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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Your moving horror stories?

162 replies

7yo7yo · 09/09/2020 16:53

I’ve been to help a friend move house today, loaded up the first van went to the new house and......the old owners are still there.
Didn’t realise they actually had to move today! Thought because of covid they had a period of grace and would move when it was mutually convenient.
Meanwhile back at friends house, removal men from their buyers will arrive in an hour and these little still had breakfast plates on the table!
They’ve been forcibly removed, but the mess!
Aibu to ask if anyone else gas gone through this? How do people not realise?

OP posts:
hungrywalrus · 14/09/2020 11:50

We booked a lorry for our stuff. But when it showed up, it was considerably smaller than it needed to have been and it didn’t fit everything. We had to fill our car up to the absolute brink and then drive 7 hours to where we were moving. Then we got our keys and found out that we had to clean the whole place, as it had been left in a horrible state by the previous tenants. I first had to clean any surface before I could put anything on it. We had bought quite a lot of furniture off them but eg the fridge/freezer had rotten food in it. I spent so long cleaning, lifting and sorting that a week later I crinked my neck and couldn’t walk properly for 3 days, as the pain radiated all the way down. We had a nearly 3 year old and a 10 month old, so only one person could do anything much at any time. No family or friends nearby either to help.

So so stressful!

AngryBananaSund · 14/09/2020 12:08

And now I have the sudden need to watch The Chain by Jack Rosenthal (and P'tang, Yang, Kipperbang )

MrsBobDylan · 14/09/2020 20:15

Our last move was because we had hit the skids financially.

The house was probate and the previous owner had been bed-bound in the living room for the last 10 years, where she died.

The carpets had maggots, the house needed a re-wire and the outside drain then blocked and pushed sewage up through the downstairs loo, flooding the downstairs. The shower broke and there wasn't a bath, so we were washing in a sink until we could get the money to fix it.

We moved straight in because my middle son is very autistic and we wanted to minimise the change for him. I thought I'd never be clean again and spent upwards of £500 on cleaning products.

John Lewis came to deliver a fridge freezer and I sobbed on the delivery guy who gave me a massive hug and told me everything would be alright, bless him.

longtompot · 15/09/2020 11:31

[quote TheSecondMrsAshwell]@hauntedvagina that was well lucky!

Okay, so I'm looking at moving from rented to bought and this thread has convinced me that I shouldn't give notice on my rented until I have exchanged and actually got through the front door of my new place. It will cost me 2 months rent (I can just about cover that), but what price heart muscle?[/quote]
We did that. It was our first house purchase so all a bit new to it. We decided to have an extra month on our rental which gave us time to do a bit of decorating in the new place before moving everything in. It was still stressful on moving day, but I guess not as much as it could have been if it was all happening on the same day.

notheragain4 · 15/09/2020 11:40

I need to show this thread to my husband, we moved into rented for 4 weeks to break the chain which he's really annoyed about (in my defence it was supposed to be 3 months but our onward purchase was brought forward, by the time we were due to complete we had keys for the rental anyway) I kept with the chain breaking despite knowing we'd only be in it 4 weeks as I wanted to avoid stories like these! Awful system.

listsandbudgets · 15/09/2020 11:48

Last house we let ourselves to discover that the vendor had left all the furniture.

We knew that the house would need damp proofing and some other work so had planned to continue renting until the work was done. They'd left nearly all the furniture down stairs. The sofa and chairs were actually growing mould, the kitchen cupboards were full of filthy mouldy pans, the dishwasher (inculded in the sale!!) had about 6 inches of of filthy brown stinking water, the shed was still full of junk and there was a lot of drug paraphernalia and a damp and disgusting pool table in the cellar!

The vendor turned out to have gone bankrupt (hence the sale) and appeared to have disappeared off the face of the planet. All the money had gone to his creditors so there was nothing to claim against. It took two large skips to sort it all out and I have probably never needed a bath more! Good thing we weren't moving in on completion day!

listsandbudgets · 15/09/2020 11:54

Oh and did I mention the soaking, mouldy, stinking carpets??

sueelleker · 15/09/2020 15:43

*TheSecondMrsAshwell

@hauntedvagina that was well lucky!

Okay, so I'm looking at moving from rented to bought and this thread has convinced me that I shouldn't give notice on my rented until I have exchanged and actually got through the front door of my new place. It will cost me 2 months rent (I can just about cover that), but what price heart muscle?*
We lived in a tied cottage, and the house we bought was lived in by 3 sisters; the house they were moving to was being vacated by an old man who was moving into sheltered housing.So minimal chain. So we took 2 weeks after picking up the keys to redecorate, then moved straight in. No problems at all!

ParFortheCourse · 20/09/2020 21:23

I moved in and found all the door handles removed from the upstairs rooms, and no light bulbs. Pretty sad really.

