What's the worst/most ridiculous thing you've found when you got the keys to your property?

[xandersmom2]

We got the keys to our new house last week, getting ready to move in later this week.

So far we've discovered:

• they only left us half a set of keys. When we questioned we were told 'oh, we never had a key to the back garage door or the patio doors in the living room'. Eh? They lived there 5 years!! No real biggie, locksmith has already been to drill them out and replace them. But honestly.....
• random boxes of trash in the loft
• the integrated fridge freezer doesn't work. When we questioned this (we wondered if we needed to flick a switch or a breaker to make it work) the vendor immediately 'lawyered up' and we got a call from his solicitor to say 'nowhere in the contract does it say the fridge freezer is in working order so we're not fixing it'

None of these is going to spoil the joy of us finally getting our own home, but it got me wondering: what's the worst/most ridiculous thing you've found when you got the keys to your new home?

We very nearly left a recently-deceased bird for our purcjhasers...

For complicated reasons, we moved our stuff out before the sale completed. While it was empty, I went back to clean. only to find that a bird - quite a large one - had got in, probably down the chimney, flown around the place panicking and pooing everywhere, then died in the fireplace with one beady eye fixed on the sitting room door...

I cleaned it all up, and the new owners were none the wiser.

In our first house, the owner removed the cooker by the simple expedient of cutting the power cable almost flush with the wall, from which about 1.5 cm of it emerged, having been badly plastered in behind the kitchen tiles. Unfortunately, he came back to 'collect his mushroom log' while we were painstakingly removing said wire individual strand by strand with pliers, with everything switched off at the mains. In January. We weren't desperately polite.

In our current house, neither the electricians nor plumbers would consent to us moving in until they had made everything safe. Even then, we had to keep away from the windows on windy nights, because the widows flexed so badly (individual leaded panes) they could easily have exploded inwards, scattering shards everywhere...

Children's baby teeth - weird!
A baking tray.
And a toilet leaking nastiness into the floorboards 🤢 The two times I viewed, the bathroom window had been wide open. The stench after it had been shut for a day was unbelievable 😷

On the 'odd but nice' front - the previous owner left us a flag from the Queen's coronation, which had been used to welcome her & her husband into he house when they moved in (the same year as the coronation) and she was passing on to us in the hope that we would be happy here too.

The oven wasn't working properly which is why we were replacing it and I decided to pay to get it fitted, the electrician discovered that both the oven and the hob were wired up wrongly which is what was causing the oven issues, the hob would have gone the same way but he was kind enough to fix it for us. There were some DIY disasters but dodgy electrical fittings are not what you want to have!

Our first house, we moved in and they’d removed the entire kitchen except the sink unit and the toilet was broken.
This house they left 3 skips of crap in the garage and really dodgy electrics including a plug socket in the bathroom.

A 1930s plug socket and a Christmas Tree.

Shit in the toilet and on the toilet seat.
Black mould in the integrated fridge, in fact whole kitchen was disgusting. Grease all over tops of cupboards.
Downstairs toilet had carpet and it was soaked in piss.
Whole house needed scrubbed before we could paint anything. Previous owners had painted round furniture as well, so yellow skirting.

Dirty bastards they were.

They should have been out by 10am but had to wait until 6pm in the winter. It was dark and wet... when I got inside they had taken all the light bulbs, no loo roll and hadn't cleaned at all

The skirting boards weren't actually fixed to the walls 😂

A large framed photo of the owner of the house after his first ' big game ' kill... some sort of antelope... with the blood from the creature smeared all across his forehead and him sitting astride the corpse. It was a hideous photo... the whole thing was professionally framed and mounted as well.

Another house the owners left a family painting of their grandchildren... and a huge box of family photos. I made sure they were passed back to them

We moved into our house 7 years ago on Friday 13th.. it had been empty apart from a few short term lets for about 9 years. It was lashing rain outside. I walked in alone with my husband to follow with removal guys a few hours later. When I walked in a mouse ran one way across the floor and a rat ran another way.. there was a huge turd with mould growing off it above the water line in the toilet, nothing worked, air locks in water pipes, garden so overgrown you sort of had to hack your way through the undergrowth, vans worth of rubbish in the garden. The kitchen was foul, think 25 years of grease and grime that hadn’t been cleaned. I sat outside and cried! It’s stunning now though after serious renovation.

My first house was a new build.
I got a call at work from my solicitor telling me the money had been transferred and I could collect the keys. I proudly went off in my lunch break with 2 work colleagues to show them my new house. Unlocked the front door to find 3 plasterers plastering the downstairs walls.
Good job I wasn’t moving in till the next day !

Ha ha these are brilliant! The worst we found was an old onion and a full home brew set up in the garage (sadly all the booze was gone)

No window keys, carpets full of someone's long hair, crusty knickers, photos, furniture, broken freezer, plates, a few used towels, all of their notes from a course and there was no underlay under the carpets, which there had been when I looked round (they had a bit pulled up)

Filthy purple shag carpet in the basement under which were dozens of dog biscuits. A persistent smell of old wet dog when it rained.
Dirt everywhere. I initially though the kitchen floor was a mid grey colour. It turned out to be several shades lighter.
Composite wood paneling in many rooms, sockets attached directly to the paneling. Many bulges in the paneling where the previous owner hadn't measured right but shoehorned it in regardless.
1920s style wall oven attached at a comfortable height for someone about 6'6". Oven door hung at a slight angle leaving a gap at both top and bottom for heat to escape.
No gutters - the municipality cited us a few weeks after we had moved in. Previous owner had said when we looked at the house that the style of house didn't require gutters. He was an architect. We placed far too much trust in his judgement as a result.
We discovered he had done most of the wiring himself, and the plumbing. Architect in way over his head. The circuitry was mind boggling.
He had installed the furnace himself too. Turned out the motor was installed upside down and a couple of heating seasons later after all the self lubricating oil had leaked out, we found ourselves with no heat on a freezing weekend, necessitating a call out to the company who had sold the furnace, a long repair session and quite a hefty bill.

But the icing on the cake was a well-established raccoon population in the attic.

Loads of dodgy diys including illegal electrics in the kitchen, leaking ensuite shower and now discovered rising damp... moral of the story... Have a full structural survey...

A massive jar of home-made lime pickle in the fitted living room cupboard.

I phoned the previous owners and they thanked me and came and picked it up - they’d been wondering where it was

My drive way being tarmacced

Last house, she left half her furniture in for the weekend as she didn’t have enough room in the van for it. Her sons mini was left on the driveway for a week, and she left her cat with us overnight too.
This house, they only started packing the morning of the move, so we couldn’t actually get our furniture in until late evening. They left two plants in the conservatory, two nice rugs, loads of tools in the workshop and six Koi carp in the fish pond!

Non of our internal doors shut. DP had to take inches off all of them. Also bags of rubbish in the loft. Bastards.

I think I have posted this before but when we moved in we opened the door to find most of the previous owners belongings all over the sitting room. Clothes, boxes, crockery, everything. Also in the middle of the room was an empty bottle of wine. She had obviously though should I pack this stuff or get pissed .... A tiny part of me admired her style.

Fridge full of food including a deer

Perfect manicured lawn but opened kitchen cupboards to find nests of mice everywhere !! Funny how some people put time into a garden and ignore a rodent army in the house

A