To The People Who Owned My House Before Me I Would Just Like To Ask

[MintyyAeroEgg]

Why, why, why, when the kitchen measures 25ft by 12ft, you chose to confine the kitchen area (all the units and appliances) to about 1/3 of the available space, and devote the remaining 2/3 to a dining area - which you chose to CARPET in dark green carpet. I just cannot get my head round what you were thinking of, you silly silly silly twunts.

Anyone else?

Why did you remove the smoke alarm from the ceiling especially when you knew a young baby would be moving in?

Why did you advertise the house as having a burglar alarm when you knew damn well it was still in its box in the cupboard under the stairs? (Kind of you to leave it for us, though..)

As self-builders, what on earth made you think that that lovely deep plaster coving through the downstairs could be held up by glue alone? After the first couple of bits fell off, we have had to take the lot down and replace it.

That clover leaf bath, which costs a fortune to fill and you cannot straighten your legs in? That was a mistake, especially in such a lovely big bathroom.

Oh, and taking all the curtains with you was fine by us (they were vile). But we did expect you to make good and put up curtain track. Not just leave us lengths which were too short for the windows and had no fixings with them. Oh, and sodding great holes in the walls where the tie-backs were attached.

You are supposed to be a joiner for heavens sake - why are half the skirting boards flapping in the breeze?

And I won't even start on the horrors we have found in the garden, other than that you sold us more land than was actually yours to sell, which we are still trying to sort out 5 years later.

So much for a new house being less hassle than the (very) old one we left behind!

What would you like to drink?

I feel I owe you one for making our house so superficially ugly. If you had done it up nicely we could never have afforded to buy it.

Five years later it looks stunning (our taste, our work) and it's just right for us.

I love how so many people can't see past wallpaper. Makes ugly but potentially beautiful houses all the more affordable for the rest of us! Thanks and enjoy that drink.

Why did you cut the cord off the hedge trimmer, and leave it in the garage for us?

Why did you think we'd want an ancient surge-protecting multi-plug thing? Are you trying to tell us something about the electrics?

Ok I've just got to add to this

Why, oh Why did you put down false floors over the entire ground floor of the house.

And if there actually was a good reason to do this, WHY did you think that foam packing would keep them up?

We are going to have to rip up the entire ground floor that everything is built on, eg the kitchen, and move out to fix it.

why did you cover your entire bathroom in Cork wallpaper and yes I mean all of it, wrapping it up and around the bath, up the shower step, up the walls, across the ceiling and even around the bin that you left behind? It was sticky and mouldy and utterly disgusting, letalone it looking like a native turd that you crawled inside to do your ablutions in

massive not native..... autocorrect '

Why did you painted all the floorboards in thick matt brown paint, every single floorboard in the entire house?

Why did you timber clad the the bathroom, thus giving it the look of a 70's swedish sauna?

I know its many years later and only resurrected for RowanMN, but...

What did you do to your cats that made them dig so many claw marks into the windowsills??

Did you realise that generations of raccoons had been born and lovingly nurtured in the attic? And if not how the heck could you possibly have missed them? If the noise of troops of them galloping back and forth in the eaves and barking at each other didn't strike you as odd, didn't the smell of years of poop buildup hit you right between the eyes on a warm day? Or the fact that they gathered very conspicuously in the lovely old tree in the garden on summer evenings as if they owned the place?

Did you know there were fossilised poop nuggets in one of the built in drawers along the upstairs hallway? And following on from that, how could you possibly have missed them?

Did you ever use the ancient wall-mounted oven whose door left a half inch gap when it 'closed'? I saw the former lady of the house raiding the frozen dinner section in our local supermarket a few weeks after we moved in so I suspect not.

Walk me through the thought process that led to the purple shag carpeting in the basement and also the wiring and lights stapled to the warren of chipboard bookshelves in the room down there that you called a library. Since you are an architect, the explanation of that glaring departure from code will no doubt be interesting. Did you know how many dog biscuits we found under said carpeting when we finally cleared the maze of shelving and ripped it up (which was difficult as it was nailed to the floor).

The lack of gutters would also be an interesting story. Another code violation.

Again, harking back to your profession, how did you manage to live with such convoluted electrical circuits even though the whole house got either new drywall or the godawful cheap panelling in the 25 years you lived there (convex in the upstairs bedrooms because somebody can't measure properly) and you therefore had ample opportunity to redo the wiring on a rational basis? And if you knew what outlets and fixed appliances were on which circuits, why didn't you leave a diagram? It would have saved us lots of unplugging of appliances and lamps and rearranging of rooms, and blowing of fuses.

