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?

😄

Leaking soil stack. The plumber said it looked like it had been there for a long time - perhaps since the house was built (in 1978).

They kindly left their Neff oven. It was broken and only had one temperature.

The original floor-standing boiler (1978). Not a problem as such as it still worked, but the wiring and programmer were completely shot so it all had to be replaced. It did free up a cupboard so not all bad.

The overflow on the bath was disconnected and the 'sealant' around the side of the bath was actually grout, so split when the bath was full and then leaked.

When we had the kitchen re-done recently the electrician found lamp wire used for many of the electrical circuits.

One of my favourites, though, was the stream of bailiffs that came round, plus the loan shark who appeared looking for the previous owner.

Current house: I wish I'd taken a picture of this, but it was before smartphones so I wouldn't have had it in digital form anyway. All over the house pipes had been boxed in so we didn't think too much of an odd little box high up on one of the walls. Eventually we were having some work done in that room and our builder demolished the box to see what was in it. It was a cold chisel, stuck in the plaster. No pipes. All we could think was that someone decades earlier had been trying to do something with the chisel, it got stuck in the wall, they couldn't get it out, so they built the box round it to hide it.

Previous house: late Victorian terrace, previously in the hands of the same family for about 30 years. They had bought it dirt cheap at a time when nobody wanted houses like that. They had spent next to nothing on maintenance. The kitchen was a sizeable room. When we moved in, everything we touched in there was greasy - kitchen cabinets (falling apart), cooker, walls, floor, ceiling, fluorescent light tube on the ceiling. It was also very damp. The walls were papered with a wood effect paper that was meant to look like panelling. When we started stripping the room out, we found this paper was held up with blutak as the plaster underneath was so damp the paper wouldn't stay up with paste. We also found on some of the walls original wood panelling, but unfortunately because of the damp this had mostly disintegrated. So wood panel effect wallpaper had been pasted over real wood panelling!

(It was a lovely room, and house, eventually. Would never take on a total wreck again, though!)

Our sellers had a habit of doing DIY very very badly. Everything looked fine on the surface, but over six years have had succession of budged jobs to repair. From shelving and curtain poles falling off walls, weird plumbing quirks to repair and (my personal favourite anecdote) an external gas pipe that had been left uncapped after they removed a gas fire and had been left to just spew household gas into the open air. Our gas engineer said he's never seen anything like it in 20 years....

Just to add a nice thing - we replaced our boiler with a £3k Winchester back in 2010, then sold the house the next year! Just a little 3 bedroom semi, but the purchasers got super lucky boiler-wise 😊I still feel nice about it.

They took all the clips off the curtain rails but the curtain rails were really strange style so we had to get new curtain tracks and have no curtains for weeks, incredibly annoying!!

Plus a long list that has taken £££££s to make better, such is home ownership.

Finally after 7 years got rid of artex ceiling and our 90s style bedroom.

Saying that the survey did point out that we really did need to decorate the upstairs as a priority 😂

Shit in and on the toilet seat.
All radiators full of cat hair, all had to be taken off the walls to clear out the hair. Some had leaks.
Crack in the bottom of bath concealed with a bath mat.
Walls had been painted round furniture.
Carpet in downstairs toilet was soaked in piss.
Kitchen only a few years old but tops thick with grease and integrated fridge freezer coated inside with black mould.
Whole place had to be scrubbed before we could even paint anything.

We then had nearly 10 years of getting post for them including insurance taken out using our adress, debt collectors letters.
The man had his own finance company that had gone into receivership but his website address was now a porn site and could be found when googling our home address !

Bailed out as much water as possible using old cup (threw away obv). Poured a bottle of white vinegar into bowl and left overnight.

Next day poked with an old knife and the limescale came away in big soft chunks that just flushed away.

Clean as a whistle but sadly still avocado till whole toilet replaced a couple of years later.

