First house joys what did you get?

[Deebee90]

So completed on my first house today and got the keys. What lovely surprises did you get if any?

mine is 2 broken toliets and one including someone’s pee that they clearly couldn’t flush

also they’ve left me socks in the washing machine.

not checked the loft yet. House has supposedly been empty 7 months too since the owner passed away.

but I am on the housing market and that’s all that matters

@MidnightMusing5
This was many years ago and we paid over the asking price as ended up in a bidding war with another potential buyer - as it was the house we really wanted we were ok with this - I still live here 35+ years later
It was vacant possession and they got petty as they wanted us to pay extra for some absolutely minging carpets and curtains and we said no thank you!
So they took everything else they could and left the carpets etc which we had to pull up immediately as they smelt of damp dog and cats pee!

Previous owners had lot of tall bookcases in various rooms. Turns out they had screwed them all to the wall with giant screws so we had a load of massive screw holes all over the walls of a house that was only 4 years old.

Plus a lawn that had so many bald patches from their dog peeing on it that we had to dig it all up and start again.

tend to find furniture etc left behind but once was helping clean a home ready for someone to move in and opening the pantry found it chock a block with blocks of marzipan! no idea why
the bedroom wardrobe was full of fur coats i do not know why the lady left them behind may have been because they were not acceptable now but she had been quite a posh lady so maybe bought in the 1950s or 1960s for important functions.
one house we moved in digging in the garden found a double iron bedstead and the skeleton of a small dog!

There were dead birds in a circle in the garden. They had definitely been put there. It was extremely fucking weird. To make it worse they were discovered by my niece who is and always has been a bit morbid. We were walking round when she shouted me to come and look. I thought it was gross, she was so excited and was saying how it could be an occult ritual or satanists. I will admit I was very freaked out because I’m a wuss, but for the time we lived there no more freaky dead animal shenanigans or satanists.

Used nappies in the garden

Bottle of wine and a card, nice and clean, but so far 2 toilets needed repair, 8ft french doors that wouldn't lock due to the weight and had been previously repaired so had to be replaced, bathroom floor has obvious water damage hidden under a rug and the sink, pedestal and loo all need replacing .

Bottle of wine with two glasses and a lovely welcome card. Loads of paperwork relating to house, boiler etc, where to buy oil.
She was a nice lady, who was still cleaning her way out of the door when we arrived. I felt bad chivvying her out as she obviously wanted to say a last goodbye but we were on a deadline.

There has been quite a lot of bodges come to light though, weird electrics, bad plastering that we've been gradually putting right. But we only had the very basic survey done as naive (and poor!) first time buyers.

5 chickens (who were fairly swiftly "rehomed" by Mr Fox)

They had taken the wood burner and removed all the light fittings - just bare wires hanging from the ceiling in every single room except for one toilet. It was February, just below zero degrees and the CH didn't work either!

Our current house had chickens in the garden when we viewed. I made it very clear that they were to be removed before we completed.

A hidden safe (which we did not know existed) full of £1000s of jewellery!

Previous owners came round the next day and retrieved it ..........

my last house had a full loft, a heating system that didn’t work. Bathroom taps that ran constantly and fleas. Lots and lots of fleas.

Dropped down the back of a kitchen drawer was a pack of photographs, neatly inside its Kodak or Boots envelope along with its 35mm film negatives. The photos were of rooms in my house with furniture that the previous owners had and also their cats, again in this house. It was a nice surprise for me so I kept them.

Bodily fluids of all descriptions all over the house and a pile of computers they’d tried to burn in the back garden. Dodgy bastards.

About 20 years ago, an artificial leg in the loft. Contacted previous owners in case it was needed - they said it was there when they moved into the house in the 70s. It's still there now

A tightly closed bin full of rotting putrid grass shoved in a hedge that stank of vomit.

Various rusting bits of crap shoved in another hedge instead of taken to the dump.

A dishwasher that leaked water all under the kitchen floor.

An oil boiler that leaked water all under the utility floor.

Tbf not all these they would have known about. Congrats OP!

A full food waste bin full of mini flies when I opened it. Disgusting.

I've always been fairly lucky compared with some of the experiences on here, although we've had our share of dodgy boilers, rotten windows and ovens on their last legs. The worst was a mouse infestation which had clearly been dealt with by poisoning not long before the sale. I spent ages trying to deep clean and deodorise the kitchen because of the mystery smell, ended up levering off the kickboards in desperation at midnight, and found lots of little semi-fossilised bodies under the kitchen cabinets. Yuck.

This might not be the answer you were expecting, but the sellers bought my DP a bottle of champagne and a congratulations card.

They also left us a note of where the stop tap was and how to work the boiler etc. How lovely?!

Oh dear! I thought you were going to say they never came back!

A lethal mole trap, found as I walked round the garden with my primary aged children 😱

Not my parents first purchase but we moved house when I was 15 & the previous owners left their cat behind. Took them 6 weeks to come get it, I was quite sad when they came and got her I'd never been allowed a pet so I wanted to keep it. My brother's neighbour sold last year & also left their (rather elderly) cat behind. My brother is kind hearted and has been feeding her, took her to the vets and got her checked (hadn't been for many years apparently - she needs and now receives regular medication so it's good for the cat that she has my brother instead she's visibly much healthier now). When I moved house I accidentally left a Christmas tree in the loft. I'd forgotten about it until Christmas rolled around. For some reason I remembered to take the decorations but not the tree. If you bought my house - apologies!

We got three removal guys kipping on our new sitting room floor for the night.

The move took waayy longer than anticipated because they hadn't sussed out the tricky access to the new house in advance, despite being warned about it. They bust the rear lights on their van (due to aforementioned tricky access) and didn't want to risk getting stopped by the police in the dark on the motorway back to the depot.

Just as well really because at 10pm there was still a ton of stuff to shift.

We gave them fish and chips and they bedded down amongst the boxes. And we all got up again at dawn to finish off the last couple of loads.