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?

😄

Years ago we bought a house where the upstairs loo and drains had clearly been blocked for some time. We flushed the loo on our first night and had water dripping down into the kitchen. They had also removed a part of the pipe under the sink in the downstairs loo and so water just poured onto the floor.
Our current house had a piece of kitchen worktop held up by an old part of a bannister and we have found a half buried car in the garden.

I had a colleague who fancied himself as a top negotiator - he was moving into a very big, very well kept house with beautifully landscaped gardens. He told them he’d pay extra for the carpets, curtains and plants for £5k (going back a while), but at the eleventh hour he reneged and expected them to leave everything. He thought he was being very clever & was insufferably cocky about it. They took everything. All the carpets ripped up, plants ripped out etc. His poor kids feet were bleeding for weeks from treading on carpet tacks and grippers, and the garden became a quagmire without the plants and bushes. We all thought it served him right for trying to be clever but actually being a massive tool.

1st house - as our first home, viewed it through rose-tinted glasses. Moved in to discover all downstairs walls and ceilings were covered in patterned artex. Took 5 huge tins of awful smelling artex remover to get if off walls and even then had to cover with textured wall paper as it wouldn’t all come off.
2nd house - bottle of champagne in fridge. Much better!

I feel for you OP, I’ve bought a horror of a house in the past where on the day of moving in we found a smashed window in the conservatory, dog turds all over the garden, filthy marks up the stairs where they hadn’t wiped feet , saucepans full of cooking oil in the cupboard, used Tampax down the back of the radiator, dirty knickers in the bathroom , bogies under the windowsill , they took the light fittings that we had paid extra for and even nicked the remote control to the garage ….need I go on 😂
However the last house we moved into was beautiful - a brand-new white company diffuser in the kitchen , a gorgeous bouquet of flowers, freshly cleaned carpets and sparkling all over!
It really is the luck of the draw !!

Bought a house a few years back. Victorian. Previous owners had put an extension on the lower ground floor. But instead of having a door between rooms, they decided to put those metal shutters that shops have, the ones that you pull down and then lock on the ground. There was even the lock on the ground.
Luckily we had planned to totally gut the place but we did live there for 6 months first. I loved whipping open the metal shutter to pretend I was open for business as I went down stairs on the mornings. It was so bizarre.

When we removed all the ghastly, gloss-painted woodchip that our house was filled with, below it on the living room wall the previous owners had written a long note accusing anyone removing the woodchip of being ‘bastards’ as they had done such a great job decorating. Written and dated in 1985… revealed when woodchip removed in 2011.

That sounds like a full replaster op! (Unless you are good at diy plastering!) I feel for you our walls were all covered in hideous paper to hide the chunks missing.

We viewed the house (my husband did) full of furniture, although the seller no longer lived here and had moved abroad. When we arrived with our furniture to move in (we relocated across country) we were left to find rotten skirting boards, mouldy carpet, cupboards with very out of date food, sh*t underneath the toilet seat and a HUGE hole in the garden that had been covered by a gigantic shed that they took with them!
we had to check into a hotel for 4 weeks to make it liveable for the kids. I left flowers, wine and chocolates after a huge deep clean for our buyers!! 😱

We lifted some awful laminate in the dining room to find another layer of shit laminate flooring underneath. Sandwiched in the middle was a significant layer of dried cat pee.

When we bought our house and moved in we found a hidden built in cage under the stairs behind a fake wall big enough for a human to sit in. It smelt of human pee too. Really grim. It was like something from Criminal Minds! 🤢

Other than that and bad decorating choices (bathroom was bright neon pink and the two reception rooms were dark purple and nicotine yellow) and a bannister that fell off the wall the house is ok.

Sagging landing. Turned out to be previously soaked chipboard. Can't believe the surveyor didn't notice.
Cracked washbasin with seized taps.
Our plumber came three mornings a week for over a month, sorting loads of things out.

