What's the most petty thing a home owner has taken with them?

[MarvellousTimeRuiningEverything]

We completed on our house yesterday. Sellers have been a nightmare, very difficult and tried to increase price by £12k the day before exchange. So we knew they'd probably screw us over and we haven't been disappointed. Lightbulbs, toilet roll holders, some handles from cupboards etc... but the most petty thing has to be the clock. They had one of those god awful clocks where you stick the numbers to the wall then screw in/add the arms. They've left the numbers, but removed the arms and taken them with them!

I couldn't have dispatched the ancient cockrel, I'd have had to let him live out his life 😥. Poor old thing (and I'm a farm girl so far from soft).
My parents moved into a smaller home and it was absolutely disgusting when we arrived. Sticky floors, stunk of smoke, dog shit absolutely everywhere, every light bulb and fixture taken (not that you'd want them to be honest, it was that grim). They had left their home immaculate for their new buyers. We spent the first few days on a group deep clean!

Goodness me some people are so petty minded it's unbelievable what they do for kicks. Fancy being that weird to take things that would extremely inconvenience the next owners! Once we had patio taken and light bulbs. In fact the whole garden was basically just sand so think they removed everything. I understand about precious plants as I'd do the same but I would leave it in good condition. Also on moving day we turned up at new house with tenants still there and not packed so we ended up helping them to get rid

Seller decided on the day of exchange that actually they weren’t leaving the freestanding dishwasher that they’d previously said they were. Ok, a shame for us as buyers, we’d need to buy one, and theirs was a Miele, but still. Ordered a cheap hotpoint or similar one the day that we moved in for next day delivery. It arrived, we fitted it, great. Seller turned up a day later and said that they hadn’t realised that their new house had an integrated dishwasher (duh!) so did we want to buy it for £150? He had it in his car? Well, no mate. We’ve already bloody bought one now!

The radiators!!

The house name thing can be odd though.

My childhood home was sold and the house name plate left behind (same reason), I drove past recently and its STILL there 22 years later. The house has been sold 3 times since.

Its the custom slate one I had designed as a kid with photos of my dead pets engraved in it... it looks like a grave stone and feels REALLY weird now.

The house was disgusting on viewing. The lady who had died was left living in a terrible state. They didn’t even bother putting away her wee stained clothes and medical stuff away.
When we moved in they had taken everything that wasn’t nailed down and some stuff that was, including the oven, it’s wasn’t a nice one, they were obviously just selling it for scrap.
Keys for the safe so we had to pay for it to be removed.
They said they wanted the fire places but actually didn’t take them. We had to get them removed because they were awful and dangerous so l wish they had
They (children of previous owners who had died) were millionaires

Im not petty, but hell, im taking my curtain poles and the fittings with me

Why wouldnt you? They were expensive and to my taste, why would i leave them in a house where they might be thrown away, just to buy the exact same ones again 🤯

How odd

Pre fixtures and fittings list a friend bought an old house where the owners not only took the boiler, hot water tank and all the radiators , they removed most of the plants from the garden and , worst of all, dug up the lovely quarry tile floor in the kitchen leaving virtually just bare earth.

Seller took carpets and bulbs. They had sold for less than they wanted. The carpets were old so not at all useful. So the motive was vindictiveness based on their need to drop the price. A month later we had a call from the husband saying we needed to redirect their mail as they had important stuff and we should do so immediately. We invited him to pick up his mail in person and use the Royal Mail redirection service. He was not happy. We asked how the carpets were going and he put the phone down.

So they had to uninstall the units to remove it then refit them?

Door handles

The previous occupants of my house took the plugs from the bath and all the sinks!

I would think you are meant to take curtain poles. They are decoration. So they go with you...

I mean it was 1983, a v old unwanted cockerel and a ex-poultry farmer. Not sure what to tell you. At least with my grandad it’s have been quick and clean. The owner’s suggestion was for my mum to try to hit it over the head with a brick. Doesn’t bear thinking about.

@Bebebebe the outlet was under the sink. The washing machine was about 3m away along the cabinets. Presumably the unscrewed it from the outlet and tugged.