Initially -

1. No skirting boards in one of the bedrooms, they had been removed since we last viewed. No idea why.

1. Yellow candle wax all down one wall of the living room.

1. Leak under the bathroom sink.

1. Bath mixer tap so bunged up with limescale the shower lever would not work.

1. Mildew on all the window frames.

1. Toilet u bend almost completely blocked with limescale.

1. The piece de resistance was the very large (A0), very terrible stylised painting of a car driving up a winding road was not in fact a painting but a stencil painted directly in the the living room wall in black gloss paint.

I’m renting via HA. I found this place via homeswapper and it fit the bill perfectly. The lady who lived in it wanted to downsize, and I needed a 3rd bedroom as I have 2DC who were too old to share. The lady was was very adamant that we had to be ready to move at a moment's notice as once the paperwork was all done then she had a LOAD of people on hand to help her move (not a problem: I’d saved money to cover moving our furniture etc). Anyway, I viewed the place and it looked tatty/untidy but ok. She assured me that the place would be deep cleaned beforehand. she liked my flat (it was clean/tidy and well maintained).

She started dragging her heels with a moving day and finalising paperwork. I’d taken a week off work to make sure I could get moved and settled in. Managed to get final admin sorted midweek…at which point she told me that actually she didn’t have anyone to move her stuff, and that she didn’t know how she was going to get it moved (she didn’t drive) but she had people on standby and everything was packed and ready to go. That week would have been the only week I’d have been able to move (because I wasn’t due to have anymore annual leave until about 4months later), so I said I maybe able to help out a little bit if need be. So instead of hiring removals and packers (my original plan). I hired a large van, filled it with my furniture, moved that to the house. Only to find that she’d not even started packing!! In order to get my stuff in, I had to help her pack and then she filled the van with her furniture and we drove it to my flat. Basically I spent the bloody day moving my stuff, unloading van, then packing/moving HER stuff. I was fuming.

the house was left filthy. I had to deep clean it. She’d assured me it would be left clean. There was a smouldering pile of rubbish in the garden that she must have torched the night before, she left rubbish everywhere. The Lino flooring in kitchen/bathroom/hallway was soaking wet (didn’t notice this before but I’d viewed the place in September and we moved in November). It was saturated with cat and dog piss. There was also a flea infestation. had I known about the fleas and how she’d leave the house, I would have put our stuff in storage, and then had the house flea bombed, deep cleaned etc. It took me weeks to finally get rid of the fleas, and multiple tip runs to get rid of the junk.

on plus side, I love this house. After lifting the piss-soaked lino and flea ridden carpets, the original floorboards were in perfect condition, and we found original quarry tiles on floors!

Notable things we have found since -

1. A electric wire hidden by the simple action of glueing carpet in top of it (never seen a carpet fitter shift so fast!).

1. Bath waste pipe just sitting on the floor under the bath and then propped up on a brick and some cardboard to get to the right height to connect to the main waste pipe. No wonder we were getting weekly pipe blockages.

1. Most recently we had our elecricity meter cupbard replaced with a fire proof one - as the workman pulled the old one out a shower of ancient roll up cigarette butts and a meter reading card from the fiftes rained down on his head. 🤢

Apart from a bit of minor diy bodging - and I'm the true champ for that anyway - we didn't find anything too nasty when we moved into our house aeons ago. Threads on here about horrific problems with buying and selling have already put me off of moving, but this thread has really put the tin lid on it for me! I'll be the one packed in a box before we leave this house!
How come the serious problems people have had on here weren't picked up by the survey?

Most surveyors will not lift floor boards or even carpets. So if there are hidden issues then they may not know about them.

