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 did fairly ok when I got my house. Light fittings, bulbs, curtain rails, door handles, carpets all intact. They even left 1 bog roll which wasn't expected but was really good of them.

The loft needed some emptying though as it had old, broken or irrelevant items stored up there which I got rid of over the next couple of years via standard bin collection. E.g. a chair that was falling apart, over 100 greetings cards for the previous owners, some manky carpets and rugs, boxes for tech products (without the tech inside!)

1 interesting item from the loft though was a 35mm photo album showing what the house / furniture looked like before my time, so nice bit of history about my house.

Whatever makes you think that? Of course they wouldn’t fall if you turned the house upside down and shook. The brackets have to be fitted to the wall or board and the rails are then fitted to the brackets! Simple and secure and definitely wouldn’t fall.

hi, don't you agree a list of items to be left in the house before the sellers leave? also, how awful to have them try to increase the price by £12k... just curious.. what did you do/say?

Leavings mainly...

Tenants in my old home - lot 1 left a garden full of dog shit and I mean full, there wasn't a single spot you could stand in without standing on a turd, and most of the turds were mouldy. The only places not covered in shit had plastic kids toys on them... how their poor children had ever used the garden I don't know. I don't know how the dog (the dog they didn't have according to the tenancy agreement!) managed to go out without standing in it.

Loads of bags of crap in the house - a mix of obvious stuff and also household rubbish.

A big floaty turd in the toilet.

I had to go sort it out - messaged ex tenant for nearly a fortnight then she vanished completely (blocked me!) without making arrangements to collect her stuff (or paying any further rent and she owed me 2 months at that point).

Funnily enough despite being uncontactable, as soon as we started putting black bags of stuff out ready to load up to go to the tip, she appeared.

Came storming out of the new boyfriends twat-mobile (loud exhausts, blacked out windows), screaming and swearing that I was stealing her stuff. I said she was free to take it, but she'd been given 2 weeks notice to collect. She loaded up, and sat in her car rummaging... then they drove off, emptying black bags of rubbish out of the windows all the way up the street!

Lot 2 took MY washing machine, but did at least leave the garden ok and the toilet turdless.

The buyer when I sold... claimed I had left the out-shed full of rubbish!

The cheeky bastards had used it to dump a load of rubbish from another property they'd bought.

A combination of my dated photos on leaving plus a friend getting pics of post/paperwork/notable knackered fittings from the black bags with the address of the other property - which had been sold to them by the same estate agents I'd used, sorted that one out!

Even the EA was astonished at that, the effort required to bring it from property one, dump it at property 2... they can't have had the right licences to dump at the tip.

All the window and patio door keys. They left them all unlocked, so we had to get an emergency locksmith out at a cost of several hundreds, the evening we moved in because we couldn't lock the house. They also vacated late, despite handing the front door key over to the estate agent at lunch time, so we arrived with a huge lorry, a baby and toddler in tow, to find that they hadn't finished packing into boxes and hadn't even started packing their van. They finally left at 9pm. It was the middle of January and I had the babies sleeping, in the cold, in the car while we took turns watching them and moving boxes. It was awful. We didn't manage to get them into the house to go to bed until 2am.

We completed on August 25th.

The sellers took the dishwasher with them. They replaced it with a secondhand dishwasher, that had mould inside.

I think I may be the first to say

loft ladders

The kind that are screwed onto the loft floor and come down by use of a pole. We thought at first that they had taken the pole in error. No, they had taken the ladder.

They had also moved out into rented to buy their dream home and had actually left the house probably 2 days before. The seller rang me on completion day to say that the keys were with the estate agent and when she was packing she realised that the hot water tank had a leak. Had she told me this when she discovered it (we had exchanged 3 weeks earlier) I could have arranged to pay for a plumber to come out and replace the tank instead of moving in with small children who I couldn't bath for a week as no fucking hot water.

And if you think, hmm that might have been me, can you please tell Amex to stop sending your bloody credit card bill with a credit balance to our house. We have sent back so much mail to them it is ridiculous. Thanks.

