And to the people who owned our current house BEFORE us...

[notasize10yetbutoneday]

...Thank you so much for leaving over 20 hideous wall shelves on the walls of each bedroom which took ages to take down and a tube of polyfilla to rectify. My fingernails will never be the same again.

Cheers for leaving around twenty dog turds in the garden on moving day - one of the hottest days of the year.

I don't get it, the woman had three DGC under five and there was that broken glass, bricks and splintery old wood everywhere too

We bought our house from DH parents and they failed to let us know that they had fixed the leaky roof with newspaper and glue. All the beams in the upstairs of the house were rotten and had to be completely replaced and the extension they put on had no foundations. When we started to replace one of the windows the whole of the gable end started to lean away from the rest of the house! they also left all the furniture behind that they didn't want with yellow postick notes saying 'dump' on them. That was 3 years ago, I still find it hard to talk to them.

MiladyDeScorchio - I wonder if your former owners now live next to us; sounds EXACTLY like their garden...

Thank you for gluing all of the curtain poles and tiebacks onto the walls. I thought you were being nice leaving all of the curtains, little did I know .... took a lot of sand papering to make the walls good again for painting.

Thank you for leaving a pair of crusty knickers under the chest of drawers.

Thank you for leaving food in the fridge/freezer and then turning the power off, leaving us to find the stuff when we moved in three weeks later.

Thank you for painting my bedroom entirely in alternating Mr. Blobby pink and yellow emulsion. Even the light switches and the radiators.

Thanks for:

Covering up the chronic damp in the kitchen with 3 layers of polystyrene tiles.
Same in the downstairs toilet... I swear we gained about half a foot of space...

Not telling us that the boiler was well and truly on it's last legs. It was lovely having to find the cash to replace that while we part way through having an extension done.

Also, seeing as you're an electrical engineer I might have expected you to know that a mains junction box that is boiling hot and leaking black tar is not right. It was fun getting the electrical company on the phone and being told it was an emergency to replace it and not to use any electrics until they had been... Especially right on my kids bedtime.

Even more fun to find we needed a full re-wire because you'd wired your own house - very shittily!

The alarm going off everytime I turned on the upstairs light was amusing for a while too..

I really love the endless bailiff letters for your adult son too... Don't worry though - I explain and give them both yours and your sons forwarding addresses and they are very nice to me then!

Thanks for painting the 15ft high ceiling in the living room exactly the same shade of blue as the "add your message here" bit on Mumsnet. No wonder it was hard to avoid getting it all over the white ceiling rose. Four coats and one permanently clicked neck later, it looks gorgeous.

Thanks for the exciting mixture of carpet styles that you used. It made it easier to tell which room we were in. Red and gold swirls? I'm in the living room. Blue and green splodges? Front bedroom. Orange and brown? Dining room. They looked lovely with the approximately 9 different patterns of floral wallpaper you liked so much.

Sorry to the next people that we can't afford to get the (condemned in 1985) boiler replaced but do take some comfort from the lovely period detailing in the 1960s kitchen. And ignore the silly cow next door with whom you will be sharing a yard. You, and her teenage son's fucking moped.

The bathroom is gorgeous, though.

Thank you for leaving the massive bunch of keys with the estate agent. Shame none of them fit the door locks! The front door lock was broken so we had to pass furniture through the windows.

No keys left for garage and shed - supposedly posted then shockingly "lost" in the post.

Not leaving the alarm code and claiming you forgot it.

For refusing to pay the window cleaner 3 years previously resulting in filthy windows and a cleaner that didn't want to come near our house.

For leaving the house so filthy. I loved cleaning your pubic hair out of the toilet, shower and sink.

For taking all of the carpets from the house and for ripping the lino in the bathrooms, just so we couldn't have them.

For leaving tons of crap down the side of the house which we still need to shift.

For "being able to move immediately" yet dragging your heels for 3 months. It wouldn't have been so bad but I was 32 weeks pregnant by the time we moved. The woman buying our house was 36 weeks...

For leaving a gap under the garage door resulting in mice coming in the house and getting under the first floor floorboards. The flooding that occurred by the mice eating pipes was great. My lovely DH was trying to fix the leak when I had a leak of my own. DD was born 6 hours later...

