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?

😄

Ooh I forgot a good one.

The ensuite toilet faces the door, and the door is opposite the window. However the toilet door won't stay closed, no matter what we try, so if you hope to use the toilet without the neighbours seeing you sat on it, you need to close the bedroom curtains first.

oh and the internal door handles were glued on so when we tried to open the doors they fell off in our hands hah!

A tiny little urn with ashes and a name engraved on it, at the back of the built in

(we tracked them down and returned it - I would want it returned if that was my child)

Previous owners removed a chunk off an upstairs floor joist so one of the rooms was sort of dangling in space.

They'd also knocked down a load bearing wall... without putting an RSJ in.

The water in the bathroom just didn't work. No idea how the previous owner was cleaning herself.

The only source of heat in the house was the gas fire however the chimney had collapsed behind it and it was probably pumping out carbon monixide into the house.

Luckily we identified all of these before we moved in. We knew the house needed SOME work but they saw us coming.

@Tiffan @AlwaysGinPlease I agree. I could not send a puppy back to someone that just left it in a garden and didn't give a shit. Poor thing.

I have to say I'm amazed how widespread the crap diy, broken boilers, casual filth-fests, lazy plumbers and electricians really are. When you are not expecting a fixer upper but that's what you get it can be such a shock, especially when you're one of the nice people who leaves things clean with a little gift!

We had a really lovely wood burner that we were looking forward to switching on - however discovered it was not connected, no chimney flue and even the burner was not allowed to be used as didn’t meet regs. Very cold winter as also discovered the boiler didn’t work and even when we did replace that most of the heaters didn’t work! Very cold!

outbuilding with lovely kitchenette with sink but no water running to it 😂.

everywhere had been painted but we soon discovered that was to hide serious damp issues.

I could actually go on but like the OP there was literally nothing on the market and we were desperate.

A secret room behind our kitchen. Bathroom not done with waterproof plywood so wet room shower sprouted mushrooms after a few weeks.

colleague found a wall full of coal!

Sellotape residue. Found more last year and we moved in 2014. So weird. Did they tape little love notes all over the house? Was on windows, around the fireplace, on doors, on sinks??

Can I ask, how did you get the limescale off the toilet in the end? The one in my main bathroom is terrible.

I feel like MN should have a property listing section where we sell houses to each other and we could all have this experience!

Found hardcore German lesbian porn pics...plastered all over the inside of a horrible built in wardrobe....!!...no attempt to hide it, never looked inside when viewing....neighbours young children came into house as we unpacked and found the cupboard and asked difficult questions about the porn pics !!

Friend bought a new done up house....all the sockets in kitchen were dummies, not wired up and the bath and shower were not connected so flooded the floor when used for first time !

Weird hidey holes everywhere. Fake baseboard with a key. Cupboard with a lock in bedroom floor. Large cupboard behind bookcase that swings out small compartment in wall etc etc

House No 1, No kitchen cupboards, but that was ok we knew that. However, They had freestanding dressers and one of those 1950’s cupboards with two doors at the top, a little pull out work surface and cupboards at the bottom. They said they were leaving them..they didn’t. No bedroom doors, the back bedroom window fell out onto the flat roof of the kitchen extension a week after we moved in.
Lifted the lounge carpet up and found another one, lifted that one and found the rubber underlay had crumbled to dust.
Oh nearly forgot, the gas leak in the hall, tow days after we moved in. My dad noticed it as he was putting stuff in the cupboard.
House No 2. Lovely house, I wasn’t keen on the mustard yellow bathroom suite but it was spotlessly clean and in perfect condition so we lived with it. Could have been worse, next doors was burgundy.
House number 3, Cat fleas in the carpets, cat shit in base cupboards, downstairs loo encrusted with lime scale and we live in a soft water area so what was going on there is anyones guess. I’ve never had a problem with limescale in any of the houses I’ve lived in. Old toys in the garden: a bike and a kiddies pedal police car. DH cleaned them up, put new tyres on the bike and DD learnt to ride on that bike.
House no 4. This house, a new build, came with the usual snagging problems. The double glazing didn’t have the safety kite marks etched onto the glass, which meant the building inspector wouldn’t sign it off until the glass was changed. Held us up by a week. When finally did get the keys we switched the hall light on and so did the lounge light, the light fitting fell out of the ceiling in the utility. Water leak from the tank in the loft. A valve was stuck open or something.

Old house asbestos buried in the garden.

Two boilers both broke straight away. Yes they literally had two boilers in case one broke down.

Our current house is lovely but needs some TLC they changed the layout and didn't move light switches so you have to go around the door to turn the kitchen light on 🤦‍♀️

We also have 5 different floors downstairs literally every area has a different floor.

Not a buyer, but in my second year student house we had the WORST letting agency, just about every cliche of a corrupt, lazy, student letting company that you could imagine. Never met the owner I think she lived the other end of the country or abroad possibly.

