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?

I wonder what the people who have my house next will say about me?

Did you know you'd left all your dried flower arrangements/wall decorations behind? There was quite a lot, your new house must look very empty. And you left the concrete hedgehog (complete with Nike hat) in the garden.

How long did it take you choose the pearlised wallpaper for the living room?

Why did you allow so many people who never lived here that they could use your address? (Yes, we know they're friends of yours.) We are constantly sending bailiffs away.

i feel I should maybe defend (slgihtly) some of these poor previous owners.

the "pretend" double glazing is called secondary double glazing. yes, it is basically another single glazed window placed behind the original. my parents had this in their house, provided by the council to try and cut out noise when they wideened a road behind the house.

newspaper as underlay, again, my parents had this because we were frigging poor and they couldn't afford underlay, let alone new carpet. my bedroom carpet came from the pub my nana worked in when they chucked it out
it's better than nothing!

and as for the corpse... well what would YOU do with someone you just killed? it's standrard practice to bury it somewhere surely? lol :P

House 1: Why did you carpet over the tiles in the kitchen - was it to hide the rabbit dropping we had to scrape up?

Why could you not sweep out the wardrobes of all your matted hair and empty tampax boxes and wrappers?

House 2: Why as a bloke are you so special and clean? i thank you for leaving our house like a shiney clean penny but please as a new build why pick a whisper peach bathroom suite? it is the bain of my life!

Why did you put wallpaper on sideways?

Why did you leave the fridge and freezer full of food and what were you going to do with the bacon that was a month past its sell by date?

Why did you have tiny bits of carpet all over the house? Where did they come from and what were they for?

What was the urine stain on the dining room floor from?

Why were the cupboards in the kitchen nailed shut?

Why did one room have no sockets at all?

I could think of more.

-Why did you give us the ends of rolls of wallpaper from when you last decorated in the 1960's? Did you really think we might want to just re-touch the faded bits (rather than knock walls out, take off the old crumbling plaster etc which is what we did)?

-Were you a big fan of jigsaw puzzles? Its just that that may explain why the carpet in at least 3 rooms was made up of loads of different sized pieces all carefull put together to cover the room

-What made you think that yellow gloss on the walls was a good choice of decor for the bathroom?

Why did you lay seagrass matting throughout the flat, including the bathroom, which when wet turned in to soggy straw and rotted?

Why did you apparently superglue this matting to the lovely original Victorian floorboards underneath and therefore destroy said lovely original Victorian floorboards?

Why did you strip out every tiny original feature, including (according to the freeholder) all the ceiling roses, internal doors (replaced with hideous cheap B&Q monstrosities), original Victorian molding and two beautiful fireplaces?

Why did you fit a kitchen so badly it sloped to one wall so that nothing round (eggs, potatoes, carrots) could be placed on the worktops without rolling gently to the other end of the kitchen?

Why did you remove all the original sash windows and replace them with terrible windows of such poor quality they rotted within ten years of fitting and had to be replaced at great expense by me?

Why when you fitted the (cheap and inefficient) boiler did you allow the fitter to use pipes so narrow the gas couldn't actually make it from the meter to boiler two floors up thus rendering said boiler useless?

You didn't even have the excuse of the 1970s to blame, you converted that flat in the early 90s you fool!

to the op -

Why did you buy the house

To the owners of a house we didn't buy

Why did your doorbell play "Land of Hope and Glory"? I nearly had to hide down the side alley when I heard it because I was crying with laughter.

Why were there so many electrical sockets? Including ones in the wardrobes and kitchen cupboards?

Why did you proudly tell us you'd installed the kitchen yourself and it was held up by very large nails?

why did you glue the anaglypta wall paper to the stairwell and up the wall to the top floor of the house? it was a bastard to get off

Where did you get the special kitchen units that all have big holes in their backs, meaning all pots/pans etc keep falling out?

Why did you knock the kitchen and dining room into one room and not level the floors properly, thereby causing a slope halfway along the floor?

Why did you not bother plastering behind your huge American-style fridge, leaving bare bricks?

Why didn't you fill in the holes in the brickwork so that mice couldn't get in? (and be cruelly murdered by two mouse-loving cats)

And wtf was the deal with the water(less) feature?!?

I know your great great great great great, fifteen times removed second cousin was Irish, so you like to pretend you are from the emerald isle, but did that really mean you need to paint every room green and orange!!

Why why why when you made a bit of a mistake on cutting the skirting board on the stairs and go a bit too far, not just start afresh rather than leave the one with an extra saw channel in it. Oh and that goes for the door frames too!

Why the shag pile and wood panelling in the utility room? the shag pile was lovely and mouldy underneath when we removed it.

And to the people who owned the flat before our current house before us. Why did you never clean, did you not realise you were infested with larder beetles. Makes me shudder even now 10 years later!!!

