Ok, own up! What did you lumber your buyer with?

[BluTangClan]

Much like an old car, it's got to the stage with our house where we think "do we spend loads of money fixing it all, or bodge it all and try to sell it?".

So here's the opportunity to own up to; the mould you painted over, the crack in the wall that you moved the bookcase in front of, the hob that doesn't work when the oven's on, and the iron mark on the carpet that you put the rug on top of.

We will forgive you your sins without judgement.

We bought a rug at a festival for our then baby DS's room. Moved out when he was nearly 2 and it had stained the carpet underneath a lovely blue rectangle on the light grey carpet underneath.

And about once a week the toilet would just keep running after flushing. Not a massive deal, it just kept trickling down into the pan until you gave it a more forceful flush and then it sorted itself again. To be fair with that one we had had two plumbers look at it and be baffled so it's not that we had utterly ignored it!

I may have superglued the floor tiles that kept peeling up and the extractor vent in the shower
Room is probably not strong enough. We replaced it with the cheapest we could find as it died before moving.

I had a downstairs toilet that leaked a bit into the grout of the tiles around it when flushed (so light grey grout turned dark grey). I used a grout pen to paint the rest of the grout dark grey

In our old house (listed, only allowed single glazed windows unless you could afford the £££££ timber sort), we had a bit of a condensation problem in one bedroom. We used to run a dehumidifier to clear the windows.

On the day we moved out, the removal men had just shifted a huge wardrobe in this room. Dh went into the room to find terrible damp on the wall where the wardrobe stood. We had no idea that the gutter outside the window was leaking.

To the new owners: we're so sorry. And it was clearly karma that my dh left a few hundred pounds worth of Computer equipment in the cupboard to enable you to pay for repairs!

We knew the boiler was old and shitty but it never gave us any hassle; our buyers pushed for a boiler service/check and we refused. Found out from ex neighbours a while down the line that within about a month of the move the boiler had packed in and been condemned 🙈 felt very bad! In my defence the boiler had never been or had an issue in all the time we’d lived there - we moved in assuming it would give up at some point and we’d replace it, and then it just never did. And we’d also inherited a ludicrously old and shitty boiler in the new house and had to have it replaced so we were in the same boat as our buyers! Sorry guys.

We left a leaky shower. It would start to show on the ceiling downstairs if 2 people showered every day for a week or so. We'd started having baths every few days and that seemed to stop it showing. We tried everything to fix it before we left including having the shower retiled and having the shower tray replaced. We just couldn't work out what was causing it before we moved out.

Friends of my husbands left a completely flooded cellar. They simply screwed new floorboards over the whole room where the hatch was. Awful.

I'm hoping to lumber buyers with - a tiny bit of karndean that just will not sit flush with the rest, some screw holes in the laminate the previous owner left us with (they're right in the only place you can have a bed so will be covered regardless I think) and a tiny leak in the roof we think we've had fixed but it doesn't leak every time it rains, so may still be an issue.

What were being completely honest about is the fact we have had subsidence caused by trees that have since been cut down. Less sure people will overlook that one...

Mine is pretty bad and usually I feel awful about anything like this but honestly I’m still glad I did this.

Terrible student neighbours.

We had nice students for 2-3 years mainly mature...etc then when I was 5 months pregnant a horrid set moved in. I’m talking constant screaming shouting door banging and late night house parties. They didn’t care. It was obvious we’d be stuck in a long battle with the police/uni to sort them out once we started that process we’d have to declare it if we moved and after talking to the landlord (a pretty nice guy) he was up front that our area was becoming quite ‘expensive and trendy’ and therefore less popular with students so he was having to accept worse tenants to fill the house. He ‘might’ sell it for the profit eventually but wasn’t going to be this year or next.

We stuck the house on the market that week. Held an open house on the Saturday morning (after bribing the students with booze to party all Friday night and crash out all Saturday morning/early afternoon and DH cleaning their garden/bins/vomit off the driveway at 6am) vaguely answered ‘I think either mature students or professional house share, we don’t see much of them they keep to themselves’ when people asked about the neighbours. Sold it that day and moved out!

In our defence we had multiple offers and purposely chose a landlord who didn’t intend to live in the property. So realistically it’s not like a nice young couple thought they’d bought their dream house or anything.

