The 5 most unusual houses I have viewed

[dejavuaswell]

The vendor who announced after our offer was accepted and after the survey had been done that they would not exchange contracts until the end of the academic year. This was back in November 1990 but I have always remembered it. They really did expect us to wait 8 months and were shocked when we didn't.

The house where you could not live for 2 or 3 months every year because the spring water supply dried up in dry weather. Luckily they told us this during the tour.

The house that neither us nor the Agent could find when we went for a viewing. We followed the instructions to the letter but there was no "secluded cottage" in sight when we arrived at the crossroads. We didn't find it using revised instructions either!

The house where the Estate Agents particulars didn't include a single picture of the inside of the house. When we looked inside we realised why!

The house in a valley that didn't get any direct sun from late Nov to late Jan due to high hills surrounding it on three side.

1. The house in Plymouth that had no floors. It was a repossession and all the floorboards had been stolen. It was a large three bed semi on a notorious council estate and was sold for £8,000 at auction (mid 90s).

1. The very large B&B in Cornwall which was kitted out for fetishists. Had "dungeons" and chains on the walls and leather whips and gimp costumes around the place. It was called "Westward Bound".

1. The bungalow, also in Plymouth, where the owner had built a pub bar in his basement without building regs.

It is an interesting job being an Estate Agents, I tells ya!

Ooh good thread.

1. The one with the parrot who sqwawked "Precious! Chicken!"at regular intervals throughout the viewing whilst my Mum and I tried to keep straight faces.

1. The one which had had the upstairs 'moved around' is the best way I can put it- so that on walking up the stairs you were immediately confronted by a large pillar which you had to gingerly side-step to get to the other rooms. I couldn't get my head round it but it sold fairly quickly after we viewed it.

1. The one where the couple viewing it were obviously very nervous and had tried to create an 'ambience'- which involved playing a David Gray Cd so loudly I literally couldn't hear myself think- we were shouting our questions to them.

4.The one we thought was the one- the asking price was "offers in excess of xxx" and we offered xxx. The vendor (who didn't need a certain amount to move up the ladder as she had re-married and lived in her new husband's house) screamed at the estate agent "Its offers in excess of! Do you know what that means!" and th agent actually advised us not to buy from her as she was so volatile!!!

1. The one being sold by a couple going through a messy divorce- they had both moved out but the house was as if someone had left really suddently- there were still dishes on the side, clothes in the wardrobe, kids toys in the garden etc but all the furniture had gone. Really spooky.

I went to view one where it was full of furniture. Huge Beatrix Potter ornaments everywhere,but no personal photos etc. also all cupboards empty,dishwasher unused(free sample still in there), washing in machine though
Went into garage and there was a brand new Jaguar XJS, sitting there unlocked.
The viewing agent (ex police) said it was very strange dodgy and would not advise buying it
Also saw one where everytime we asked about fitting etc ,the lady just said we're not sure . I had visions of buying and turning up to find they had stripped the house out and we were left with a shell. We didn't buy

The one with a wooden "extension" tacked on the end of the kitchen. Imagine something like a shed! It also had an external door that had been neatly blocked up inside but the door was still there on the outside.

The very overpriced flat the estate agent was obviously desperate to offload.

Her selling technique was to light lots of joss sticks, put on some sultry mood music, and then as soon as we got through the door she threw herself down full-length onto the sofa and said in a throaty voice, "imagine... coming home from a hard day at work... your feet are aching... and you lie slowly down on your settee and just... reeeee-laaaaaax..."

It was like she was trying to hypnotise us - DH and I backed quietly away trying not to look into her eyes.

The one where the hallway was full of animals in hutches, the garage had been turned into a kennels, and there were people in bed in two of the bedrooms. The smell was just atrocious.

Ohh and the one with used syringes and needles on the floor and the estate agent asked "so are you going to make an offer then?"

we saw an enormous victorian house in devon... was obviously once very grand... inhabited by family who appeared to be out of a John Irving novel... it had about 8 bedrooms, several of which had sleeping teenagers in them, the mum of the house told us to ignore them... an elderly lady followed us around the house reminiscing about her early life in Africa... a huge st bernard dog kept appearing and slobbering all over us before being shoo-ed away... the house had a network of cellars which were v spooky... also some years previously they had sold a very small section of the house to some sort of artists collective but it was effectively still part of the house, just with a weird flimsy partition at one staircase.

we didn't buy it!

