Shit stuff in the house you just bought

[TheFrozenCanal]

This is a semi lighthearted thread, hopefully popcornable.

We recently moved house. Buyer beware is of course the rule at play here.

We offered when houses were being snapped up within a day, and eventually found a house though had to go 20k over the asking price for it. We desperately needed to move - work and no space for dc. We had no money left in the budget for anything more than a quick coat of paint.

We moved in and the:

Boiler is dead. It's -2 outside and I've had two plumbers over to quote on a replacement and they've both told me they fixed it, only for me to discover it isn't fixed.

In bringing the furniture down to move they gouged chunks out of the stairs wall. It's not even that tight to come down. To make space, they took the handrail off (and discarded it I presume) leaving huge holes in the wall. I now need to replaster the wall really.

The upvc windows are extremely draughty for some reason - I didn't think that would happen it wasn't noticeable when we first visited last May!

The whole house is papered in a paper that really needs to come off. But in taking the paper off I see that it was put up to hide some really shonky plastering. Between that and the wallpaper paste gloop that I'm struggling to scrape away, we can't decide if we ought to replaster the whole house (as a DIY job) or sand it down with an electric sander.

What delights were in store for you when you moved in that were not picked up by the survey?

😄

Some of these are Jawdropping
The problem I had was nothing like these but a big inconvenience to me as I have a disability
I walked into my ground floor flat which I had been assured would be empty... The only things the previous owners had removed were the TV and their bed frame! Cupboards full of crockery, tools old paint cans and under sink cupboard was their cupboard of doom.. even towels rolled up in the bathroom and a toilet brush.. I had to get a friend with a van to take the furniture before I could get mine in

A friend of mine bought a house that had a greenhouse in the garden. The vendors said they would sell it to him for £500. Friend said no thanks, didn’t want it. When he moved in he found the vendors has smashed the greenhouse into oblivion and was now just thousands of pieces of broken glass.

When my parents moved, they found an old one armed bandit, amongst loads of rubbish/shit and a burglar alarm with no instructions set to chime every time anyone moved from room to room.
their solicitor got it sorted.
Do none of these new home owners have a solicitor? Or does Mumsnet only attract the perfect previous tennents?

Install an accumulator vessel between incoming mains and shower outlet. It acts like a buffer, so it takes on pressure when water pressure at normal, then when there's a drop in pressure (someone flushes a loo say) it releases it's stored pressure thus infilling the fall and maintaining flow to shower. There is usually enough in the tank to give you about 5 minutes of bridging the gap in pressure, enough for the toilet cistern to fill and pressure restore. You can get different sizes though. Hth

Ours had some delights.

All of the floors were soaked in dog piss.m, through to the floorboards which were also rotten. Every inch of floor came out, to which we discovered the old floors were also still down so it went something like laminate, wee trapped in the middle like some sort of disgusting sandwich, Lino, more wee…

We also had the whole thing replastered as nicotine was seeping down the walls as we cleaned.

Needless to say most of the house has been gutted but we still have a roof that leaks in multiple places, a broken boiler and multiple broken windows (we’ve replaced some but it’s so expensive it’s a one at a time job!)

Oh and finally they also left their very old cat in the garden (small amount of land/sheds where she used to live) She was an old semi-feral and we did agree to keep her as she had been there all her life and I felt sorry for her. She lived a few more years and we just fed her and never got to touch her as she wouldn’t allow it!

Thank you so much Op, this is making me feel much better about my own disaster.

bought from lovely family who had lived in the house for 27 years. Nice family, naice area, naice house.

I was a mess, just leaving abusive marriage with kids, first time buyer (lived in exh house previously).

so….they saw me coming. For moving day, they had cleaned thr house & really made an effort. But omg, the guy was a DIY king. Everything, literally everything, had been bodged.

Hole in the roof, covered up.
Dangerous electrics that he’s done himself.
damp that he’d painted over.
Conservatory that he’d put up himself & is basically a wind tunnel.
Double glazing blown (he’d bought the windows online & installed them himself).
gutters - yes he’d put them up. Wonky. So water poured down on the side of the house, adding to thr general damp.
front door - guess what, he’d installed it himself. And it didn’t fit.

I could go on, there was so much more. He’s even built the garden fences himself, they fell over on Day 3.

because I was super cautious, having never built a house before, I had a full survey. Which came back fine.

on thr plus side, I now know every tradesperson in. 20 mile radius and have contributed loads to the local economy😀

Bought not built 😂 though I have rebuilt the bloody thing!

Gas leak - not obvious when we did the last viewing but so obvious when we moved in. I thought that was not pleasant of them . So I was left with young DC and no heating or oven because it was so obvious the gas man came out and turned everything off. That - along with moving was a low point for me . I thought they were not kind for leaving the house like this. To be honest I couldn't be bother to make a fuss - perhaps I should have. I just wish they had told me so I could fix it earlier I do not think kindly of our vendors for leaving me in that situation

I think the house buying system is shit.

