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.

Our last house we left with just a little damp patch that was penetrating damp and came and went occasionally. That was all. Our new house - let’s just say that there was a storm the week after we moved in and OMG water poured in several rooms/ roof/ patio doors/ window frames. We needed to dry line all the walls/ replace the windows and doors and repair the chimney plus replace ridge tiles. Most of these issues were seasonal so didn’t appear when we viewed the house or on the full structural survey. The buyers would have definitely known - all painted over. Oh and both showers leaked info the floor below the first day we used them 😭

I've never sold a house but our buyers left us with a garage full of crap. Hair in the bath and dust in cupboards and urn-hoovered floors. We assume the dirt and hair was cos we knocked 1k of asking price as it needed quite alot doing according to the survey - so we knew about the other crap.

Fully damp concrete floor under two layers of lino in the very large kitchen. Not picked up on the buyer's survey strangely enough.

The house was put on the market right at the lower end of the valuation as we knew it needed a lot of work and wanted rid.

Buyer nitpicked throughout the sale and pestered the agents relentlessly about bringing forward moving dates regardless of the chain. Threatened to pull out/ drop his offer if we didn't do as he requested.
We had to move out a month before our new house was ready and paid for temporary accommodation and furniture storage which cost us around 2K.

I didn't clean when we moved and I'm sure he had a lovely surprise when he ripped the kitchen out and took up the flooring.

I don't feel guilty.

When I say we knocked 1k off it was after survey said it needed 5k work and we couldn't borrow enough to cover the original agreed price. It was a few years ago now!

@IJustLovePirates

We left a rural property without catching the last rooster

On a thread full of scary stories, this post is awesome!

If your buying, read and know what to look for. Great thread

As FTBers, we inherited a leaky rotting garage that was built on top of rubble rather than proper foundations, a garden that had been used as a dog toilet, a botched tarmac job in the drive, blown double glazing (these were enormous windows so when we were quoted to replace them it was an immense cost), damaged internal doors (dogs), the cheapest kitchen they could have possibly bought, badly fitted, patchwork walls where they'd painted around furniture, a mould problem in the porch and it was filthy (even with cleaning, if you had a hot shower the walls dripped nicotine water 🤢), a dodgy boiler and dodgy electrics.
When we left, we'd fixed the mould, redecorated, got a new boiler and had the electrics sorted properly and fixed the worst of the issues but just couldn't afford the double glazing replacement or replacing the garage. We were, however, open about the issues and the buyer was going to gut and refurb it fully anyway. They were so awful and slow and obstructive about exchange and completion date we had to put our stuff in storage, lived with my Mum and home educated 4 kids for 6 weeks because of them. We still cleaned the house top to bottom, left them spare bulbs and instructions/guarantees, curtains/blinds etc. We did keep the bottle of fizz and flowers we had been going to leave them.
This house, the vendors took the curtain poles from every room (they're really long so cost a fortune to replace) and some kitchen cupboards; I was so distraught from our purchasers I just didn't have the energy to raise it as an issue. As we've lived here, a few things have come to light about their refurbishment of the property but we like it here so we are just going to fix it (properly) so if we move again it will be immaculate for our purchasers.

Yikes! We're about to put our flat on the market and have spent a small fortune renovating it! Reading these comments I'd be delighted with an unflushed poo!

We bought lots of crystallised cat pee with our last house purchase. Soaked through the bedroom carpet and into the floorboards and skirting all round the room levels of cat pee.
But the elderly sellers were genuinely lovely, it was a great house and we still love it many years later.

Vile, loud, anti social neighbours. Awful. I felt so bad about it but I couldn't stand to live there any longer.

Ah, this question made me laugh out loud! Thanks for a bit of lighthearted fun 🤩

It wasn't my house but one I was patching for someone pre sale. It was bad. Had a few weeks to basically renovate an entire house by myself.

Had to replaster half the house- didn't have the time to reskim the whole thing so basically bodged a fill job wherever there was damage. Wherever there were big (structural) cracks, dug out, refilled and covered over (the cracks had started to reappear before I was even finished painting). A missing floor joist (the floor was literally floppy) covered over with a couch. Serious water ingress around window frames on the second floor were chipped out, plaster boarded and reskimmed, with nothing done regarding the ingress.

Part of the back of the house was pulling away from the front so concealed a one inch gap with expanding foam and plaster skim. A slumping wall that was chipped back and then reskimmed to make it look like it wasn't slumping.

It was a good thing that the person who purchased the place didn't care and was planning on fully refurbished it was later interviewed in a magazine telling people her new house purchase was a "fixer upper".

@InsanelyPregnantAndSore that's a terrible thing to do..hope karma got you for that one

To PP who have taken a builder with them before buying, did you do it after an offer was made? Is it the done thing? To have potential buyers lifting and moving things? Asking for a friend.

Just a broken kitchen cupboard, a ghost and the fact that people had broken into us cars 4 times and the scratches on the back door where they’d tried in 😕

My first home I was terrified in because of the junkie neighbours, so much so I had a nervous breakdown and became very ill. Thank you seller 1.