One where they had converted the garage - a detached garage - into a kitchen - but not joined it on to the house. Presumably you'd have to sprint across the drive in all weathers bearing a casserole.

In another house there was a giant Venture Photography style portrait of the husband, stark naked, with the newborn baby strategically placed over his nether regions. The estate agent and I were bursting with suppressed laughter in front of the po-faced vendor.

The worst was the one I looked at, every room had a different swirly/flowery carpet, and every wall in every room had different wall paper.

Believe it or not, this was a rental house. It was large, with a lovely garde, and in a perfect location for schools, but I just couldn't live there.

I laughed hysterically during the viewing, and afterwards DH said I'd been rude.

The second to worst was the house (also a potential rental) had sanded floorboards, and in what would have been one of the children's rooms the boards were broken, leaving it potentially dangerous.
DH had been really keen on the house, and led me to believe it was all we could afford. I burst into tears during the viewing.

The one being sold by middle-aged couple who obviously just loathed each other and had finally decided to go separate ways after living separate lives on separate floors - so the living room was now his bedroom with a shower cubicle stuck in one corner. They sat there glowering at us in different rooms and the estate agent, both determined not to give an inch.

The large house in Notting Hill that had been subdivided into bedsits with the unusual kitchen/bathroom combination that had bath, loo and cooking equipment all in same room.

A very sad new-build in a Cornish mining town that was aiming at Georgian grandeur but with absolutely no idea what that entailed so all the fittings came, from the looks of them, from B&Q, it absolutely stank of damp and the developer was living in one tiny corner on site (for tax purposes I would guess), sleeping in a bunk bed and surrounded by discarded Pot Noodles and Cup-a-Soups. Truly horrendous.

Oh and during the same house hunt we viewed a relative new build owned by a man who lived abroad. His teenage daughter had been staying during the summer while she wasn't at uni...and had invited several friends to join her. I have never ever seen such filth in a modern house. Or any house for that matter. DH screeched at DS2 to come out of the bathroom, when he saw the state of it. Truly gag worthy.

The one that had a disco floor in the bathroom - it was plastic with coloured lights that changed colour all the time. Very odd.

"The worst was the one I looked at, every room had a different swirly/flowery carpet, and every wall in every room had different wall paper. "
I think we must have bought that one - and spent the first few years redecorating and replacing carpets back to neutral shades. A friend bought a similarly decorated house. Her DH was relocated just before they were able to redecorate the last swirly area - the hall and landing. Their purchasers later told them that they bought the house because they liked the hall and landing decor!

We viewed a house where the asking price was in excess of £950,000. for that money you got a carpet where the dog had had an accident there, the swimming pool had various types of wildlife living there and all the upstairs rooms stank of damp needless to say we said no to the vendor

The maisonette where the access to the loft was from a childs bedroom, crawling over a "bridge" across a staircase, and where my husband proceeded to fall through the non-weightbearing floor when viewing the house..... We did not make an offer, and the vendor was not happy as they had to repair the ceiling. But hey, they did not say it was not weight bearing!!!

The lower ground floor flat where they had extended under the pavement to build a second bathroom. This was in order to convert a 1 flat into two bedsits. When we saw it, it was converted back into a 2 bed flat. The flat had a patio to the back, with a blocked door to the street, with a "made up address", such as 2a xxxx road, which still had mail through the mail flap. We lived happily in that flat for over a year, enjoying the luxury of two bedrooms, two bathrooms, one kitchen, one walk in wardrobe/dressing room/kitchen, and a large living room.

The house we looked at that had NO DOORS - not even to the bathrooms - they had all been removed and replaced by curtains. At the top of the stairs was a large cupboard with a curtain for a door - the seller peeled back the curtain AND THERE WERE STACKED ALL THE DOORS ...

