smell and grime, cat piss throughout where a stray cat had made themselves at home. The kitchen was dirty and tiny, holes in walls, missing floorboards, the bathroom was beyond disgusting with some funky sticky crap on the floor. The previous owner had even removed the gutters for some weird reason and there was old CCTV everywhere.
We bought it because it was cheap and in the area we wanted to live

Only bathroom in house accessed through main bedroom

I’ve lived in two houses like that. One for 10 year. It’s not uncommon here. It was fine for us as a couple.

Two places; we looked at a repossession, and the house had a side entrance. The tenants had ripped out everything except the loo. What we thought was a hallway turned out to have been the (now empty) kitchen!
And something funny; we were looking at warden assisted flats for my Mum, and the guide kept telling us how flats frequently became available. Obviously because the elderly tenants had died, but she never once said that. "People err, move out" We kept muttering under our breaths "or die".

We say a repossession once - the open plan ‘kitchen’ was a patch of tiled floor in the corner of the living room.

I remember viewing a flat that boasted a double bedroom. I stood in the middle of the room and stretched out my arms - and touched both walls at once. Double my arse!

DD opened the bathroom door and there was a man in the shower

the guide kept telling us how flats frequently became available. Obviously because the elderly tenants had died, but she never once said that. "People err, move out" We kept muttering under our breaths "or die"

Some do move out though, into care homes. I know of a 95-yr-old who’s just done that - she’s still in good health but her sight is too poor to look after herself now

Many years ago my now husband and I went to look at a flat to rent in the centre of Bath. Gorgeous old building and the flat was on the first floor. We walked into the flat and along the hallway. The kitchen was to the left, all newly fitted and shiny, very nice, the living room was to the right and access to the bedroom was through the living room. Except it was a partition wall that stopped two feet from the ceiling. Once in the bedroom, I noticed a clothes rail concealing a proper front door, complete with Yale lock. Apparently it lead back out into the communal hallway.

Then my husband asked the glaringly obvious question. Er, where's the bathroom? The owner lead us back to the hallway between the kitchen and living room and pointed out a door. A shower cubicle had been fitted into the wall. Okay, that's a space saver, the flat is a no for us, but we admire the ingenuity. But where, we asked, is the toilet? Ah. He held up a Yale key. The toilets are all down on the ground floor. This is the key to your personal one.

Suffice to say we did not pursue it. They wanted about £500 a month for it too (around 2004).

While looking for a flat in London 30 plus years ago we viewed one in Brixton that you had to access by walking through a launderette and up a flight of steps. The living room was triangular and there were gay porn pics pinned to the walls. We didn't take it!

Looking for a rental flat in Glasgow again thirty plus years ago we viewed one which had carpet tiles cut from a carpet sample book on the living room floor - many different colours. There was a big coin-in-the-slot gas meter right next to the living room fire. Depressing.

When we were looking for a house to buy we viewed one that was so dirty our shoes stuck to the grease on the carpet - it was like fly paper. The female owner seemed quite down and tearful and her children looked a bit neglected. She also went out to her way to point out everything that was wrong with the house. We went back to the estate agent and told her all of this. She pursed her lips and said, "well, she needs to sell - her husband wants his half of the money." I felt sorry for the woman and her kids - wonder what happened to them.

Again looking for a house to buy. All was fine with the house until we went out into the back garden. There was a huge electricity pylon a few feet from the fence making a very loud buzzing noise. We asked the owner if it did that all the time. He said, "you know, it's the first time I have ever heard it." Oh, really?

One house we viewed smelled like a wet dog. Estate agent said the owners had an elderly dog which didn’t go upstairs, carpet looked wet so clearly dog was weeping in the house.
The stairs were in the living room and had no bannister, so one slip and you would fall into the living room from upstairs. Kitchen and bathroom mouldy.
A mum at the school bought it and paid full asking price. She then had to strip walls back to brickwork and replace all the floorboards due to the smell of dog pee. Spent thousands.