Anyway, we were suddenly contacted in a panic by Shit Student Lettings Co who had realised that our house hadn't had a gas safety inspection in about three years. Highly highly illegal and dangerous. Gas safety engineer duly turns up and begins his work, three out of the four of us tenant happened to be in at the time.

Gas safety engineer suddenly comes pounding up the stairs from the cellar (which we never entered, usually was locked, he'd obtained the keys from Shit Student Lettings Co) and shouts for everyone to get out, NOW. DO NOT switch any switches! Seriously, DO NOT SWITCH ANYTHING OFF OR ON JUST GET OUT!

He then goes on to evacuate our neighbours and making frenzied phone calls from the opposite side of the street.....

Turns out that down in the cellar there had been a gas leak. God knows how long it had been going on but that cellar, having not been opened for potentially the last three years had slowly been filling up with gas. We were literally sitting on top of an unexploded gas bomb. Every time we'd switched something on, or used a lighter or made any kind of electrical spark we'd somehow escaped making the whole bloody place go up and were on distinctly borrowed time.

Don't mind telling you all that it shit us, and our neighbours, right up. Did make for EXCELLENT extenuating circumstances to increase the deadline for the essay I was in the middle of writing though so every (gas) cloud....😬

A dead dog buried in a very shallow grave just outside the kitchen door. That was a nice surprise when I pulled up a plant with my bare hands and a skull came with it!

I am madly scrolling so that I find out about the bomb…. Please, please…

The beautiful wooden floorboards in my Victorian terrace, had been stained and waxed so sympatheticly, they really were the game changer.

Until moving day when I found they had sanded and waxed around the furniture!

glitter in seemingly every nook and cranny in the house. 3 years on and we still keep finding it!

Oh god, I’d actually forgotten our current house came with fleas. Out very old cat at the time was a house cat as she’d get lost (vet suspected some kind of cat dementia) but she was also very allergic to fleas. It was the living room carpet that was infested!

2 cats, one alive, one dead.
An attic packed with used cat litter.
They'd buried years worth of crap under the decking in the garden - there was so much rubbish that they'd actually decked over the ground floor windows at the back of the house (Obvs we could see the decking and knew it had to go - but we didn't know what lay beneath - they said they'd done it so that they had first floor access to the garden for their disabled mother.)
The carpets all REEKED - they'd had loose chinchillas everywhere.
A leaking gas fire
Unusable bathrooms - literally - the bath was cracked so couldn't hold water and the shower leaked through the ceiling. They'd looked fine when we looked around.
Serious damp (we fixed that by opening the windows).
Oh and them - themselves!! They didn't manage to actually leave until almost 24 hours after completion because they didn't start packing until completion happened. It was a fricking nightmare. And STILL they left a cat behind.
Anyway, 18 months on its all MUCH better.

We moved into our house, as a rental, in early spring of 2018. DD was just over a year old and had health complications; it was unseasonably cold. We'd been told the house had been empty for 'some weeks' (actually: months) and had 'some visible damp that'll soon dry out. We found:

• walls running wet up to six foot level.
• the boiler, an antique, packed up as soon as it was switched on.
• no electricity as it'd got so wet it tripped the moment you turned it on, so we had to wait for the electricians.
• broken glass in several panes, and acrylic cut to fit in others (I've got quite fond of the acrylic ...).
• a large, ugly, asbstos-clad shed in pride of place in the garden.
• Ditto outbbuildings full of lethal rubbish.
• windows painted shut on the outside.
• massive gaps between doors and frames.
• a spare room where the previous tenant's dog had been kept. It smelt fine until we got the heating working, then ... ugh!

We bought the house in 2020, and we didn't think there would be too many more shocks, but we found:

• a one-brick-sized gap over the top of the door. The (sturdy, anaglypta) paper had been pinned in place, but there was literally nothing between us and the outside layer of brick except paper.
• no fire barrier between us and the next house at loft level. We only discovered this was an issue when the landlord admitted they weren't legally allowed to complete the sale without certain building regulations in place (!).
• the house had always had an EPC of F, meaning it was never legal to rent to us.
• Most annoyingly, some idiot tanked the kitchen and the hallway. We suspected they had, but even so, it wasn't a nice surprise.

Possibly the worst in the 'shit stuff' is that the (large, corporate) landlord who owned our house also owns the property next door. The landlord sold us the house and garden, and drew up the boundary. However, they never thought to clear this with their long-term tenant next door, with the result that she thinks she still has rights over quite a bit of our garden.

Bathroom tiled floor to ceiling, started leaking into downstairs immediately. Upon investigation, the top layer of tiles had huge spaces underneath with odd tiles here and there, we think they'd struggled to take first tiles off so eventually tiled another layer on top but the spaces and loose original layer meant it just leaked :-(
Garage door seized, if we'd wanted to use it we'd have had to replace it.
Leaking uncapped gas pipe in kitchen hidden behind fitted units. The drawers always had an odd smell, a bit like shoe polish. When we stripped them out to renovate, the gas supply was immediately disabled due to the explosion risk.

Not at all I laughed writing it 😂 it’s ridiculous