There was another one which had at least 1000 large spiders hanging from the car port (the only way to get into the house) - they were dangling and swinging and the seller mentioned proudly that they came every year...i am seriously arachnaphobic and legged it to the car...

Then there was the one where the very large growling dog enclosed DHs groin in it's mouth for most of the viewing and the sellers thought this might be welcoming obv as they did nothing about it...

Finally - a house we did buy was quite cheap as a result of a bad divorce. When we moved in there was a fab reclining chair been left behind. We naturally claimed it as our own and 2 months later the man's sister turned up demanding the rocking chair he said she could have. We showed her the recliner and she said no, that obviously wasn't it. 6 months later, another knock on the door - sister again saying actually it was that one and could she have it? We told her we'd sold it

Oh, I've just remembered: the house (self-designed) by a man with too much money who had commissioned a huuuuge painting of the head and shoulders of himself as Christ on the cross... Oh. My. God.

The flat that had a junkie lying on a bed surrounded by dead cockroaches and a loo that even the estate agent refused to show us (I was pregnant at the time)

The house that had a garden with no fence overlooking a garden full of burnt-out fireworks, about 50 children's bike and two (very sweet) 10 year olds who offered to show their pitbull to my 2 year old.

The two bedroom basement flat where only the sitting room had a window/natural light.

dejavuaswell our house receives no sun from October to March... tis most depressing!

There was a house on that Sarah Beeny programme once that has a sink and a bidet curtained off in a bedroom. No toilet, just a sink and a bidet

The one where there was an en-suite to the master bedroom, but it wasn't a separate room it was just at one end of the bedroom, including the loo which was virtually at the end of the bed .

The one where the retired vendors wouldn't let us have keys, so they were always there for viewings. But rather than keeping out of the way they would creep round after our Negs and Viewers, sometimes developing a deep & meaningful interest in the latest pizza delivery menus which had been pushed through the letterbox whilst desperately trying not to look as though they were ear-wigging

The one where the lady vendor was a bit OCD and would virtually Spring clean the house before any viewing, including buying fresh flowers - lovely. One Saturday viewing was cancelled at the last minute as the Viewer's LO started vomiting on Sat am. She phoned, full of apologies, to cancel and explain why, plus her DH wasn't available to go instead. Come Mon am I happened to take the call from the vendor; she went ballistic when I told her it had been cancelled, even though I explained why; started wailing about having spent £XX on flowers, how selfish to cancel at the last minute etc. She finally shut up when I said "well you wouldn't want a LO vomiting all over your cream carpets, would you?"

The one where the vendor kept ferrets - and insisted on showing them to everyone who came to view the house . Not so stupid though, we had a number of houses in that road at the time and people tended to get a bit confused about which house was which sometimes, so you only had to mention the ferrets for them to clearly remember the house

The £M+ house where our temp Sat viewing lady, who was already inside as it was bucketing down, enraged a viewer by telling him she didn't come out with her brolly when she saw him parking as she didn't think he could be the viewer she was expecting as he didn't look like the kind of person who could afford a £M+ house

There was a story in the papers today about an estate agent showing viewers around a house which had a (human) corpse on the sofa...

I read it, so sad. He can't be blamed if he thought she was asleep and at least he went back to check on her afterwards.

Reminds me of a story a solicitor friend told me. Her clients, purchasers, had arranged to collect keys to their new house direct from the vendor on completion day. They got the call to say money gone through and they could now move in. Go to house, with removal van in tow, knock on door - no answer. Finally start looking through the downstairs windows. Same thing, vendor dead in his armchair. I think they ended up staying in a hotel for a week or so before they could move in.

The Victorian house with the owners saying to show ourselves around and looking at each other with unspoken words of knowing we wouldn't be making an offer. We just knew there was something that would be amiss, but what would it be?! We'd already decided 'no' by that point but as this was the first viewing we were sent to (that's right) we decided to do a bit of a fact-finding mission, look practically at room sizes, location etc.

Sure enough, we got to the back bedroom and looked out of the window. The next door neighbour's garden was a sight to behold - mattresses, cars, and cars on top of cars!