Meatshake · 21/09/2020 08:12

Wouldn't be surprised to find myself on here. We accidentally hired some fucking cowboy idiot movers, paid a decent amount to pack and go and basically said we have a 3 week old baby, we need you to take care of stuff where we can't. Fella talked a big game but on the day turned up with a tiny Luton van, we couldn't unload until 1pm when the sale went through and they couldn't go back and reload until after.

Ended up costing us £600 as the vendor couldn't unload so her van had to go into storage and she had to go to M&S to get some emergency bits and a hotel for the night.

I was mortified and I think it contributed wildly to my PND diagnosis a few months later. I felt horrible about it! The buyer was ok-ish about it, she could see it wasn't it our fault at least.

MrsToothyBitch · 21/09/2020 09:40

Pretty mild horrors compared to some here but horrendous at the time.

We sold our property to developers when I was 13, neighbours not happy, a move abroad didn't happen, we found our house with not much notice. Emotions running high already. We realised the day we moved that we'd bought off mr & mrs bodger. I tried to have a shower in my ensuite- it didn't work, the cat came in wearing the cat-flap that had collapsed on her, we found a weeks worth of slimy veg trapped in the dirty dishwasher, we tried to close curtains they'd left which collapsed because they were held in place with paper clips, there were random mothballs everywhere and when my mum went for a bath to try & calm down, the taps fell off on her. I then came in holding my loo seat, which cracked off when I sat on it and we both cried our eyes out!

I loved the first flat I rented but we couldn't stay after the LL put the rent up. I moved across the road to somewhere nowhere near as nice. Self moved box by box across by shanks pony & my parents came to help. Dad had his hands full and was going carefully, crossing the road on the crossing, which had been green for peds and was almost at the other side when someone whizzed round the corner of the otherwise empty road, didn't slow at all and got to the crossing just as the vehicle light went green and decided they didn't want to wait five seconds for the pedestrian to get out the way. There was no queue behind her, either, no traffic pressure. Dad picked up his pace and shouted to mum to get away from the edge of the kerb so he could get up on it, mum didn't click the situation quick enough, dad fell over his own scurrying feet and landed horribly- mercifully up the pavement. He'd also been carrying all my toiletries, which went flying and some very kind people picked him up and helped him gather my tampons. The lady who tried to mow him down just put her foot down and drove off. I drive round that corner often, everyone always slows down and stops and gives pedestrians time to clear the crossing. She was a bitch. I watched the entire thing from the middle of the road traffic island.

Moving out of my last rental. Was buying and I'd arranged to go home for a month in case of drama (mercifully there wasn't any after my last two attempts to buy hit the skids last min). House developed a mould problem in the wet autumn & winter last year. LL knew this was a problem - he'd begged us to leave the huge - big enough for someone to get in through, hard to close windows open all day whilst we both worked out the house and refused all our pleas for good humidifiers after we pointed out the massive security risk and the damage we'd both sustained to our bodies trying to open and close them as often as possible. We were giving notice anyway so didn't want to spend, plus it was his property. It was bad. Posessions moulded and I got bacterial tonsillitis off mould in my pillows. Still no humidifiers. We did regular mould scrub treatments and I went home for 9 days about 2 weeks before move out to mind my dad (he's old) whilst mum was away. Treated my rooms before I left, came back for last week or so to pack and came back to utter mould explosion. Walls looked like they had measles, I had a canvas wardrobe and one side of it was sodden. Moved almost all my clothes and shoes out immediately, loaded my car & took everything to my mum who managed to salvage almost all of my stuff but did get a chest infection. LL still refused to acknowledge problem or pay for damage he felt we had caused by "improper ventilation" .

I fell out with the fat scum bag EA after I dumped about five mould-wrecker Longchamps totes on his desk, told him how dare he think I'd do this to my own things, and that I expected money back to cover like for like replacements of ALL damaged goods and he'd better hope my Hermes silks and my bed frame weren't affected. Eventually the EA suggested that both parties should just agree to move forward since if we claimed, the LL would move against us to pay for damage to his property that they suddenly decided had been caused by my housemates tumble dryer. There was no mould around or above the dryer, we opened a window as often as possible when we used it and - as we pointed out in our reply, various tumbles (the one there at the time was 6 months old) had been there 4 years with no drama. Until the wet wet winter. We also had a builders opinon that the problem was a build issue.

We agreed to "settle" and somehow got our entire deposit back, despite us refusing to fork out for a professional clean, doing it ourselves and presenting a fake receipt I'd knocked up.

IpanemaFlowers · 21/09/2020 09:54

Not as bad as some, but during our last move, I took the kids car seats out of the garage and said pack everything but NOT the car seats (we were moving overseas so had sold our car and were waiting for the hire car to arrive).

Guess what, yes they packed the car seats in the first trailer and we didn’t know until 5pm when were ready to leave for the hotel. Dh had to do an emergency run to Halfords leaving me quietly sobbing and 3 crying and hungry kids in driveway.

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