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.

The house we bought as a young couple with a new baby had.. dodgy electrics - original 50’s wiring that many electricians wouldn’t touch, plus you could have the kitchen or living room light on but not both. A boiler that packed up the first winter we were there. An attic filled with junk. By the time we wanted to sell, home reports had come in, and no one would touch it with a bargepole. We ended up selling to one of those specialist companies though, so no one else got the shock we did.

I sold a house 2 years ago, everything that needed doing was obvious and it was a bargain for the BTL landlord who we eventually sold it to after CF FTB told us to drop the price by 10k or they'd walk the day the contracts were to be exchanged.

I told the EA to us my exact words. They signed the contracts that day or they could get to fuck

Under the floorboards in the under stairs cupboard is a witchy spell & programmed crystals for good energy, happiness and all things good. Apologies to any strongly anti-witch people who ever buy the place!

My DD was selling her house but when she moved the furniture the tenants sons had spilt some orange fizzy drink on the new grey carpet. I got grey emulation paint and rubbed it in so it was not visible. They had also pulled the curtain rail off and left a hole. I filled it with wet tissue and stuck a piece of masking tape over the hole and painted it to match the walls.

I left my house in pristine condition with any repairs sorted for the new buyer, as I would expect to find it.

The house I moved into was filthy, bodge jobs, crap left in kitchen cupboards...dirty footprints in the shower, hidden black mould, dodgy boiler, honestly the list goes on. I was devastated and for anyone who does this sort of thing should be ashamed and hope karma finds its way to you.

Awful thread

One of my friends moved into a place where the seller had taken the interior doors, the boiler and the toilets, but left the washing machine, fridge and oven

@Forthisisnt

Awful thread

I agree. I am disgusted at some of the things I have read.

Agree.
Just ‘do, as you would be done by.’
There are still a lot of decent people who will leave a house (home) as they would like to find it - all faults declared and taken into consideration, a bottle of wine, and a best wishes note.

Interesting that the OP hasn’t shared anything themselves, or bothered to return to the thread. Lazy journalist?

@Totallyworthit

We shoved tinned fish down a gap by the skirting boards in the front room

That’s appalling, the reduced offer was awful but you could have refused.

That's appalling?... No it's not...it's hilarious!!!

Well not really ''our'' buyer but adjoining neighbours (I have mentioned him in another post re narcissistic and DV behaviour towards his wife) have listed their property.

There is a lot of unconsented work and rooms (called sheds on the agents plan) attached to a smaller dwelling that if approved, turns it into a much larger 2nd dwelling which isn't supposed to happen in our district. No one really cares except he has complained to various official bodies at various times, about the legal farming activities around him and has been an absolute pain to those of us around him.

He also prys about on our properties.

Last year we stored our silage bales alongside the boundary fence and our access way. About 4 weeks ago he called me to say he had been over that part of our property and that the smell from the open bales (I had only one opened and had it covered with a tarp) was wafting through his house. He wanted them all moved (which you don't do once they have been taken out of a paddock and stored.)

There is a stack of weeds, old shipping containers and the like on his property between the ''sheds'' and our fenceline, however, the Agent has taken aerial views of his property, and our bales look close by.

We have also fitted some more stock handling gear to our yards (which have always been there) well before he bought the property, and which he is pissed off about.

So while any future buyer will be well aware of what activities happen next door, it's affecting his chance of a sale at the residential town price he is looking for.

So I guess you can say we have ''lumbered'' rural life and activities on him. Mind you, the presentation of his property isn't what I would call well presented to the market. But I guess he has to whinge about something that in his eyes, is totally someone else's fault.

Not something I left for a buyer but what they left us....

Previous owner was a builder and he'd built a lovely huge kitchen on the back of the house. It had wooden cladding on the walls at the one end of the room and the floor was parquet.

Every time we went to see the house before moving in they were burning incense, they were a bit hippy so we thought nothing of it... until we moved in.

They'd had 2 boxer dogs who had evidently been allowed to pee all over the floor (hence the incense) and the rear wall wasn't actually joined to the one side wall (it was built like a freestanding wall in the way that a 5yr old would build a lego house), if you stood outside in the back garden you could see the gap and actually put your hand into it and reach the wooden cladding inside the kitchen.

We've been here 20 years now but are still finding some unexpected "surprises". It's an old property so is never going to be perfect but....

