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.

Oh and the vinyl wallpaper. That stuff is evil.

Mind you the crocodiles doing various sports did entertain us.

We did leave some lovely curtains up at our old house but I bet they did not thank us for the cleaning bill as it was the favourite place for our free-flying cockatiels to perch and s*it

ooh forgot about the vinyl wallpaper, in our first house the used it to cover up some damp so when I removed it the plaster fell off the wall in a whole sheet. Cost us fortune to sort out the damp and replaster.

Thank you for disguising the fact that the house had dry rot by nailing extra pieces of wood along side the rotting joists, so the ceiling wouldn't sag. Thank you for leaving the rotting parts of the joist in place so the dry rot could spread.

In addition thank you for not disclosing about the wet rot under the stairs and the woodworm problem in the bathroom.

Thank you for leaving a non functioning oven and a hob that was condemned as dangerous short after we moved in. It is great fun trying to cook all your meals in a microwave and on a George Forman grill.

Thank you for installing a kitchen without any drawers.

Thank your for installing the most impractical shower and bath arrangement ever known.

Finally thank you for the poo brown coloured gloss paint you used on the woodwork. I know we knew about it before we moved in, but it was a joy to remove, particularly when we discovered the diarrhoea yellow underneath it.

Oh my god, for the last 8 years I have been fuming at the white obsessed person I bought my house off....

Why replace all your windows and doors to white plastic when EVERY other house on the estate has brown wood?

Why paint every wall white? Why have tiny white conservatory?

Why replace the bathroom to a, yep, you guessed it, a white suite?

But mostly, the house was only 3 years old when you smegging did all this, so why?

But now I see I really should get over myself!

Themothership ... they replaced wooden windows with plastic on tha 3 year old house??!!!! Just why????

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a)For taking your cats with you, but leaving their fleas

b) For lagging the hot water tank with your knickers

c) For being on the mailing list for porn films

d) For having pampas grass in the garden - after reading MN we realised c) and d) might be linked

Thank you for

a) leaving bare brickwork in the kitchen which you had cunningly hidden behind your ridiculously oversized fridge-freezer.

b) leaving an 'interesting' system of electric sockets which we are having to completely replace

c) the various holes in 'useful' places around the kitchen

d) the sloping floor in the kitchen

e) taking the made-to-measure wooden blinds which we had agreed you would leave

f) ensuring the beautiful cream carpet we saw on the stairs when we viewed was a dirty black carpet by the time we moved in

g) assuring us that you were 'desperate' for a quick sale and subsequently dawdling over matters so that it was 6 months before we could move

h) for all the little details which we are still discovering 4 years after moving in. It's always nice to have a surprise to brighten up a dull day.

i) for excusing the fact that you didn't even bother to do a quick clean before you left by saying that you'd packed the mop (and the broom, Hoover, cleaning products etc as well, I assume)

And finally- for neglecting to tell your various mobile phone companies/ charities/ banks that you moved. If you want your mail, you'd better check my bin with the company concerned.

BonzoDoodah It's mental! The only reason I can think of it that I've never had to tell taxi drivers what number house I live at.....

For not telling the Post Office that you were moving : For not telling anyone on your junk/catalogue mailing list that you were moving : For not telling your daughter's divorce solicitor that you were moving

But mainly

For planting the front garden full of MASSIVE plants and trees that are much too big and out of control

For putting the pond across one corner of the back garden, wasting all the space behind it because I can't get into it to plant Something Nice

For leaving bits of old wardrobe and other rubbish under the leylandii trees that tower over us at the back

For advertising a poky hole as a "utility room" which is so small that I have to lean over the washbin to open the door of the tumble dryer which is stacked on top of the washing machine, and throw things into it from a distance, and nearly give myself a hernia when I take things out

(Why did we buy the house then, I hear you ask? Cos my husband made the decision and I had no say in the matter.)

ok, they never owned it but still

for 'filling holes' by putting masking tape over and then painting it.

for filling in a giant hole in the bedroom wall with sponges, magaizines and masking tape.

for sticking polystyrene tiles to teh wall in the small bedroom in a 'fancy modern pattern'. they were great to remove and the glue. even now after removing, sanding down etc i can still seee the blobs of glue.

for leaving so much junk behind the shed that 2 years on i am still considering a skip to get rid of all in one hit.

for wiring the shed up with an copper pipe covering the wire. i live in fear of that one, but will be disconnected this summer. i can live without a light in the shed.

For wallpapering each and every skirting board
How difficult is it to cut off the excess

For wallpapering on top of wallpaper.....7 times in one room. That was a weird one because the 3rd paper was the same as the last one WTF

For leaving one 12'x6' bedroom full from floor to ceiling with your broken junk, including dead tomato plants, chip pans full of rancid oil and over 100 lemonade bottles. How I wished you could still get money off bottles it would have helped to pay for the skip we needed to get rid of it all.

Just one question really - why did you leave your humongous family portrait on the dining room wall when you left absolutely nothing else?

We even asked the Estate agent if you wanted it back but you didnt. It looks V expensive if a litte strange.

1. for not telling anyone - even your investment managers - that you've moved 2 years on!

1. for lying about the mice infestation

1. for cutting half of the light fittings to remove your frankly rather cheap lampshades

1. for hiding the floods from the rooflights with rugs

1. for damaging the floor boards when moving out

1. for leaving loads of your stuff outside the house which we had to pay the council to remove

1. for leaving the bathroom in a truly disgusting state with black mould everywhere

1. for instructing bodge the builder to do your building work - we're going to have to rip it all out and do it again but this time properly. Cheers.

for :

leaving your flea infested carpets

for leaving your outerhouse stinking of cat piss which took us 4month to get rid of the smell !

for getting your so called electrician of a son to bodge up any loose wires in sight

for falling out with the window cleaner so now he wont come anywhere near our house !

for leaving your kitchen stinking of chip fat lard [feel sick emotion]

for running up x amount of debt and not telling your debt collectors you had changed address

for burying your dead cats in the garden

leaving your bathroom and toilet in such a state we had to buy new ones despite being council tenants

thats enough for now...... TBC lol

For using industrial steel instead of copper for the pipework, three grown men couldn't cut through it.
For the dangerous electrics
For the fish net stocking we found between the layers of carpet in all the bedrooms.