Some are very vague about causes of things as well. Our survey said "possible penetrating damp in the main bedroom". It was nothing of the sort, there is a thermal bridge where the external and internal wall join and the previous owner did not manage the condensation well (or indeed at all 😣)

Oh so I tried this but without the scraping afterwards, thank you. I'll try this combined with the cola and salt soda as suggested in PP

Those of you saying i shouldnt have given the puppy back this was 6 o clock at night as the completion was late going through, i had three young children two dogs of my own one of whom was aggressive towards dogs he didnt know and mobile phones didnt exist in 1990

i was totally overwhelmed with leaving a lovely clean guest house we sold to move into a total shithole and when we loooked at the house it wasnt too bad looking they had hidden most of the mess , the sale took a while to go through so obviously they let it go to rack and ruin after we made the offer

A front door that won't open in the summer when the wood swells.
To replace we need to rebuild the large porch.
Got a quote 5 years ago and that was £15k don't know what it would be
now couldn't afford it then and definitely can't now.
Fortunately we have a side door which everyone uses.

She was a church goer and everyone said how clean her house would be.
When we moved it was absolutely filthy.
Plus she left a large bag of sex toys.

Auto correct error, suicide ideation. 😔

We discovered:

The boiler in the loft was only powerful enough for a small flat (according to the plumber) and not for the 3-bed semi we bought; so the hot water tap in the kitchen did not work because the boiler didn’t know when it was turned on (or some sort of explanation he gave).

Radiators - two not working

Shower leaked into kitchen below when turned on

Damp coursing not done on one side of the conservatory, subsequently damaging the floor inside (was covered by a rug)

Several conservatory windows can’t be opened as the seals have gone on them; another two have lost the keys and can the opened

Dishwasher pipes corroded and leaked under the sink

Conservatory was over the legal size allowed without planning permission so we made them take out indemnity insurance on our behalf; they dragged their heels over this and tried to insist it was fine

When my parents bought a house when I was small, the previous owners took every single light bulb, the doorbell and all the glass out of the greenhouse...
We bought our current home about 5 years ago. No nasty surprises except for that when we arrived at 12pm after completion, the previous owners had not actually started moving out yet! Our whole life and home was packed into a moving van and we had to sit in it for hours until they were gone and then move in in the dark...

We moved end of November and suddenly feel much better!

Nevertheless they did leave us... a toilet brush, a manky Brita filter, half a pint of milk and a load of other random bits in the fridge as well as hair in the shower. The massive IKEA wardrobe was left and is bolted to the wall and needs to die but for some reason my DP keeps worrying we can't do it on our own so I have finally resolved to get people in to remove it (it's where I want to put the bed, which won't fit anywhere else).

Also the windows are extremely draughty. Two of the windows don't actually open at all despite having rotten and ancient frames (which were filthy and mildewy when we moved), and they also provide very little escape from the Heathrow noise... Even the one double glazed door feels like a hurricane is blowing through it.

Minor thing, many of the lights don't work. I also do genuinely find it weird they took all the light fittings, tbh. I know it isn't that odd, but it's odd to me that you would leave milk and not light fittings. Our surveyor claimed they couldn't find the gas meter.

The "entitlement to a parking permit" from the "caretaker" was a complete lie. The caretaker was verbally abusive when we phoned to ask for one, having been totally AWOL for three weeks. We are only now getting it sorted.

I feel like we massively overpaid (viewed and offered in July at peak), and our solicitor was shocking so who knows what she'll have missed; she recently emailed to say we needed to pay another £144 because she'd screwed up the completion statement.

Jeez I think we must be scrupulously honest - we're mid-sale and we've been open with our buyers that, at present the boiler works, but it's definitely on its way out and you're not likely to get that long out of it... the washer-drier drier part died after we'd agreed the sale and we've replaced it rather than just managing without.

This is really sad. We last moved in 1999! The last thing in our lorry was the hoover because I went round each room before we locked up . Do people have no pride anymore??

Same. Obviously we’re a rare species though.

Of all the interesting posts on here all I can think about is the poor dumped dog that got returned to its owner. Not sure who comes off worse the original owner or the person buying the house

Oh, haha! Thank you! x

Indeed. 🙏