Sellers say 'buyer beware!' But also they don't want buyers coming into their house and opening cupboards, checking all the taps have hot water, turning the heating on to check it works, turning on the shower to see how it runs etc. They can't have it both ways

That’s interesting @CleopatrasBeautifulNose . I’m not quite sure where we would have space for an accumulator tank but it would certainly solve a problem.

My buyer actually texted me to thank me for leaving the property so clean. It wasn't (by my standards) spotless, but I went round with a vacuum and a pack of floor wipes before going. I'd lived there a long time, and I couldn't have envisaged leaving it dirty.

@ColdHandsHotHead I left my previous house as clean as I could - cleaned all the cupboards carpets shelves etc - It's just what people do isn't it. Rented flat I cleaned everything - & got 100% of the deposit back which was very welcome. But 1st house we bought all big dogs had had a bath - so that took some cleaning - they took all the doorknobs - and some of the kitchen cupboards & all lightbulbs. They took the kitchen floor with them so we had little other than concrete to walk on . I could have complained but honestly I dd not have the energy to do it.

When we bought our house, the seller said the boiler had recently been serviced by British Gas.The Homebuyer survey doesn’t include heating assessments. When we moved in the boiler didn’t work properly and when we called a plumber he said British Gas wouldn’t service a boiler that old! I remember crying and feeling ripped off. We went over to the local pub and felt better after a few drinks to numb us from the prospect of immediate boiler replacement!

We left our beautiful, solid, 1930s semi immaculate, left a card and wine, plus wood for the woodburner. It had a new roof, bathroom, recently repointed etc. I even had the wheeley bins cleaned as it was bin day the day we left!

Moved into a 70s detached, walls are paper thin so you can hear everything, the kitchen was dripping in grease, dead fly graveyards on windowsills, green algae growing in the shower screen trim & seals, loud banging pipes when you run any water. After a short time it became apparent that they had painted over black mould on the bathroom ceiling. They'd applied a thin layer of grout over black mould infested grout - poorly - so the tiles have rough grout stuck all over them. The converted garage is barely insulated (only done in 2021) so it's like a fridge. Extractor fan filters had to be binned, absolutely gummed up with grease, as is the built in oven, the door glass was black! They'd said their cleaner was coming in after they'd left, but it seems they had only mopped the hall floor. Gas fire in the lounge wasn't even connected, they left a toilet brush in the downstairs loo - grim. Shower was broken. The conservatory took 7 hours of scrubbing, it was utterly filthy, and that was just the inside! Outside plug socket also not connected (probably for the best!). Plus lots more that I've blocked out!

This thread certainly illustrates how due to lack of money or being too old or being lazy some sellers let their houses get into a right old state. When my father died (our parents had been in the house for 50 years) we all took what we wanted andn then let his carers and the new owners round to take what they liked. After that we paid a company to clear the rest who said there was about 2.5 times the amount of stuff as in most houses they clear! They even found our father's medical skeleton from the 1940s - a real one in those days which I wish we had found. That should have been reportable which would have held up a house sale for 3 months the clearance company said so thankfully they just took it to the tip (I am sure it was from my father's medical student days given the old wooden box it was in and that he was not a serial killer)....

We let the new owners supervise (before completion) the clearance with the professional company. The company could not remove the chest freezer - our parents' second fridge freezer kept in an out house. They had to take the door off and come back another day to do that bit. However the clearance company did do a very good job and it was all completely empty by the time of completion of the sale. Very sad too - as end of an era for our family home.

I don't know what bit of must be empty sellers do not understand. When my son bought we had recently had another fairly full house after tenants left the other son's place. I sent about 3 emails to our solicitor asking him to make it very clear we wanted it empty on the purchase and still there was so much left including in the loft and shed.

I'm sorry, I'm laughing like a drain at this!

The boiler that packed up on Christmas eve, kids play set that was so rusted it was dangerous, and in the garage were boxes of credit card bills and other financial stuff

Pubic carpet! That's horrific.

The most astonishing thing about some of the things on this thread is that people didn’t notice them when viewing. Kitchens don’t become filthy and grease encrusted overnight or conservatories. How do such obvious things get missed on viewings?

I dunno, it's almost as if no-one looks round these places before buying them !

To be fair, the old dears place that I moved into had quite a lot of stuff failing/bodged repairs.

I'll know what to look for next time ... knackered boiler is a bit of a classic leaving present though.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g It really was. I had to scrape it up with an old fork. Needless to say a new bathroom was first on the list.

knackered boiler is a bit of a classic leaving present though

It is, we inherited one, so did my son. In fact we had to replace the entire heating system because the one we got was an amalgamation of several bodge jobs, our heating engineer was horrified. But you can’t see that, you can see filth.

They had retired the bathroom by tiling over the old tiles and using poly filler to affix them. Result was tiles frequently falling off.

I suppose people think with filth that the vendor may clean up completion.

If they don’t clean to market the house they’re never going to.