The list is long. I think probably the most bodged bits are that part of one of the walls in the downstairs hallway is 'plastered' with expansion foam and deep-fill filler. And the floor of the cupboard under the stairs is essentially an inelegant exercise in ensuring rats can't get in from under the house, realised in chicken wire, wire wool and (a lot) more expansion foam, with the floorboards sitting at funny angles and a bit of lino very determinedly stuck over the top to hold it all together. On the upside I will say it does work!

Oh, and the bathroom cabinet (which is quite nice, to be fair) is attached to the wall with a few token screws and a loooooooooot of No More Nails so that sucker is taking the plaster with it if it they ever want to take it down.

I shifted my flat in the summer.

Had it been winter, I'd have been washing the bedroom wall corners for mould growing up the walls. They'd been insulated, painted with anti damp paint and painted freshly but every year, I had to manage the rooms ie no furniture against the wall to allow it to breathe. Washing with bleach worked best, the anti mould sprays were useless.

It was my first flat and was bottom end. I made it lovely inside but in truth it was a show's ear with limited capacity. No heating for example, I had new electric heaters installed but even then it was freezing.

I did sell it at a cheap price though.

I left a leaky shower, a disconnected leaky toilet (more than one in the house) and a patch of floor that wasn't laminated because we'd bought end of stock flooring and didn't have quite enough. I'd hidden it by putting a sideboard on it. Oops.

Noisy late night hot tub party neighbours...in a terrace.

Two out of four gas hobs that don't work (they've never worked since the day we moved in 7 years ago - I've always just cooked on two).

Skirting board coming loose in the hallway.

Boiler on its last legs but with a valid service certificate.

Wooden worktops in the kitchen that need sanding and resealing.

We did quite a lot before we put it on the market and the buyer got it for under asking price so we didn't feel too bad really.

First place we sold, we didn't leave any problems, when we first moved in we blitzed it top to bottom and new Windows in the back.

Second place, the house itself was spot on, no problems at all. The neighbours attached were a nightmare though.

Mind you, a single bloke bought it and moved in with a TV and sound system the size of a bungalow, so I think he was going to be more of a nightmare than them.

I put a mirror up. Looks great.

When we redecorated the painter took the screw out to paint, and a fine jet of water squirts out. To fix it, we'd have to cut the plaster board out then fix it back again. So I just put the screw back in the same place.

Lovely house, horrible neighbour here!

I feel like we moved into one of the houses people might reply about here! Looked amazing when we moved in during the summer (freshly painted of course) but in winter the whole thing was literally dripping with condensation / damp and when we stripped the wallpaper in my ds room the whole thing was riddled with black mould underneath the paper. The surveys had all come back okay but it was more of an issue with ventilation etc. Took us £5k in new roof felt and vented tiles to sort it all out!

NC for this, as mine is awful.

A rat infestation.

We didn't leave anything dodgy, we always fixed any issues when they occurred. However the house we have just moved into is terrible. The boiler was leaking gas, they had a leak under the sink which they knew about as there was a dish under there. Luckily we found the leaks as we are redoing the kitchen but if we weren't it could of caused serious damage.
The shower tray had a leak and the drains stink. We knew we were buying a house that needed a bit of love but I dread to think what else is lurking on.

@121hugsneeded

Friends of my husbands left a completely flooded cellar. They simply screwed new floorboards over the whole room where the hatch was. Awful.

I think I owe the couple who bought it! Was it a ground floor flat in Scotland?

In my first house the window frame in the bedroom was more filler than wood in places.
Our last flat was beautiful but had a huge problem which we carefully pointed out to viewers. The new owners still contacted us about it later. The woman who owned it before us had 17 indoor cats in a 2 bed flat. It was like a sea of cats when I viewed it. It was disgusting (but cheap) when we moved in. Mostly we managed to get rid of the smell, one walk in cupboard needed the floor rand the walls up to waist height replaced. The second bedroom still had a distinct whiff of cat on damp days, because the underside of the polished floorboards had quite a lot of crystallised cat pee on them. We sold in dry weather.

This thread is making me feel better!

We will be selling soon and plan to leave:

Dodgy fitted wardrobe doors.
Terrible plastering in a few of the rooms (tbf anyone with eyes will see this so it’s up to them if it’s a deal breaker).
A mouldy cupboard.

That’s actually it. I thought there were more. All the flaws in this house are ones you can see.

The flat I sold was great but had absolutely terrible freeholders. Constant demand for money for substandard repairs and never responded to genuine concerns and repairs requested by the leaseholders. I should have guessed when I saw that it has changed hands every few years. But I was naive!