Thank you for leaving a huge amount of rubbish in the garden, which was so overgrown and filthy that it took a few days for us to notice the canoe that you'd left behind!

Thank you for the bathroom cupboard full of pubic hair. Did you all snip some off and pile it in as a special surprise for us? I can't think how else it came to be like that.

Thank you SO much for the orange bedroom. Bright orange walls, with matching orange ceiling and carpets. Lovely. As was the purple hall and reddy purply hall/stair carpet.

Thank you for the artex on the living room wall that was so pointy and sharp it was actually dangerous!

Why the bleep did you have a dishwater in a gap where there is no water? Because now I have no washing machine because we thought there was water in that spot and there isn't.

Oh but a genuine thank you for not being arsed to get someone to do the £600 of work that needed doing to make good some things after you'd moved out so that we ended up getting SIX THOUSAND POUNDS back that had been held back from the sale of the house by the solicitors.

I like that one Sacharissa .

Are all these things unavoidable ?
I have only ever owned one house, this one,t hat dh owned when i moved in. i don't ever want to move, based on this.

the one where theres a baby asleep, or you don't know that you can't open the oven door, are these the things not covered in the survey,that you are supposed to check yourself ?
Do you wish you'd insisted on a viewing on your own ?

I will never again buy a house without a full structural survey, that was our mistake we'd spent £1k on house that fell through so had no more money for the house bought.
But really sold as seen shouldn't apply when you're spending hundreds of thousands of pounds.

I'm probably a bit late but I am still seething 3 years after moving out of the house of hell.

Thank you previous tenants for this catalog of wonderful things when we moved 200 miles away with 2 children and another imminently on her way:

• for not cleaning up after your dog, my disabled FIL ended up cleaning that up on moving day. Then we had to fence off quarter of the garden which was filled with dog mess mixed with stones and random pieces of wood and all the carpets from the house.
• for building your own dangerous decking, then letting the dog on it when it was still wet with ordinary red paint, your dog then proceeded to decorate the patio doors with his paws. It really wasn't much to clean off. And the paint gets washed off the decking in the rain then the wood snaps (we moved in in Feb). You bridged the damp proof course and bodged it up so that mice could and did live under it.
• for ripping up all the carpets and vanishing over floor boards without cleaning them or filling them first. Varnish over tomato sauce is a particularly good look. You could also see outside through the floor boards. It might have explained the horrendous fly problem the house had.
• for taking all the light bulbs.
• for being obsessed with small pictures, they were hundreds of holes in the walls.
• for being obsessed with shelves, we had to take most of them out to fit actual furniture in.
• for wallpapering over wallpaper, it's particularly nice that you alternated where the edges met with each layer. When i say edges met I meant overlapped a centimeter.
• for leaving blackboard painted dining room walls.
• for blocking the sink - that was fun to clean up at 36wks pg with DH at work.
• for never, ever cleaning the cooker and washing off the temperature settings.
• for leaving you disconnected freezer full of food in the outhouse with the dead mice.
• for all the junk under the stairs and in the loft, and under the kitchen cupboards.
• for over-painting all woodwork and radiators in banana yellow (we found the paint in the garage) amongst others.
• for the fuchsia and lilac bathroom colour scheme. It went particularly great when MIL and FIL bought and laid a mint green f'ing carpet when we were out (big thanks to them too!).
• for leaving the bathroom disgustingly clean filthy.
• for being too tight to redirect mail and asking for it all the time at the school gates, it gave me the pleasure of seeing you again.

Thank you land lord (builder by trade)

• for changing contact details and not letting us know them.
• for changing estate agents and keeping our bond.
• for not being able to close the front garden gates because they were hinged to broken pieces of garden wall.
• for being worried constantly that said garden wall would crumble over.
• for the asbestos garage in the garden, 3/4 full of junk including telephone box panels and a scary pointing lady picture.
• for not replacing the carpet that was full of sand with two large holes the previous occupants' dog had made.
• for not fixing all the soot that periodically fell down the chimney.
• for plastering over the see-daylight-through cracks when the bay needed structural support. The fact that all the other houses in the street were having it done was a clue! It also meant wasps started nesting there, which was my children's bedroom.
• for never updating the 1940's kitchen as promised. It was freezing as there was no double glazing and a wooden door to the outside. It was also very small. I believe there was 2m floor space. The cupboards didn't open fully due to this but no problem as they were rotting anyway.
• for not replacing the sharply cracked bath panel and not fixing the leaking boiler and damp problem in the bathroom.
• for getting friends to do the gas certificate eventually, if it were other gas men they would have condemned the disgraceful cooker and the boiler whose pilot light blew out in the wind.
• for never responding to our reports of things that needed work around the house.
• for leaving a used condom in the after you'd replaced the kitchen bulb just before before we moved in.
• for agreeing with the tenants after us that 3 weeks after they'd already moved in, that the decking was broken (we'd reported in years before), the kitchen units were falling off the walls (yes, they tend to do that after 60 years), the unused wood door to kitchen was rotting (that's what happens when the previous tenants to us go at it with an axe), and that the place was filthy and smelled (we'd cleaned). And that due to this he was keeping our bond. This after he'd gone on holiday and wasn't available to sort things out.

Feels better to get that rant out.