Putting it back in though required it to be threaded through. There was no way to do it without taking the cabinets off.

All the internal doors of the house 😂

Every lightbulb, every bloody internal door had been switched for a really shitty, ill fitting one, she took all the flooring, carpets and laminate and the shower pipe and head. It was also filthy everywhere but the worst was that she had taken the oven and the hob out of the kitchen and put them (broken) in the back garden! She also left loads of excess shit in the bedrooms that we had to get rid of!

The flooring and oven/hob were on the fixtures and fittings list so legally should have stayed.
We were talking to a neighbour in the garden saying what a state she’d left it in when another neighbour popped her head up over the fence saying that she was her relative and it was nothing personal to us but she wanted to get her ex in trouble (he was the owner/seller) as he was kicking her out now that their son had come of age where he wasn’t responsible for keeping him housed anymore.

She didn’t inconvenience him though ffs, she made it a nightmare for us with a little baby!!!

Bought a house in France and they cut all the light fittings on the ceilings leaving wires too short to connect.

Our buyer whined on for ages wanting £80 for a bathroom cabinet that switched on when you waved your hand under it. Eventually DH said “pay it so we don’t lose the sale.” Paid. It was left but it was disgusting and more to the point didn’t frigging work and I had to pay an electrician to remove it and cap off the supply.

No, they're very functional. In summer the sun comes up about 4am and it's very hard to sleep past that with no way of hanging curtains in any of the rooms. If people remove poles they should at least fill holes, repaint and fit basic tracks... though so many curtains are eyelet these days that even that is not much good.

The starting point with F&F used to be that anything that would stay attached if you turned the house upside down and shook it would be included.

Our sellers took all of the curtain poles, but they were those crappy white plastic curtain tracks that you buy for less than a tenner in B&Q. It was really inconvenient because we were moving with a newborn baby and had no way of covering any of the windows until we could get replacements sorted. We didn't manage to find replacements with holes in the same places so ended up with the screw holes visible in the wall. We'd been back to the house prior to the moving day to measure up for curtains so we were prepared and they hadn't thought to mention they were taking them. I met the previous owners a few years later and it turned out the people we bought the house off hadn't even installed the curtain tracks, so heaven knows why they decided to take them when they left!

Yes all the lightbulbs and most of the kitchen ( just left the kitchen sink unit!) but the worst was the internal door handles so that I had windows open to air out the rooms and a bedroom door shut in the breeze and I was locked in! Freaked me out until my partner got a screwdriver to poke in the hole to get me out!

We had this in one of my family homes as I was growing up, all the lightbulbs, even the broken blind, electrics down to wires.

Not what they took but what they left/did

I was renting and moved into what had been an ex student house

Used condoms,dog shit,traffic cones,traffic signs,tin foil with god knows what on it,used toilet roll,wee all over the floor of the toilet,a fridge full of rotten food,moggots in the corner of my bedroom,dried vomit in the carpet,spunk stains on the grotty curtains,two broken bed frames,vomit/shit stains on a mattress-prob more but my brains blocked it out

They smashed the front window the last night they where there-and it was boarded up by the landlord and just left

He had the nerve to tell me that if I wanted it to he replaced,I had to pay for it!(thankfully the council got involved and told him to sort it-took him another 18 months but he finally did)

I moved in with the kids and just wanted to cry-my sil and i had to let them play in the garden while we tried to sort the house best we could-in the end it took us more than a week

The landlord tried to keep my deposit when we moved out,claiming I'd left the house in a worse state than when we moved out!

When we bought the house we're in now,she took the loft ladders but I think that was more of a misunderstanding rather than petty

The fridge. Fine, but the kitchen had been built around it, so they had cut the power cord to get it out, leaving the plug in the only available socket which was behind the back wall of one of the neighbouring cupboards.

That plus the long handled lighter they left with a note saying the oven could only be lit by turning the gas on full then sticking the lighter (and your hand) right to the back of it meant a new kitchen we really hadn't budgeted for...