The 50 year old boiler in the kitchen had to be replaced in January. It's positioned sideways behind a decor panel and to access it you had to pull out the built in fridge next to it and climb into the space. Obviously the new boiler had to be resited as you'd never get away with that now!

I was looking forward to having an extra kitchen cupboard but sadly not. It appears that the now retired boiler is the main worktop support with the tiles being cemented to the top of the boiler. It's a custom build kitchen and to just replace the worktop isn't actually that easy...

A second delightful surprise was being woken at 3 am by the burglar alarm. It appears it was wired into the old boiler electrical circuit so when that was disconnected so was the alarm. No one knew this! The back up batteries lasted only so long and then it went off. Couldn't turn it off either as there was no power to the control panel.

Our neighbours must have been cursing us.

We have a lot of other peculiarities like the socket in second kitchen that isn't connected to the mains. Only it is. We've had floors up looking for this aberrant spur but no one can find where it is connected. What's worrying is that the wiring that must be feeding it is pretty ancient.

When we sell it will definitely be on an "as seen" basis!

Am genuinely embarrassed reading through this thread. If I ever do home viewings again, I'll be sure to spend at least 30 minutes, observing every nook and cranny. Disgusting what some of you would lumber buyers with.

In our first property, a flat, I’d asked my DH to paint our D.C. room. It was very small room and he took a whole week off work to paint it. Wasn’t until we were moving out and the furniture removed that I learned DH had not moved any of the furniture but painted around it.

How could somebody be THAT lazy, good lord!

This is one of the reasons why I am put off ever selling my place and moving out. You just can’t trust sellers to be completely transparent and honest. Over time I have redone everything in my current home. We had a burst pipe and had the entire water pipes redone, new central heating and new bathroom. If we ever were to ever sell we wouldn’t have anything to hide and if there was a problem we would just be honest about it and leave it to the buyer to take it or leave it. Just a shame that others are not like us.

When DP bought his flat, the previous owner left the property in a complete mess that he'd bodged up. DP lacked confidence in those days and didn't ask questions as he thought it would be rude.

• The drains weren't lined up with the pipes outside so lots of waste was pouring out everywhere other than into the drainage system.
• The "fitted kitchen" was a set of doors screwed onto old fridge carcases and a couple of cupboards.
• The shower panels turned out to be cushionfloor that weren't even siliconed onto the side of the bath and consequently leaked into the cavity below and rotted the floorboards.
• Worst of all, every carpet throughout was completely infested with fleas and had to be dumped immediately.

When we left the property, anything that came up on the survey, DP repaired before the new owners took over. I think he was scarred for life by the horror story that unfolded when he first moved in.

We had a shower that only trickled out scalding hot water, a bath with a crack in it, an en-suite shower we used as storage as it constantly dripped. Painted over a mould spot in our bedroom. A boiler on its last legs.

We had a lot, I mean a lot, of crickets living behind our radiators which had escaped from my sons reptile vivarium. They are silent and invisible during the day but boy oh boy do they sing all night!!!

Showers seem to be a reoccurring theme! I will never buy a property now without running the shower!

Just moved into our new house. Huge cracks everywhere, and two years worth of dirt to deal with. Taken 6 days of cleaning 18hrs p/d to get rid of it and the mountains of dog hair 🤢

Left my previous house in pristine condition. Buyer called to say thank you so much, it’s like a show home.

Never moving again

We were lumbered with:

1. An entire ROOM hidden behind plaster in the kitchen.
2. A bathroom done up beautifully as a wet room... but not tanked so within weeks of moving in the tiles came up due to moisture, joist rotted away underneath... £5k later we had a functioning bathroom.

My SIL bought a house last year, when they viewed it the owners had a lot of furniture but it all looked ok with a bit of work to do. When they got the keys my sil was 7 months pregnant they walked in the house and the furniture had been hiding massive holes in the floor, they had to redo the floor for all of downstairs then various other problems in the rooms upstairs!

A major deathwatch beetle infestation in one end of a 16c timber framed grade 2 listed house. The buyers decided not to have any form of survey done.

"The previous people also owed money and we had letters threatening debt collectors, he was actually a financial advisor with his own company !"

Same for our previous owners. They're accountants, ffs. Never mind. I'm sure they can afford the £13k balloon payment on their car that they don't know about because they never gave the dealer their new address.

I thought all houses were "sold as seen", and that your basic survey only checks very basic things?