For leaving so many holes everywhere and random items. Especially the "fully boarded" loft full. (There are only 3 boards)

For "planting a forest" in the tiny front garden. I thought the neighbours were joking that you said this. You really had tried though.

For ordering a parcel on next day delivery 3 weeks after you left. Then phoning our solicitor and threatening us if we didn't forward the parcel to you. Too bad I had refused to accept it eh???

For forgetting to tell your redundancy insurance people you had left. I had a great time at the door with them saying you weren't home because you were at work

For the failure of the royal mail's redirect system for that one crucial letter that arrived for you - a letter advising that they hadn't been able to contact you by phone. If you wanted the job you needed to contact them within the next 7 days. Ooooops!

For being such a rubbish neighbour that our neighbours think we are a great replacement! I have great neighbours!

I'd forgotten how mad I was about it all..!

wow - some of these stories are frightening - how can people be so rubbish??

We bought our house from the family of the little old lady who died so she hadn't done anything malicious but had very very odd taste.

Triple tiled the bathroom .... honest there are tiles under the bath showing from the 50's, 70's and the new 90's ones on top.

The front room had pine cladding along the entire chimmney wall and into the alcoves were built-in white 70's melamine cocktail cabinets that were held in with 6 inch nails into the lovely original (1920's) picture rails and cornices.

The WHOLE house was woodchipped in every room and painted pink or peach and yes this included picture rails, cornices, ceiling roses, skirting boards etc etc etc.

The chimney .... was in the downstairs room and in the attic .... but not in the bedroom!!! And all that held the entire chimney breast up (in the attic) were a few pieces of wood nailed to the wall like a rickety gallows.

The ceilings in the hall, landing, bathroom, toilet and bedroom were covered in those firehazard, poison-trap polystyrene tiles - that we ripped out the week we moved in.
But we didn't find the ones under the false ceiling in the kitchen for quite a while ....

The boiler was so crap it broke leaking gas and had to be condemmed whilst I was in labour (6 days of contractions)

And the bedroom window (over a flat roof), once opened couldn't be closed except by using three hands and a couple of screwdrivers to lever all the hinge mechanism back into the frame.

Plus we think there is a car under the rockery.

But we knew most of this before we moved in .... and we love our house ....

I know but I can understand it too - you sell the house as seen, you're not obliged to say "we painted round the telly btw" - it is for the buyer to check.

I've done it myself to an extent - we had and area of unfinished floor that had been inside a built-in wardrobe that we removed, and never got round to doing the bit of floor - we just put the bed over it. We didn't deliberately hide it, but we did forget about it until we moved out so we hadn't mentioned it. Likewise one room had crappy badly-put-in skirting boards, but they were hidden by furniture and we didn't think about it until we were leaving.

So when I found broken bits and bobs in our new house I kind of thought it was fair enough.

The hideous patio though, that does make me think WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?

The house we left wasn't perfect and of course there was the odd small hole where things were taken off the wall. I cleaned the house from top to bottom and scrubbed the oven so it was clean when they moved in. I knew they would clean it all again themselves but I knew it wouldn't take them too long and they could just concentrate on getting unpacked.

I put all the instruction manuals in a pile on the kitchen side along with the phone book and take away menus.

I also left them a bottle of wine in the fridge and a "new home" card.

Dear previous owners,

I'd like to thank you for...

Papering the stairwell in woodchip from the ground floor to second floor, painting it acid yellow for ground and first floor then changing to battleship grey for the very dark second floor.

Sponging our bedroom walls in raspberry pink and cream (including the radiator), leaving the hideous 1970s wardrobe in the same room for us to dismantle and take to the dump, and attempting a 'sky effect' ceiling in the same room by painting it blue and randomly sponging white blobs all over it.

Leaving those mini towelley things (you know the ones they have in pubs to soak up spills on the bar), on the shelf above the toilet cistern to soak up your beer, fag ash and god knows what else (they were binned IMMEDIATELY).

Constructing a death trap, rickety 'Sun Room', the most fabulously optimistic EA descripton I have ever come across (the wood was so rotten, plants were growing out of the side window frames and it was in serious danger of glass falling sideways into neighbour's garden injuring her while innocently watering her flowers). Leaving it festoned with a fetching combination of cobwebs and shitty bunches of dried flowers/seed heads for that sought after rustic shithole effect.

