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.

Firstly thank you for your cat, he made a great pet and we were thinking about getting one anyway.

I would thank you for the garden but you clearly had no idea you had one and were under the impression that was the local rubbish dump outside the back door. A note on the garden walls - foundations are useful.

Thank you for getting halfway through making the kitchen out of MDF and then giving up.

Newspaper is not underlay.

Green can be a nice colour but I think using five shades (including avacado suite) in one bathroom is a mistake. I thought the pale green ceiling was an optical illusion caused by reflection from the walls, I was wrong. Stripping the wallpaper revealed the 6th different shade painted underneath.

Not emptying the freezers left in the back garden, leaving freezers there in the first place, there were 3, how many freezers did you have in the house or was it a collection amassed over several years?

But mainly thank you for looking very sheepish while we were viewing and saying you would accept offers, I don't think you had any idea I'd already fallen in love with the house the first time it was on the market and £10,000 more expensive, we may have been slightly cheeky by offering even less but I think some of the 'surprises' in the garden made that fair.

Oblomov I was thinking that. Do people not have surveys?

I am clearly a freak though as I have been stripping wallpaper/lifting carpets for the past week and love going back through all the layers until I hit the 50s newspapers at the bottom Our house was clearly very funky in the 1960s

WRT the survey question: we were actually talked out of having a "full structural" or whatever you call them (it's 6 years ago...), by our sollicitor. he said we'd be insane to spend money on an expensive survey when a basic one would do, as our property of choice was an ex-council one built in the 50s, and therefore very solid.

yeah right!

Now it is time for rule 1: don't listen unconditionally to your sollicitor .

Oh, and thanks to the former occupants for many of the points already mentioned above by other posters, such as...

• re-routing the electrics to bypass the meter, and almost electrocuting the electrician who came to fix it for us, and who after that refused to come back
• leaving unpaid bills, and packing off to places unknown
• leaving us some interesting graffiti in all of the rooms
• taking out most of the light fittings
• leaving us to tile the bathroom floor. without glue, grout and with octagonal tiles that were never going to fit together without leaving little squares in between

Despite all of this though, we've managed to make your pit into our palace, and can now actually say that we really love living here.

Thank you, dear former occupants, for

• Sawing through the (structural) newel post on the stairs, pinning it back together very badly, and painting over the join
• Having a bathroom floor fitted without actually using any waterproofing
• Sawing off your tumble drier exhaust in a difficult-to-access place so that it fills with bees (we had "bees on tap" for a while)
• Filthy hideous brown carpets with disgusting decaying underlay
• Thickly carpeting over the virtually derelict stairs that almost fell through
• Installing energy saving bulbs on sockets with dimmer switches (pop!)
• Choosing deep pink swirly carpet to go with lime green walls in the living room
• That 70s Fitted Kitchen. The one with the cardboard unit backs that can't be cleaned because they go soggy
• All the cracks in the walls that let the chainsmoking neighbours' vile ciggy whiffs right through
• Using cornflakes boxes in all your repairs
• And, last but not least, hiding the infestation of giant oriental cockroaches

We may have defeated some of these.

I've had a bit of a sense of humour failure with this thread but am loving bees on tap

Actually, credit where credit is due, "bees on tap" was DH's creation. All I could think about was Eddie Izzard's "Aaaah! I'm covered in bees!".

Seriously though, we liked the bees. We missed them when we came home from holiday and they were gone.

ooh I'm just about to sell and this thread makes me feel so kind! There's not a thing wrong with this house that we hhaven't 100% fixed!