Current home had extension built over mains water, leaky pipes, skirtings falling off, dodgy roof and an elderly neighbour who chaps my door all hours of the day/night because she has dementia and hears noises that aren't there. Thanks seller 2.

We sold our first home to the local council and still in the second home because I now only have the old lady to worry about, we fixed everything else with a very large bank loan.

Karma's a bitch though - current homes sellers are bankrupt, had their new house reposessed and now live in our old council estate with the junkies.

Ha! what a hilarious confessional thread...we left our first house in good condition, second one needed stacks doing (which we knew about), left that one in better nick than we bought it, and then rented our next home....which had a lovely landlady. She had lived at the house before us. And it was a beautiful home in a beautiful new city - my hub's home city as well. It was a real refuge after a really bad time of things trying to make a life in the country work (it didn't, we hated it). We looked after our rented home and when we moved out we cleaned it from top to bottom as she was planning to sell it, while cleaning I found one of her baby's old socks down the back of one of the radiators. So I popped it in one of the chest of drawers she'd left, not really knowing what to do but not having the heart to bin it, and left it up to her to bin or not.... Anyway the letting agency insisted on an inspection with us there before we left, so I asked the landlady to come as well, to back us up as something felt 'off' with the agency (they were awful to us throughout the rental) the agency woman inspected the house from top to bottom, picking at everything she could find, and had obviously been rootling through the chest of drawers as she came down the stairs holding the baby sock in front of her with a look of disgust saying that finding this might have an affect on us getting our deposit back - little realising our fab landlady then realised it was her baby's sock! Agency was given a rocket, and we got our deposit back quickly. We then found out the agency were known to be awful with tenets...to the point they had to change their name, lol! AND our landlady sold the house to a young family knowing it had been looked after, she did not use that letting agency she'd rented it out with. The next house we bought, was an ex rental (not the same landlady!) and had been left in an awful state...billy bodge repairs, damp and mould, and windows almost falling out. 5 years on we've fixed most of it...but we knew it was a hole when we bought it, and it's less of an ugly duckling now. No confessional I'm afraid....apart from leaving a baby sock in a drawer.

I left a flat that was only 4 years old so was in good nick ~ however:

I had a book case screwed to the wall and when I removed it it took a huge chunk of the plaster board with it (think those hollow walls of new builds!} My dad did a very bitch job trying to make that look a tad better....

Toilet went wrong the day before (as in water just kept running continuously ). It happened to a neighbour and their water bill was huge because they didn’t bother to tell their landlord. I felt so gui,ty after the botched wall thar I called the plumber, they couldn’t come till the day after moving so I left the £50 for the new owner with a sorry note!

The funniest one was I left myself a note to empty the last freezer draw to put in my cool box - totally forgot. Realised that night in my new house. Poor new owner would have found a few half eaten tubs of Ben and Jerries. Hopefully the bottles of wine and beer with the welcome card I left would have made up for it.

Previous owners of my new house left me a filthy oven and a clogged bath drain ~ I didn’t go to bed the last night at mine because I was cleaning the whole flat top to bottom! New house previous owners also didn’t bother to lock their cat in that day and it took the estate agent at the very end of the working day to shift them out and tell them the6 would have to wait for their cat to return outside!

It’s funny you say about painting round furniture ~ when I painted my kitchen, I painted around the free standing fridge freezer because it was full so I didn’t want to unplug it - I must remember to paint behind it!

On a thread full of scary stories, this post is awesome! grin

Abandoning an animal is awesome, @Thewithesarehere?

Wow...

Lived opposite a drug dealer. He had smashed our car windows in for looking at him funny. You’d have never thought it as they were big period houses, but that one was still flats. He was terrifying. I don’t miss him or his crazy gf.

Bought a house, seller took the radiator from kitchen!

Friend just bought house needs work but problem with roof wasn't expected. Whilst inspecting we found an old plaque possibly Victorian, it's on my wall now.

Obviously not our fault, but instead the loony buyer, but apparently the buyer was very annoyed her car wouldn't fit in the single garage. It was an original 60s garage that we never used for anything except hoarding storage so had no idea it was anything other than a normal 60s garage. Although knowing the size of the original Minis, I guess it is fairly obviously not going to fit a 21st century car. But if you are in the tiny minority of people who would want to put a car in a single garage, I recommend you measure it before blaming the previous owners for the builder's 1960's garage designs.

God this is just awful to read. We went out of our way to make sure ours was perfect, the worst we left was a small dent in the laminate. He treated us like * though. Why we left him a bottle of wine and nice note I still have no idea, I was 8 months pregnant and he put me under such stress.

We then moved into a home with damp, crap curtains and floors throughout (astroturf indoors?!) carpet in a toilet, blown windows, shit boilers and cracks everywhere. Again I was heavily pregnant and they knew it, it’s taken a year during COVID to fix never moving again after this x