What did you find when you moved house that you would rather not have found?

[IclimbedSnowdon]

Was thinking back to when we last moved.

The loo in the bathroom wouldn't flush, and when we went up in the loft we found a dead rat. It looked as though it had been there for some time.
The worst by far though was what we found at the bottom of the garden. Dh was digging and came across a heavy duty green plastic bag. When he opened it the smell was awful. Inside were the bodies of two cats!
Who in their right mind buries an animal in a plastic bag?
So what did you find when you moved into your home?

Not as bad as most of these, but general neglect in our current house.
It took six months between us viewing the property and finally moving in (delays due to covid and issues over access to the property). The previous owners were getting divorced and apparently not on speaking terms for most of those 6 months. It seems they both decided that neither one of them were going to lift a finger once our offer has been made. In those 6 months the bath collapsed out of its fitting, the incorrectly-fitted sink started leaning and the wood burner front broke amongst other things. They striped everything from the property, down to fitted furniture and lightbulbs. Somehow they had acquired a hospital grade industrial light fixture for one of the bedrooms - they took the bulb, so we had to replace the whole fixture. Ideal when moving into a property in January in the winter gloom.

In our case it was all fine when we viewed, just in the 6 months between making the offer and moving in things had deteriorated.

Layers of dirt, dust and grime ... Even the shower had a thick layer of dusty grime on top of the shower head

Food left on baking trays in the oven.

I have to confess that I accidentally did this when I moved out of my first house 🫣🤭 My mom had stayed over to help me pack up and we got chips to save us cooking. It was a huge portion, so we’d left some in the oven in case we fancied more later.

The next day, halfway down the M1, my mom - who’d been fastidious about cleaning everything to within an inch of its life - suddenly cried out ‘The chips!!’ She’s never forgotten that 😆

Loads of deer antlers in the garage roof. Was a bit of a shock!

We left them when we moved with a note saying they came with the house :)

I knew someone who found about ten pairs of fireman boots in their shed on moving in day.

These could all have happened after the viewings, though, once the previous owners had the sale in the bag.

Flea infestation in one house, dog urine soaked floorboards, rubble breaching the damp course. In another bodged drains huge fly infestation in roof and a boiler which had been moved by the owner and done incorrectly (various safety features mising( so was very dangerous according to the plumber. A concrete garden structure built over the drainage inspection hatches, sketchy diy wiring everywhere, carpet beetles. Think we've fixed it all now!

An entire flower bed topping, about 10 feet long, 2 feet wide and up to 6 inches deep, made up of used cat litter. Only about three feet from our back door. Not there at viewing, but we assume once they knew the house was sold, they just used it to dump.

This is just one of the things we found. We found a loft full, and had to hire a skip. Nothing dodgy up there, just stuff they couldn't be bothered to dump before moving. The shed was the same. Plus they had apparently given up not smoking indoors, so the carpets had to be taken up and thrown out, and the whole house redecorated.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. We bought a lovely fully done house that just needed a lick of paint to make it our taste, and ended up with a shell, down to floorboards, a skip full of carpets and unwanted belongings, holes in walls, a collapsing ceiling, oh, endless stuff.

We found a crack pipe, other drug paraphernalia, a folder of prison documents and a baby's umbilical cord stump. The whole place was absolutely filthy and stuck to high heaven of weed. It was upsetting to think that a baby had been living there at some point.

This is making our 'not fully functioning septic tank' seem almost bearable.

There can be a long gap between viewing and moving in. We viewed our place in March and it was October when we actually moved in. It was immaculate when we viewed it but it was clear that the vendors hadn’t really bothered to clean it since the day it was taken off the market.

In our current house - the previous owner was a DIY afficionado tight git who had used sleeping bags and jumpers as wall insulation when installing various internal walls about 10 years previously. Our builder had never seen anything like it.

Oh, and carpet moths. Two years and many treatments later we still havnt got rid of them. And they ruined a much loved silk dress of mine...

Stolen goods.

Dead reptiles in the garage - the previous owner apparently bred them in there & some had escaped/died

Fag ends , used tissues, cakes of dust, hair, half eaten sweets, toys, and a receipt from 1971 in the gaps of radiator
clearly never been cleaned from 1971 to 2021 when I bought and while prepping for painting I bought one of those radiator brushes. Christ the stuff that came out made me icky. The vendors who’d sold to me had decorated the entire house 4 years previously and had done a piss poor job on it to flip the house- hadn’t bothered to clean it properly.

A catalogue of bodged jobs.
It's clear they did a lot themselves and looked good at viewing but closer inspection after we'd bought it I wish I had taken a closer look, I certainly wouldn't have paid the asking price that we did!
Also, the garden was lovely at when we viewed it but 5 months later when we moved in, it was like a jungle! And the fences/arch/trellis had fallen down beyond repair. We were gutted. One of the main reasons we bought the house was for the garden and we had to strip everything back and start again.

Quite a stash of cash under the carpet

Used Sanpro
Human teeth
Dead rat
Wasps nest
Silverfish infestation
Ants nest
No electricity supply
Broken boiler
False widow nests in every cupboard, under the kitchen cabinets etc.

Clumps of dog hair varnished into the floor boards - they clearly just painted over it.

We found that our house roof was not properly attached to the walls. The whole place had a thick layer of polystyrene under the wallpaper. The roof space (old house) was insulated with hay. There was a 20’ deep well directly outside the back door which had been in use as the main water supply until recently. We had to practically rebuild it from scratch, but within the constraints of Listed Building Consent. It gave us more palpitations than anything else we’ve ever taken on and we are still working on it, but is still a fabulous lifetime home.

A dish of mandarin oranges in the fridge.

A filthy oven with a grill pan that had to be thrown out immediately.
Bare live wires
Empty whisky and gin bottles in enormous quantities under the floorboards.

I think I have been lucky, we had a small gas leak.

My beautiful new flat was a total refurb and i love it. However at some point between buying and moving in someone had taken a dump in the en suit toilet and not flushed it. So When I move in it’s not pleasant.

all sorted with with bottles of coke lol but I wasn’t thrilled

Previous house was just generally grubby but also had skid marks in the loo, toothpaste caked on round the basin which had clearly been building up for a while plus that days spit out left near the plughole.Then bailiffs turned up looking for them a few days later. What fun. This house had a load of porno videos stuffed down the side of the fitted wardrobes.