Still chortling at Head Fairy's kitchen. Did you invite people in to play party games? I would've

Why did you use towel rails as curtain poles? Actually, I suspect it was because they are cheaper but we can't take down the bloody curtains! And they look shit!

Why didn't you tell us that there was a tupperware box under the bath to catch the drips? We only found out when it overflowed.

Didn't you miss the complete set of false teeth jammed behind the bedroom radiator?
And did you know (no you couldn't have done) what your teenage son kept under his bedroom carpet?

You never came back for the rats, by the way.
But (good news) we managed to get that large plastic horse out of the sewage pipe. Eventually.

WHY did you paint the front door, brass house numbers and letterbox in a mixture of woodstain, paint and creosote?

WHY didn't you use an undercoat before painting the red kitchen bright yellow?

WHY didn't you position the bath with the taps end beside the wall so that installing a shower attachment would be possible without piddling water all over the floor?

WHY did you then also put the toilet and sink in the same corner leaving enough room to swing a DC?

WHY did you experiment with the look of pink paint only on one part of one radiator?

WHY did you decorate my bedroom wall with leaves then try to disguise them with a different shade of paint?

Having said all that, it seems I got off lightly!

I rent and I'd like to know why most of the houses we end up are badly affected by condensation mould? Why, when I first notice the smell, the estate agents fob me off by saying that the house has not been lived in?
Why, if you had no problems with mould before, was there fresh paint on the walls most badly affected?
Why, when you know we have children living here, would you tell the agents to tell us that we have to move the furniture round on a regular basis, have the heating on and open all windows every day?
Why you would bodge important things like securing the attic opening properly, so that it does not fall down on dh (could have been the kids) one day?
Why would you only do short-term repairs on the boiler so that it breaks down on a regular basis leaving us with no hot water?
Why would owners presume that renters are happy to live in botched, badly maintained houses? Do you really think we are that desperate? It's not good enough for you to live in so you think you can pass it off on the likes of us?

Why did you leave behind your manky, smelly old double bed, that we had to get rid of.
And why did you never clean your hob, so I had to scrape the fat and grease off with a knife.
And the fitted cupboards in the lounge were fake cupboards, just the front parts of cupboards put on the wall to hide piles of unfinished brickes and concrete.
And how could you have ever had a bath in that bathroom, the bath thick with black grime and dirt?

(in house before this one)

Why did you smoke in the downstairs cloke room, which had no window, thus leaving the doors and walls yellow and unable to get rid of the smell until we had it painted?

why did you try to remove the light fittings and leave the wires all exposed?

why did you not tell us that there is zero television reception here and can't get Sky.

why did you not tell us you'd had a 17-year long feud with evil neighbour?

and do you want your copy of "How to make love to the same person for the rest of your life" back?

A house we viewed before buying this one ...

... did one of your adult children, having watched House Doctor, tell you houses sold better these days if painted neutral colours? Is that why your bought a job lot of builder's magnolia emulsion and painted one thin coat over every single flat surface, original feature, area of embossed wallpaper and plasterwork problem, including the original oak front door? Obviously doing so whilst chain smoking as the fag smoke was apparently permanently embedded in the paint effect?

On a house that I didn't contemplate buying once I had seen it:

Why did you point out that all the pine cladding throughout the kitchen (walls, floor to ceiling) was your own work in the last 5 years - it was a throwback to the 70's and would have been a nightmare to get off and redo?

Why did you think that pointing out the damp patches in the basement and saying 'don't worry, its not damp, my dog comes down here to have a wee when I'm out' was a positive thing to say...?

Yes why didn't you tell us there was no TV reception?

Why didn't you tell us all the plug sockets were single sockets?

Did you have to take out all your bathroom fittings leaving holes in several tiles?

Other than that we have been pretty lucky with our house!

Love this thread

Am slightly scared though as we are thinking of buying. Shall now check for buried mattresses, foam walls, blocked drains etc with extra care

To my dear landlady,

Why the woodchip and artex? Why?

And why, when you did the damp proofing did you not strip and re-paint the whole wall? Did you think that it added a certain something to have the lower third of the wall bare, painted plaster with the upper third in woodchip?

Why, when you clearly went to the trouble of damp proofing did you not do it properly? Why do I still get mould in half my house?

Why the red carpets?

Why is the living room 3 different shades of green, none of which go together?

Diud you paint the house such horrible colours to go with the cheap paintings you've hung or did you find the paintings to match the rooms?

Why bother getting a brand new cooker if after living here a few months we already have to turn everything half way through cooking ot get it to cook evenly?

Why did you not remove the extra sensitive extra loud fire alarm that goes off whenever you have a shower or cook anything (it went off when I cooked pancakes the other day, I beg of you!)

Why is the washing machine plumbed badly into the sink so that you have to remember to remove all washing fromt he machine before doing the washing up to avoid all your clean clothes being soaked in dish water?

Why does it smell of rotten eggs when you first run the kitchen taps? I have put every chemical in the world down all the drains yet it still persists.

Oh I do feel better