The different coloured areas of walls, where the mad arsewipe had painted round all the furniture, in between our final viewing and completing.

Amongst the usual stuff, the back gate. 🙄
Sent his father back for the net curtain fittings he left on the window sill.

Spotlessly clean though 🤷‍♀️

We went through the small claims courts - not very fruitful in that we won but then you have to go through the bailiff process. He gave us some stuff back which we sold to pay the court fee. Through the process we found he had a massive list of outstanding county court judgements against him so when the bailiff letters came we just told them where he lived and he moved on again pretty quickly.

1984 film: The Chain. A film about a circular chain of 7 properties. 1980s stellar cast 😁

@HowAmYa my grandmother is the proud owner of a fabulous rose garden of 60+ year old rose bushes that she dug up and brought with her through 7 house moves in her lifetime. I'm sure all her purchasers thought she was a CF, but I can see how she was attached
Taking your David Austens is justified imo

I paid 2.5 million for my property, day we moved in they had taken all the glass panelling from the staircase banister. Very unsafe with a small child!

I've had stuff left more than taken.

used condoms and overflowing bins was a particular low point.

Another left one - we walked in and it was like the old owner had just disappeared.

Shoes still in the hall, bed unmade, clothes in the wardrobe, three huge trunks of old curtains & bedding....nightmare to get rid of. The old owner also hadn't heard of a bin and behind every single one of the radiators was filled with food packaging....including bizarrely the loft (we hadn't checked the loft on viewing) and it was just chocker blocked with used tins, crisps packets, old breakfast cereal boxes from 2004...it was an interesting experience!

Opposite of what you've asked really but when my parents bought thier home it was as though the previous owners just picked up thier coats and toothbrushes and walked out. Leaving us with a load of stuff to sort out/get rid of. The moving van people couldn't believe it and had to try and move a van full of furniture into a home that was already full of furniture.

We did move into a seven-bedroomed house (it was very cheap because it was going to try to fall down the following year, as we found out the following year) in which the previous owner had left behind six large and incredibly ugly 1930s/1940s wardrobes in very poor condition; the only bedroom which didn't have one of them in it was the main bedroom, which instead had a built-in PDF wardrobe whose sliding doors constantly fell off, but at least we were expecting that one. The others, we weren't.

In one move, the previous owners took the world's grottiest carpets, but left the carpet grippers in the doorways. We had a 2 year old who was used to running around with bare feet....They also took every single light bulb and fitting, leaving the wires.

The sellers of my first house took the skirting boards from one of the bedrooms. And cut the phone line so we had to get it reinstalled before we could get an internet connection

Lightbulbs 💡
Carpet, yes they pulled up the carpet. Ha

You are supposed to leave all plants in the garden but if you really want to keep your plants you can make it a condition of the sale

Window handles from sash windows. And bog standard 50 p worth hooks from the wall. The effort gone into the removal really does not justify the cost. Swore and cursed while filling in those holes. These greedy wannabes went to buy a house over 1 mil.

I’ve just put my newly renovated house on the market, it has three bay windows and I’ve put in IKEA blackout blinds in all of them as a temporary solution so the new buyers (please do come new buyers) can take their time choosing their window treatments.
When I bought the house it took three huge skips to take away all the rubbish left behind.
The pettiness some people stoop to is mind boggling.

Our sellers left the loft full of crap but took the loft ladder.
When we finally got up there, we found all their wedding congratulations cards and the wife’s personal diary…complete with detailed entries of the husband’s sperm count throughout the year.

When I was buying my first house in a very cheap and rather sketchy area, one house we couldn't go upstairs to view as everything had gone. Including the floorboards!

The seller for my first house prised the phone socket off the wall.

She had told me at least twice she wanted to keep her phone number and I often wondered if she thought that was how you did it 🤔

I'm moving soon, and I'm totally bringing some of my garden plants with me! In a happy circumstance, the person we're buying from is buying our house, her garden is entirely empty of plants. So I need to start from nothing there. And I'm worried she won't appreciate or mind my plants it took me years to grow ... I don't care if anyone thinks I'm mad I'm doing it.