I am also wondering about the creative process that led to the fire engine red woodwork throughout the house. I 'd like to know about the cheap wood panelling and the lowered ceiling with the ugly panels and the big blinking fluorescent light in the downstairs office/bedroom. If you used it as an office, did you ever let clients set foot in there? When you decided to turn it into a bedroom did you ever check what your teens were writing on the walls??

Oh and it was a good idea to pull back the big dining room curtains to hide the stains from water leaking through the roof over the dining room window. Full marks for cunning.

OMG

This kind of put everything into perspective - the falling to bits shed which was full of junk, the outside toilet we had removed to find that the retaining wall behind was collapsing!

No porn though, and the only artexing was in the utility room and the bathroom ceiling.

And to the people who bought my old house. I'm really sorry my ex painted the front and back doors in emulsion (covering over the gloss I'd painted), ripped up the stair carpet and painted the stairs black gloss and the walls yellow. I had moved out by then. Though I did end up selling it for less than I paid for it in the end (this was nearly 20 years ago).

What possessed you to NAIL UP the wallpaper in the hallway? Why did you hang a chandelier from a false, suspended ceiling so that it would hit people of average height in the chest as they walked into the room? And, while we're at it, WTF was all that blue shredded plastic in the garden all about?

that light one reminds me of thr house my mum and dad bought at auction, which had a light hanging from the ceiling to waist height. And under the stairs, with the fuse boxes and gas meter etc - A toilet.

Ah, how funny to see this old thread of mine revived!

Why on earth did you put plasterboard over the redundant copper piping in the living room alcove? It would have been much easier to simply remove the stuff.

WTF were you thinking putting woodchip on the ceilings.

WTF were you thinking using concrete to make swirly patterns on the wall above the wood burning stove.

Didn't you think to fill the hole in the wall before you fitted the kitchen units? It was hard to spot behind the large drainpipe outside but boy it made the kitchen freezing .

Crying with laughter over dizhin's "native turds" and beyond's terrified cats.

It was lovely to find so many electric sockets in the kitchen after finding the rest of the house contained about four in total, but really, did you have to fit one directly underneath the kitchen sink amongst the leaky pipework?

Also - and I'm not even going to ask what you were doing up there - as you'd taken the light bulb out, it would have been nice to let us know you'd left a shitload of broken glass in the attic.

Why did you leave a fish under the floorboards?!?! Oh wait that was us, after you screwed us out of almost 10 grand right before completion .

Why, when you had your kitchen floor tiled did you decide to not do the whole floor?? Just doing up to where you put your kitchen units in, leaving a two foot gap around the kitchen walls. So that when the kitchen is to be ripped out, we have to replace the floor as the tiles are no longer available....?

Did you move into one of my previous houses? .

Answer to your question: It worked out much cheaper, and why tile under the units when you never see them??!

Erika that's brilliant! Did they ever say anything?

Why on earth would you paint over light switches and plug sockets?

Why would you spill something brown and disgusting looking down your living room and bedroom walls and not clean it up???

And why would you leave all your kitchen work tops with a layer of god knows how old grease for your buyers?

In fact, why were you such dirty skanky twats that must have only ever cleaned once in your lives, and only then, the obviously viewable areas when we came to view the house????

First house

How did you use the bath with 4 adults and a baby and not notice that it was so stained that we thought it was a brown bath. My DH who lived in a house for his first 20 years with no bathroom refused to even wash his feet in there. Why only rewire part of the house, the kitchen was a nightmare with the old 2 pin plugs. Thanks for all the 5 layers of wallpaper in the 2 living rooms, I had to spend 4 weekends removing it.

Second house

As a qualified electrician why have we to this day got two live wires in the front room and why did you leave the light wire in the outside toilet live and not tell the next owner. We told them 8 years later after we broke the door down to see what was in there. Why did you build a brick fireplace right up to the ceiling but not tie it into the wall. Good job my husband was able to jump out of the way after only removing the top two bricks. Why did you use 4 inch nails in every bit of wood especially in the tongue and groove in the kitchen ceiling and walls, we had to have the whole kitchen re plastered. The wardrobes in our bedroom were the worse example of DIY I had even seen.

Why did you line the alcove around the range with ordinary plasterboard rather than the flame-retardant type, which when we removed it also turned out to be held in place by pieces of wood. The ones next to the flue were nicely charred. Basically, you lined the chimney with wood. Why?!???

Nice of you to recarpet the stairs for viewings which were then ruined by dirty boots when you moved out.

And thanks for not cleaning anything after sale was agreed. There was about five layers of foil on the grill pan.

Why, on completion day with 3 young children, did you leave us to pack and move all your belongings, then clean your entire house, including vomit from the sink?

Oh yes, because you were an alcoholic