We bought a house during lockdown. The info said that's the stopcock was in the kitchen. 4 of us looking for the stopcock. Couldn't find it. So we got a plumber out who turned on the mains from the road.
So then a pipe sticking out of earth in the garden started spouting water. The water in the house was never connected just looked like it had.

It was in the contract of sale that the loft and garage were cleared. The garage was fine but the loft was crammed to the rafters with 'stuff'. And the loft is huge! It took ages to clear. I wrote to the previous owner to ask for half the cost of the new loft ladder. Should have asked for the whole thing really. Anyway, he paid up. Technically in breach of contract.

Also the oven was so filthy it had an inch of brown jelly in the bottom of it. Had to have it professionally cleaned. And hundreds of windfalls in the grass of the back garden. I mean hundreds!

Oh, and the money was paid over at 10.30 that morning so house legally ours and they were still there at 8.30 at night! We had to kick our heels in the locality for hours. DH so angry I thought he was going to swing for the man of the house.

12 tins of paint left in shed, along with various other items, fuse box knackered, plug 3 items in, in the kitchen, & it overloads. Left heavy piece of furniture in dining room, bench in garden that took 4 hours to dismantle. Gutter leaks. Bin bags up chimney, ( obviously to save heat escaping). Kitchen dirty, 1 cupboard filled with DIY crap.

They called round for post after they left, I half jokingly said, do you want to take paint, furniture etc with you, he replied we left the paint incase you needed it. Mmmmm.

Luckily we are now getting the house to how we will love it, but still pray for us 🤣🤣🤣

Too many to mention but the biggest surprise was a massive concrete flat roof in the kitchen ceiling.

The vendor. He had no idea we were completing that day, (had in fact just completed) and was sat watching telly with his missus.

They took the oven that was listee as being left was a range so huge gap in the kitchen and we left our lovely range as we thought there would be one.

Dodgy windows everywhere that are really draughty especially the bathroom. Many broken kitchen tiles that were laid on an uneven floor so break really easily.

Extractor fan that doesn't work in the bathroom (which is wallpapered) so black mould appeared as soon as we started using it (they had obviously just wiped it off). Very fancy looking shower and bath which in fact need replacing.

Carpets that stank of dog and needed replacing. Highly patterned wallpaper and an obvious love of brown everywhere. Dodgy locks on the back door. Pointless bit of grass in the back with the rest flagged in a stupid size that we can't get from anywhere. Lots of badly filled holes and walls touched up in paint that doesn't match. Integrated appliances that absolutely stank (no way was I washing my clothes or dishes in them). Conservatory roof that has been insulated on the cheap so the interior lining stuff fell down. Shit insulation in the loft. Dodgy electric ls and lots of switches that dont seem to do anything

We bought this house after having a fixer upper and thinking we wouldn't have to do anything to it. Turns out we need to do everything

We were told the Rayburn in the kitchen was used to cook daily, though oddly, our survey said it was in the living room and heated the hot water. We knew it didn't. But we didn't expect it to take two days to bake a potato and fill next door's bedroom with smoke when we lit it.

I read about people like this every few months on MN. My gast is always actually flabbered. How, just how, can someone not grasp that on the date of completion the property isn't their any more, so they need to be packed and out? How long did it take to get him on his way?

Opened the kitchen cupboard was an old chip pan in there with the oil still in, house had been empty for a year! In the airing cupboard there was old sheets with what looked like dried blood on 🤢

So they fitted a vintage shower.........?

WTF!!!!😧

When we moved, in we found that all door handles came away in our hands. We regularly found ourselves stuck in a room until the other one came along (thankfully, we were never both locked in). Also, they left us a large bottle of holy water 😏

It appears so, yep

Our vendors were lovey and left a gorgeous mirror which we were very pleased about.

However we then found a rather scary looking picture of a Victorian woman in hidden under a sheet in the corner of the loft (house is Victorian as well). We chose to leave her where she was rather than risk raising a ghost from their summer!

SLUMBER!!!!