For fitting pub-style swirly carpet from top to bottom, except for the kitchen where there was a betwitching patchwork of vintage lino (and a crusty bamboo curtain unaquainted with Cif and a damp cloth since 1975 - bonus!) and not vacuming it for years.

For painting the bathroom purple and adding an ivy stencil at the top of all the walls.

For wallpapering one of the bedrooms in a vinyl paper so steam resistant, it took 2 days to strip it off.

For being so effing mad, our neighbours had to make two patios at different ends of the garden so they could move to the opposite end when the previous owners emerged to get some sunshine and fresh air.

For arguing in the garden. Naked. At 2am.

For being so hyped up on amphetamines we later found out his nickname at his workplace was 'Speedy'. It would explain the incredibly aggressive messages passed onto us by the EA from our delightful vendor.

And finally for telling our lovely neighbour that the house was 'ready to move into and didn't need a thing doing to it'

Thanks for half a cars engine left in the cellar and the bottles of lemonade (which actually had battery acid in).

And then the next house, so kind of you to take every single lightbulb, curtain rail, loo roll holder etc.

On a positive note-
Thank you for this lovely house and the beautiful way you decorated it.

Thanks for leaving all the crap you couldn't be bothered to move in the loft along with the suit all nicely hung up on a hanger left hanging in the loft from the rafters, thus giving DH a near heart attack the first time we he went up there!

Also thanks for not bothering to change your address for your pension and premium bonds, you only missed out on £10 but could have been a million! You've only be moved 10 years, I think thats enough time to inform people don't you

We thought you were being kind leaving all the kitchen appliances behind. Until we found our that the tumble dryer only had 1 setting still working (incineration setting), the freezer of the fridge freezer didn't work and the motor had burnt out on the washing machine. Not so bad, until we realised that the aforementioned 'fitted applicances' had been fitted prior to the floor being tiled and the kitchen units being fixed, so we had to dismantle half the kitchen to get the appliances out.

Thank you for fitting everything to the walls with no more nails do you have any idea how much plaster comes off with it?

Thank you for putting the plumbing in the wrong way round - our shower unit now has to be upside down in order to work

thank you for not screwing the oven into the units so that when I opened the oven door the oven fell out of the cupboard

thank you for not using underlay and not cleaning the floor underneath before laying cream carpet - coal does seep through cream carpet from underneath.

Thank you for not fitting the kitchen units, bathrooms or central heating properly. The leaks ruined 4 rooms in the house and the upstairs bathroom still leaks despite being refitted.

Thank you for putting the cupboard doors on the kitchen the wrong way up and not using the pre drilled holes for fitting the hinges

ROFL Minda

Im sure that the things you have found during your house moves were far from hilarious at the time, but you do tell a good story!

Our current house was held together with9 inch nails, and why use one piece of wood when 5 would do!

For taking ages to move out after we had moved IN!
We arrived with our stuff and you were 5hrs late moving out and you even took the lightbulbs and the pegs off the washing line!

You left a dead dog buried in a shallow grave in the lawn and then just piled some old bits of wood over it.
It stank the whole estate out and even now 10yrs later it still makes me heave

You kept coming back for your post and would not give a forwarding address and it took 8yrs until all your creditors and debt collectors stopped coming round and understood that we did not know where you had gone!

Shame on you for covering up a lovely vegetable patch (30ft X 8 ft) with patio stones to make a dog run for your enormous Rottweillers to run up and down.

But thank you, thank you for making our neighbours so thankfull to have us as you were the WORST anti-social familly ever and thank goodness you went back to live in a caravan with your relatives (reason no address!).
Phew!

For not moving until we threatened to pull out.

For keeping up borders with carpet nails.

For using pale blue gloss on the walls.

For wiring the doorbell into the plug including knocking a hole in the living room wall in order to access the plug.

For leaving your loo brushes (seriously what did you think I would do with them??)

Oh and trying to get your DD into the good local school by not forwarding your post. Oh the joy of telling you that I had returned to sender...

For leaving your mother under one of the bushes in the front garden and then coming back a few days later wanting the bush back.